Apparently if you put your mind to it, you can recycle any kind of material. This Green Prophet had never heard of recycling silver, but thankfully it is not a foreign concept to jewelry designers who use it everyday and who don’t want to let any resource go to waste.
Like Lily (or Lilyja) who lives, creates, and recycles in Tel Aviv.
Lily collects all of the silver scraps that she generates while creating her handmade jewelry line and takes them to a friend’s studio, where they are all melded together and rendered useful again. Certain items in her Etsy shop are made entirely out of recycled silver (like the ocean sky recycled sterling silver hoop earrings shown above – who knew?).
Lily says that although she is only saving a few grams of silver here and there, she feels like she is nevertheless leaving a tiny bit of silver to Mother Nature and saving the world’s silver mines a little bit of work. She also expressed concern about the sub-par working conditions of those who extract silver in the mines.
“It is all actually about reuse,” she says.
Lily also describes many of her designs as organic, but alas, this is not the same kind of organic as organic food. (Check out some of her “organic” and recycled earrings below.) But beautiful all the same.
To see more of Lilyja’s recycled jewelry, visit her Etsy shop.
Read more about eco-friendly jewelry::
Hey, Are You Gonna Use That? Second Great Green Prophet Giveaway with Yoav Kotik!
[…] Lilyja is a jewelry designer, currently working out of Tel Aviv, who is careful that no resource in her studio go to waste. She saves all of the silver scraps generated from her jewelry making and melds them together again so that she can make recycled silver jewelry. Added bonus: the recycled silver jewelry comes in organic shapes. […]