Eco-friendly diamonds made from the sky
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Meet the world's first zero-carbon diamond!
Ever heard of diamonds made from the sky? Well, now you have!
Environmentalist Dale Vince - founder of green energy firm Ecotricity and chairman of Forest Green Rovers football club - has developed eco-friendly diamonds by sucking carbon out of the air.
They're called Sky Diamonds and were made in Stroud, Gloucestershire.
The process uses a sky mining facility to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, with wind and sun providing the energy. The process also reuses collected rain water.
Dale Vince holding over 拢1 million worth of Sky Diamonds
The company says the process is a way to challenge traditional diamond mining, which causes damage to the planet.
It took the team more than five years to get the technique right, ensuring they are physically and chemically identical to Earth-mined diamonds.
The diamonds - certified by the International Gemological Institute - take a couple of weeks to be made.
"The entire ingredient list comes from the sky and it's not just low or zero carbon, it's actually negative carbon in that respect, because we're locking up atmospheric carbon into a very permanent form of carbon: the diamond," Mr Vince said.
Can you believe these diamonds were created by sucking carbon out of the sky?
He went on to say: "We no longer need to dig these enormous holes in the ground - they're visible from space, some of them. We don't need to do that to get diamonds, we can just make them from the sky.
"We see this as 21st century technology, the exact kind of thing we need to be doing to fight the climate and other sustainability crises, but also enable us to carry on living the way that we're used to living and want to live," he added.
- Published28 February 2020
- Published19 September 2018
