Sustainable (adj) – a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged.

Despite the best efforts of the mining industry to expand diamond mining operations around the world, we have already passed ‘peak diamond mining,’ extracting 25% fewer carats in 2016 than a decade ago.

Today, most of the ‘low hanging fruit’ has already been mined. So now, each carat mined is more difficult to extract and more energy intensive than in the past.

Most new diamond production in the last 25 years has occurred in the extreme cold of the Canadian and Russian Arctic, where mining operations are even more environmentally destructive than past mines in Africa, India, and Australia.

Three decades ago, the Argyle Diamond Mine in Australia yielded 7 or 8 carats of diamond per tonne of Earth. Today, yields have fallen to 3.5 carats per tonne and yields are predicted to fall to 2.3 carats per tonne in the years ahead before the mine is expected to close in less than five years. Thus, the mine outputs fewer than half the diamonds it did three decades ago for a given amount of fossil fuel and explosives.

While diamonds are forever, diamond mines are not. During the 21st Century, commercial diamond mining will cease for one of two reasons:

• Geologists have aerial mapped and found nearly all the diamond bearing locations on the planet. Miners will have extracted virtually every available diamond out of every Kimberlite pipe on Earth
• Consumers will vote with their credit cards, demanding diamonds that do not cost the Earth, (pun intended), thus ending the financial viability of diamond extraction.

We trust it is the second option that becomes the reason for the cessation of diamond mining.