As controversy rages over the new movie Blood Diamond, Greg Valerio, founder of one of the world's only fair-trade jewellery companies, Cred Jewellery, claimed that large-scale gold miners are causing social and environmental devastation wherever they go. It is this that prompted Valerio to make fair-trade wedding rings, which will soon be for sale in Boodles jewellery store in Dublin.

"People just don't realise what they're buying, and that's because no-one talks about it, " Valerio told the Sunday Tribune.

"The fact is that when you buy a piece of gold jewellery, almost undoubtedly someone has suffered to get it there. This is an even bigger issue than that of conflict diamonds. It affects hundreds of thousands more people."

According to Valerio, the mining methods of large-scale companies mean that it takes three tons of toxic waste being pumped into the earth to create an average 10-gram gold wedding ring. "These miners descend on remote communities, employ locals for slave-labour wages, deforest the entire area, pump the ground with cyanide or mercury, pollute the water systems, leave the people sick or dying and living on land that literally glows in the dark, take all the resources, make all the money, and leave, " he said.

"People regard a wedding ring or an engagement ring as a symbol of love and purity and goodness. But how can there be any beauty in something that comes as a result of this type of exploitation?"

Valerio said gold mining in Brazil had left whole communities suffering from mercury poisoning. "Ultimately, people are dying from it. There are children working with mercury, getting poisoned, " he said. "And in Tanzania, in November, there was an even more direct example of violence, when some small-scale gold miners were buried alive by a large mining company because they had encroached upon their concession."

Knowledge of such exploitation prompted Valerio to found Cred Jewellery in 1996. Working with a small Colombian mining company called Green Gold, he struggled to establish fair-trade standards in the jewellery business. The local community now have control over the gold mines used for Cred Jewellery, and barren ground is reforested after use.

Profits are pumped back into the area.