Most of the gold reserves held in custody by Deutsche Börse Commodities GmbH for its investors are stored in the vaults of Clearstream Banking in Frankfurt. Clearstream Banking is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Deutsche Börse AG. 

As a designated sponsor, Deutsche Bank AG ensures, among other things, that Xetra-Gold® buy and sell orders are executed immediately within the current bid-ask spread and up to at least €100,000. 

Deutsche Börse AG organises the trading, clearing (anonymously via the central counterparty, thus eliminating counterparty risk) and settlement of the transactions.

The categorisation of sustainability criteria into ‘Environmental’, ‘Social’ and ‘Governance’ – ESG for short – originated in the financial sector, where it was used to classify investments and assets. The term has since been adopted into general language use. 

Investment gold such as bars or coins which is stored in the vaults of bullion banks, central banks, exchanges and refiners, which can be proven to have been stored on a verifiable date before 1 January 2012 is referred to as ‘grandfathered gold’. It requires no proof of origin, which also applies to third-party holdings on behalf of the listed companies. While it is not possible to prove that grandfathered gold was sourced under ESG-compliant circumstances, Deutsche Börse Commodities endeavours to provide all available information. 

Like ‘green gold’, the term ‘green mining’ is not officially defined. It generally describes the greatest possible consideration of ESG criteria in the extraction of gold along the entire value chain. This includes the environmentally friendly development of gold mines and gold extraction or gold recycling, full respect for human and labour rights (particularly regarding occupational health and safety, child or forced labour, forms of modern slavery, and fair remuneration) and responsible corporate governance. 

The lion’s share of gold bullion production is subject to the Responsible Sourcing Programme of the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), which has set a leading global standard. Labels such as ‘Fairtrade Gold’, ‘Green Gold’ and ‘Auropelli Responsible Gold’ also identify gold that has been produced emission-free and may therefore be categorised as sustainable. However, there is still a lack of uniform criteria and a market standard for the evaluation and classification of gold in terms of sustainability, which can result in differing evaluations by different providers.  

The term ‘recycled gold’ applies to refined gold not directly sourced from a mine. In practice, this includes end-user products, scrap and old metals, materials that arise from refining and product manufacturing, old gold in the form of jewellery or gold bars, and products containing gold. To the extent possible, Deutsche Börse Commodities aims to use bars from recycled gold. Its partner Umicore AG & Co. KG specialises in state-of-the-art recycling technologies. For the identical amount of gold, the CO₂ emissions caused by recycling scrap gold are less than one-twentieth of those generated by traditional mining. 

A circular economy is a regenerative system in which resource use and waste production, emissions and energy waste are minimised by slowing down, reducing and closing energy and material cycles. This can be achieved in a variety of ways, including recycling.

The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) is the international wholesale marketplace for gold and the most important OTC market for gold and silver. It also defines the gold underlying the trade through the LBMA ‘Good Delivery Rules and Governance’. As this quality standard ensures efficient trading of the standardised LBMA Good Delivery bars, the LBMA is an important partner of Deutsche Börse Commodities. 

Responsible handling of raw materials is extremely important to Deutsche Börse Commodities and its investors. The key partner in this endeavour is Umicore AG & Co. KG, producer of bars in the world’s largest recycling plant for waste containing precious metals. Its closed circuit serves to conserve resources: instead of 200 tonnes of natural ore, Umicore requires merely six tonnes of old mobile phones to produce one 1 kg gold bar via its recycling process – with the same product quality. Every year, the company produces around 100 tonnes of gold from scrap gold and electronic scrap. 

In urban mining, gold is extracted for recycling purposes from sources available in high concentrations, especially in urban areas, i.e. from smartphones, tablets, PCs and motor vehicles. Gold recovery through urban mining is currently the area of recycling with the greatest growth potential. The recycling rate for old gold such as jewellery is already at 100 per cent.

The London-based World Gold Council is a global lobbying organisation for the gold mining industry. Its aim is to stimulate and maintain gold demand. Together with the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), it works to develop and implement an international system to ensure the integrity of gold bar origin and control the product chain.