As global outcry increases over Africa’s blood diamond industry and the environmental impacts of traditional mining, one Scottsdale diamond company, Avilan Diamonds, is trying to fight back by recycling the precious stone.
Instead of purchasing new diamonds to sell at its Valley store, Avilan Diamonds offers consumers previously owned jewels to support the idea of a self-proclaimed “storied diamond.”
The recycling principle markets the commodity similarly to a certified used car.
A traditionally mined diamond goes through several steps after its unearthing: It’s polished and sorted, sent to a manufacturer and wholesaler, and then shipped to a retailer. It grows increasingly difficult to trace which diamonds have and have not been involved in forced labor mining, which makes combating the practice from a retail standpoint difficult, says Jana Hadany, marketing vice president at Avilan Diamonds.
Conversely, once a previously owned diamond is bought at Avilan, the company inscribes the diamond and then tracks its lifetime circulation after it’s sold.
“We’re trying to stop traditional mining that contributes to the human rights atrocities that are associated with it, and the environmental destruction with the mining process,” Hadany says.
On Nov. 1, the Scientific Certification System (SCS), an environmental and sustainability advocate, awarded Avilan as the first “responsible source” for diamonds.
To achieve the certification, Alivan opened its financial statements to SCS and demonstrated the environmental impact of an entirely post-consumer retailer.
Alivan took two years to practice the tracking method used to ensure the re-circulated diamonds continue to be recycled. Consumers are able to visit SCS’s website and see the diamond’s lifecycle after Avilan sells it.
Avilan is hoping by providing an alternative and “ethical” method for consumers, it will pressure other retailers to follow suit, Hadany says.
“In high-cost commodities, nobody volunteers to do the right thing, it just doesn’t work that way, unfortunately,” Hadany says.
Hadany says she feels that standards in the diamond industry are not clean enough, and despite people talking about change, very few people are actually achieving it.
One solution to the environmental and humanitarian impacts from diamond mining is manufactured diamonds, a process completed in several ways that creates an anatomically identical compound to a natural diamond.
The rare-jewel industry frowns upon the idea of laboratory-grown diamonds, as do some consumers, because the diamonds lose their uniqueness.
“You’re not creating them the way they came from nature,” Hadany says. “There is no unique value to them.”