Debunking False Advertising by Diamond Miners Natural Diamond Council paid S&P Global to fabricate a false environmental impact study misleading more than 350 million consumers At Diamond Foundry, we are quite busy delivering the future of diamonds through technological innovation and human creativity. As a startup with one hundredths the number of employees of the big diamond miners, we are not staffed to refute every piece of misleading information being produced by a marketing machinery powered by profits from cartel priced mined diamonds. When the Natural Diamond Council (formerly the Diamond Producers Association) sponsored an impact study with TruCost, a unit of S&P Global, that claimed head-scratching benefits of the social and environmental benefit of diamond mining – saying that mining is better for the environment than producing diamonds in a laboratory – we did not consider this quixotic study worth responding to. We figured that people would disregard this study, seeing it for what it is: a fantastically specious argument. For the record, Diamond Foundry is certified by an independent agency as carbon-neutral today. We not only for starters use 100% hydropower at our manufacturing foundry, so there is no carbon dioxide emission from manufacturing. We also buy carbon credits on top of that to cover our entire company. Our company is 100 percent carbon neutral. On the other hand, the diamond miners envision achieving carbon neutrality at least a decade from now. Maybe two decades. One can safely say that diamond miners' carbon-neutral dreams are just that for the moment. The S&P Global study is incredibly sloppy under the most benign interpretation of what is going on. The study’s claimed cost for the amount of energy required for man-made production in parts even exceeds the market price for kinds of diamonds produced with these techniques. The reception of S&P Global’s TruCost study was weak to start with even among strident supporters of mined diamonds. For example, one industry analyst states how “comic” the study is: And if the battles will be played on ecological fields,
More transparency is needed now than ever before.
