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In-depth

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Contents Feature - Jade Rock hard Seeing green Birth of rock Jade in Mesoamerica Golden opportunities Rockhounding Cartographer's table Just the facts Games CG vault Re:sources

Kirk Makepeace, president of Jade West, is surrounded by the wares of his trade in a variety of forms at his office in Surrey, British Columbia. (Photo: Brooke McDonald)

Walking through a gemstone store along the side of a highway, you're bound to see a wide variety of polished rocks. The jades, agates and amethysts vary in shape, size and look, but when Kirk Makepeace looks into the jade bin he doesn't see an interesting souvenir —he sees floor tiles.

At least, he wishes he saw floor tiles. Makepeace is the president of Canada's foremost jade dealer, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. He finds himself the national leader in a multi-million-dollar business, surrounded by billion-dollar businesses that deal with other, more popular, minerals.

Why hasn't jade become more than a pretty gem?

Marketing is the name of the game, and so far jade is playing catch-up with better-known and more mainstream minerals like marble and granite. Says Makepeace: "For gemstone use, we are limited to small quantity of demand and relatively high costs." He adds that if the jade industry had orders for floor tiles, fireplace stones and other construction-related projects the cost of mining the mineral would be reduced, allowing the industry to take more out of the land and further expanding the market for jade. Beyond that, the best jade is found deep in the mountains, where only 20 percent of what is pulled out of the hills is fit to be polished and sold as gemstones. The other 80 percent could be sold as finishing stone in the construction industry, but there's no market for it — or at least no interest in using it.

"Our mining process would be different if we were mining for tiles," Makepeace says. "Our gem material would become a by-product of our operation; we would retrieve the gem material while processing the larger quantities of lower-grade material."

But Makepeace isn't holding his breath for that to happen.

"Unfortunately, at this time we don't have orders for the large quantities of dimension stone so we are forced by economics to mine only for gem- and carving-grade jade, [which is] a more expensive per-kilogram method of mining."

Potential markets
If those orders are going to be coming from anywhere, they'll be coming from China. The country was the first to recognize the beauty of jade and has used the mineral for thousands of years. But Canada is not getting a chip off that rock.

"China is the world's largest potential market for jade but it doesn't even know about nephrite jade from Canada," Makepeace says. "The world is quite ignorant to the value and availability of jade from Canada."

Until that demand appears on the horizon, Canada's jade industry will continue to deal strictly with gemstones, and businessmen like Makepeace will shake their heads as they drill through perfectly good jade to get to the gemstone-quality jade the market demands.

He estimates that he has enough stock to supply world markets with jade for over 300 years, so he and any prospector who stumbles across an outcrop of green rock in the next three centuries should cross their fingers that jade will move out of the roadside polished-gem stores and into the kitchen floors and fireplace designs of builders around the world.

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