The diamond industry promises sustainable diamonds & improved transparency, but does it deliver?
There’s a certain mystique to Earth-mined diamonds. Sure, these rare pieces of atomic perfection contain a billion years of history and the romance of faraway places. But, they’re also the target of massive machinery and endless human ingenuity to find and extract them. If you’ve only considered diamonds intriguing because of their role in our emotional lives, brace yourself — their origins are just as dramatic. And origins are the topic of interest for a lot of marketing efforts.
If you go outside today, stop and take a look around. Notice the environment surrounding you, or down the street at your local park. Think about all the different lives that depend on our ecosystem and others all around our globe. Now picture a giant gaping hole where that park used to be. Or a distressed and destroyed seabed that was once home to exotic wildlife.
Do sustainable diamonds exist? A deeper look into diamond mining
Since natural diamonds are formed deep within the Earth’s surface, companies must employ miners to go deep within the Earth’s surface. We see a lot of claims about sustainable diamonds, ethically sourced diamonds, and eco-friendly diamonds, but, what does any of it mean? Do sustainable diamonds even exist? To answer that, we look closer the origins of diamonds, and diamond mining.
Gone are the days of handheld pitchforks and shovels, there are three main kinds of diamond mining techniques popular nowadays — ranging from small scale to massive, and even underwater operations.
What is Open-Pit Mining?
The most common kind of diamond mining is pit mining. Pit mining is precisely what it sounds like. Mining companies use heavy-duty explosives to blow large pits in the ground. Heavy machinery then extracts diamonds.
“Once the ore is broken, excavators load the ore into haul trucks and transport it to a primary ore crusher where the diamond extracting process begins. A single blast can break approximately three thousand tonnes of ore.”
Cape Town Museum.
It’s dirty work that results in irreversible ecological damage to the landscape, burns hundreds of millions of gallons of fuel, and leaves pits up to 600 metres deep and as long as there is more resource to find, the hole just continues to enlarge. Often, after a diamond company has pillaged the Earth for every stone they can, they are asked to rehab the land…although that doesn’t always happen.
“In this context, the term [rehab] includes designing and constructing landforms and establishing sustainable ecosystems, depending on the use aimed for. This includes reconstructing a soil ‘profile’, choosing species, establishing plants and introducing animals,” says a WA Today article.
Yet, in Western Australia alone, there are ten thousand abandoned mines that have no rehab plans in sight. Some of these open pits are so large, they can be seen from outer space. And at other sites, such as The Diavik Diamond Mine in Canada, companies are doing their best to amend the original plans for rehab — hoping to use the land that they’ve already destroyed as a holding ground for its own waste.
“Open-pit mining is to be considered one of the most dangerous sectors in the industrial world. It causes significant effects to miners health, as well as damage to the ecological land. Open-pit mining causes changes to vegetation, soil, and bedrock, which ultimately contributes to changes in surface hydrology, groundwater levels, and flow paths,” explains a study from ScienceDirect.
What is Underground Diamond Mining?
Underground diamond mining is a form of pit mining that exploits depleted pit mines. Miners drill large shafts parallel to the kimberlite pipes which makes it easier to dig enclosed tunnels and transport hard-to-reach diamonds to the surface. However, it is much more complex and, as a result, much more expensive. Essentially, two shafts are drilled along the sides of kimberlite — a rock that could potentially contain diamonds. Once the shafts are in, two parallel tunnels can be dug. Rock blasts are used in the top tunnel, in hopes that any diamonds inside of the kimberlite will fall to the second level.
But underground mining comes with its own set of challenges. Take for example the Snap Lake Mine in Northern Canada. After only 7 years of mining operations, it had to be placed under “care and maintenance” due to water seepage issues. Just about a year later, the decision was made to close it down completely and flood the underground parts of the mine.
Underground diamond mining is a form of pit mining that exploits depleted pit mines.
Snap Lake Mine - Canada
What is Offshore Marine Diamond Mining?
Marine diamond mining is like something out of science fiction. Imagine giant flexible tubes sucking gravel from the Earth floor. That’s one kind. The other method uses massive drills to pull up diamond-bearing gravel. Marine diamond mining started in the 1960’s off the coast of Namibia. To date, more than 1.4 million carats have been extracted from the seafloor.
DeBeers runs this margin mining operation in collaboration with the government of Namibia under the name — Debmarine Namibia.
This kind of hands-off mining comes at a high environmental cost. Marine mining equipment dredges thousands of tons of sediment from the sea. The damage can take decades to recover. Marine mining not only impacts the seafloor, but disturbs migratory species, such as sharks, whales, dolphins, and seals, already under stress from climate change.
Marine mining is anticipated to gain speed as land-based diamond mines are depleted.
To help find diamonds that were washed into the Atlantic Ocean millions of years ago, companies have constructed huge parcels that suck up the seabed in search of these stones. So what happens to all of the extra sediment? It’s simply dumped back into the ocean. In a CNN article about the effects of offshore mining, Kirsten Thompson, a marine scientist from the University of Exeter, gives her input.
“Marine mining removes parts of the seabed with heavy machinery and habitat recovery from this type of disturbance can take decades,” says Thompson.
But the disturbance to the seabed isn’t all that this type of mining can do. These huge ships are also causing increased noise and light pollution.
In the next few years, Debmarine plans to launch the largest ever custom-built mining vessel measuring 577 feet long and capable of dredging diamonds with a mechanical arm from a depth of 400 feet.
A submarine used to examine the seabed COPYRIGHT CNN
