British multimillionaire and environmentalist Dale Vince is planning to create carbon-negative, lab-grown diamonds which he claims are "made directly from the sky."
PA
The Ecotricity founder has formulated plans to create these diamonds using carbon, water and energy sourced directly from his "sky mining facility" in Stroud.
The facility uses the existing carbon in the air to form the diamonds, which would appear chemically identical to the diamonds found beneath the ground.
The plant is powered by wind and solar energy and the water used in production is collected from rainfall.
Vance claims the creation of these diamonds will remove excess carbon dioxide from the air, which is the leading greenhouse gas responsible for climate change.
By removing the carbon from the atmosphere, the diamonds are "carbon-negative," because the chemicals used in its creation will not find their way back into the atmosphere.
According to Statistica, the diamond industry produced some 140 million carats in 2019 alone, worth an estimated $80 billion (€68.7 billion).
The market for lab-grown diamonds has increased in recent years as the truth about the environmental impact of the diamond industry have come to light.
It has been a long-established fact that the price of diamonds is artificially inflated by a monopoly who pay for traditions involving diamonds - such as their involvement in the marriage institution - to be kept in the public consciousness.
Vince claims the diamond industry does "irreversible damage" to the environment, and hopes to challenge them with these new carbon-negative ones.
He told the Guardian: “Making diamonds from nothing more than the sky, from the air we breathe – is a magical, evocative idea – it’s modern alchemy. We don’t need to mine the earth to have diamonds, we can mine the sky.”
He has not yet decided on a final price tag for his new creations, which are set to be examined by the International Gemological Institute.
The term "blood diamond" or "conflict diamond" was coined to refer to the amount of blood that is shed in diamond mining and production.
Furthermore, producing a one-carat stone can involve shifting 1000 tonnes of rock and dust into the atmosphere, wasting 3890 litres of water and creating more than 108kg of CO2 emissions.
Vince hopes his new venture can produce 200 carats of sky diamonds every month but hopes to scale up production to 1000 carats every month within a year.
The hydrogen needed for production will also be renewably-sourced, as it will be manufactured by splitting rainwater molecules.
This stands to remove thousands of kilograms of CO2 from the atmosphere per month once production ramps up.
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