Danish jewelry company Pandora has opened the world’s largest fine-jewelry crafting facility in Vietnam, a $150 million factory powered entirely by renewable electricity and using 100% recycled gold and silver.

The expansion highlights a broader challenge for the jewelry industry: reducing the environmental footprint of precious metals while meeting growing demand for jewelry. Using recycled gold and silver can reduce the need for newly mined metals, but experts say making that shift requires reliable supply chains and greater transparency.

The new facility in Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam will produce up to 60 million pieces of jewelry a year, increasing the company’s manufacturing capacity by 50% while cutting its carbon footprint by 17%, CEO Berta de Pablos-Barbier told The Associated Press.

“We are leading the way and we really hope that the rest follow,” she said.

After 37 years in Thailand, Pandora wanted to expand its manufacturing base to increase flexibility and strengthen supply-chain resilience, Pablos-Barbier said.

She said that it chose Vietnam for its skilled artisans who can meet Pandora's standards for craftsmanship, its business environment and its strong infrastructure.

Access to renewable energy infrastructure to power factories is increasingly an "important factor" for Pandora and other Danish companies, Lina Gandløse Hansen, Denmark's ambassador to Vietnam, said.

Pandora's Vietnam facility, with 7,000 workers, will be powered entirely by renewable electricity from the sun and wind, with solar panels installed on its rooftops and plans to work with local solar farms, the company said.

It is also across the road from the $1 billion factory that toymaker Lego opened in 2025, where it says it makes toys without adding planet-warming gases to the atmosphere.

Vietnam has rapidly expanded renewable energy and had Southeast Asia’s largest installed solar and wind capacity at the end of 2024. But the country still relies heavily on coal to power its fast-growing economy, making it important for manufacturers to shift toward cleaner electricity as Vietnam works toward net-zero emissions by 2050.

Manufacturing makes up a fifth of Vietnam’s GDP and consumes half the energy it uses. There are plans to phase out its coal power plants by 2040.

Pandora's commitment to using recycled gold and silver was a “big deal," said Saleem H. Ali, who leads the program on critical minerals and inclusive energy transitions at the United Nations University.

He said gold is especially easy to recycle and unlike metals such as copper, it does not break down or rust. Silver can also be recycled, although it can tarnish and needs to be cleaned.

“That is why it is so valuable. We still have gold from the ancient Egyptians, in pretty good shape,” he said.

The Danish company switched to using 100% recycled silver and gold for new jewelry in August 2024.

Its factories receive small grains of refined metal from recyclers in Europe and Asia, sourced from items ranging from medical equipment to old cutlery, said Pandora’s chief sustainability officer Mads Twomey-Madsen.

It also means finding suppliers, smelters or refiners that use only recycled material. There's also a risk that some could add newly mined material into the mix, Ali said. “That involves a lot of auditing.”

Pandora began changing its wider supply chain five years ago by adopting standards set by the Responsible Jewellery Council, an industry group that promotes responsible practices including on human rights, workers’ rights and environmental impacts, Twomey-Madsen said. The company uses independent auditors, he said.

He said the ultimate goal is for the entire supply chain, including the energy-intensive process of heating and separating metals from other materials to remove impurities, to be powered by clean energy.

Recovering valuable metals from discarded products and other waste is a challenge, Twomey-Madsen said.

The world is producing more e-waste than ever — 62 million metric tons in 2022, projected to grow to 82 million metric tons by 2030, according to a report by the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union and research arm UNITAR. Much of this is processed informally, where workers can be exposed to toxic substances while recovering valuable metals such as gold and silver.

More than 1,000 harmful substances have been found in e-waste or produced when it is improperly recycled, including lead, mercury, cadmium and other toxic chemicals, according to the World Health Organization.

Ali, the critical minerals expert, said that artisanal gold mining — when individuals or small groups extract gold using simple tools — was now the largest cause of mercury pollution worldwide. Miners in poor countries may use the toxic metal to separate gold from other materials, harming people and the environment.

He said there have been efforts to improve gold sourcing, but tracing gold remains difficult. South Asia, in particular, has high demand for gold and jewelry sellers often don’t ask where their gold comes from.

“Once it gets melted, it’s very hard to track it,” he said.

Twomey-Madsen said that the company hopes its commitment to buying recycled metals will show suppliers that there is a growing market for the materials. He added that Pandora initially paid a premium for recycled gold and silver, absorbing the higher cost and investing with suppliers to build a more reliable supply chain for the materials.

Making jewelry is far less emissions-intensive than sectors such as aviation or cement. But he said a switch by the entire industry switching to recycled gold and silver could prevent about 58 million metric tons (63.9 million U.S. tons) of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere each year.

“That is comparable to the entire emissions of New York City,” he said.

Courtesy : ABC News