The True Cost of Mined Diamonds: What Happens to the Land

By Isabelle Lincoln-Moore 16th January 2017 4 min read

Part one of four | Ethica Diamonds, Newquay, Cornwall

This is the first in a series of blogs we have written about what mined diamonds actually cost - not the price tag in the shop window, but the real cost. The environmental cost. The ecological cost. The human cost.

We are not writing these to lecture anyone or to make you feel guilty about a ring you already own. We are writing them because we think that when you are choosing something as significant as an engagement ring, you deserve to understand the full picture.

Let us start with the ground beneath our feet.

The Scale of the Problem

When you dig something out of the ground, you leave a hole behind. That is obvious. What is less obvious is the scale of that hole when you are mining diamonds.

On average, 250 tonnes of earth and ore must be excavated for every single carat of diamond extracted. Read that again. Two hundred and fifty tonnes. For one carat. A carat weighs 0.2 grams.

The world's largest open cast diamond mine, Orapa in Botswana, covers 1.18 square kilometres at ground level. It extracts 20 million tonnes of ore from the ground every year, and a further 40 million tonnes of waste rock on top of that. And that is one mine. There are over fifty significant diamond mines currently operating globally.

250 tonnes of earth moved for every 0.2 grams of diamond. The mathematics of diamond mining are extraordinary - and not in a good way.

Where Does All That Waste Go?

The short answer is: wherever is most convenient. Enormous piles of waste rock - called tailings - are built up alongside mines and left there indefinitely. The chemicals within the disturbed soil leach into groundwater and surrounding water sources. The sheer physical presence of these waste mountains disrupts drainage, blocks migration routes, and permanently alters the landscape.

Some mining companies make commitments to restore mined land after operations close. In practice, restoration takes decades, is never complete, and in many regions of the world these commitments are made with little intention of being kept.

Open Pit Mining

The most common form of diamond mining involves drilling and blasting into Kimberlite rock - the volcanic formations in which diamonds form - to create enormous open pit mines. These pits can extend hundreds of metres into the earth and stretch for kilometres across the surface.

The Diavik mine in Canada is one of the most visually striking examples of what this looks like. A vast, engineered crater carved into an island in the Northwest Territories, surrounded by the extraordinary wilderness it is steadily destroying. Operations like Diavik extract diamonds from an environment of global ecological importance and leave behind a landscape that will not recover within any human lifetime.

Strip Mining and Marine Mining

Where diamonds have been naturally transported away from Kimberlite formations by rivers or ocean currents over millions of years, strip mining is used instead. This involves scraping back topsoil to expose the diamond-bearing sand or silt beneath it, or hoovering up sediment from the seabed.

Strip mining is largely unregulated, requires significantly less investment than open pit operations, and is used extensively across parts of Africa and South America. When done carelessly - and it frequently is - the topsoil removed becomes contaminated with the underlying silicates and cannot be returned to agricultural use. Communities that depended on that land for farming lose their livelihoods permanently.

Marine mining - extracting diamonds from the seabed - is a relatively recent practice and its long term consequences are still being studied. What we do know is that it causes significant disruption to seabed ecosystems that have taken thousands of years to develop, and that the recovery process after mining operations stop can take between two and ten years, assuming recovery happens at all.

The Land That Cannot Be Returned

There is a phrase used in some mining industry documents about the commitment to return land to close to its previous state after a mine closes. We would like to spend a moment on that word - close.

Close is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence. Close is not the same as restored. Close does not mean the ancient peat bogs that took ten thousand years to develop will return. Close does not mean the caribou migration routes that evolved over millennia will be reinstated. Close does not mean the agricultural soil that sustained communities for generations will be productive again.

Close means: we made a vague effort, and then we left.

In some regions of the world, mining companies are not even required to make the effort. The land is taken, the diamonds are extracted, and the hole is left behind. Permanently.

cornwall coastline of beautiful blue waters

Why This Matters for Your Ring

A lab grown diamond is created in a controlled environment. No land is excavated. No topsoil is destroyed. No Kimberlite rock is blasted apart. No tailings mountains are built. The stone is grown from carbon, using energy, and the physical footprint of the process is vanishingly small compared to what we have described above.

At Ethica Diamonds in Newquay, we only sell lab grown diamonds and gemstones. We do this because we believe that the story behind your ring should be one you feel genuinely good about - and the story behind a mined diamond is, by any honest reckoning, very difficult to feel good about.