Is it fair to compare synthetic diamonds to Tesla cars? Is a gem produced by a carbon-containing gas factory really green? And do synthetic diamonds have a sustainability license? These are questions that follow an interview with a promotional flavor by Forbes (find it here) to Anthony Tsang, CEO of The Future Rocks, a new online market for jewels created by various designers, which uses so-called laboratory-grown diamonds, i.e. artificially produced. The company is based in Hong Kong and seeks customers among the youngest, Millennials and Gen-Z, i.e. in their twenties and thirties. According to market research, this age group is the most sensitive to the issue of sustainability.
Furthermore, as is known, laboratory diamonds are also less expensive than natural ones. But it is the green aspect that is underlined by those who sell them. In reality, the sustainability of man-made gems is only relative. Lab-grown diamonds are produced in two ways: with reactors that use a high-pressure, high-temperature process or with a chemical process that consists of carbon vapor deposition. “We don’t compare with natural diamonds, we just provide different option, the market is big enough,” Tsang said. Okay. But the manager goes further: “Fifteen years ago everyone laughed at Tesla and now Ferrari is also entering the electric vehicle market”.
This comparison, however, does not seem entirely apt. First of all, electric cars are not green products: they consume a lot of generally non-renewable energy, and the construction of their huge batteries requires excavations and land devastation to extract the so-called rare earths. Furthermore, looking forward these batteries will constitute a huge management problem at the end of their life cycle. In addition to costing more, electric cars also require an infrastructure that has yet to be built to bring the electricity needed for recharging everywhere. This means thousands of kilometers of copper cables, which will cause a huge extraction of ore in addition to the energy consumption necessary to create millions of points needed for recharging. Therefore, Teslas and electric cars in general are not really green products. But the sustainability of electric cars is not the point. Does this hammering marketing on the alleged green aspects of synthetic diamonds make sense? Wouldn’t it be better to just say that factory-created gems cost less and have the same chemical property, though not the allure, as earth-created diamonds?
