Diamonds have a dirty secret. But there's a climate-conscious solution

In addition to cost savings and supposed environmental benefits, lab-grown diamonds have the same chemical and physical properties as mined diamonds

Alexander Weindling has a fading, black and white framed photograph on the desk of his New York City office. It’s of his grandfather, wearing a hat and suit, posing more than a century ago with some of the workers of a diamond mine he oversaw in what was then known as the Belgian Congo.

The mining of diamonds in Africa led to a human rights disaster from colonial times onwards and Weindling, a third-generation diamond and jewelry merchant, uses the incongruity of this photo in the white minimalism of his Tribeca office as a mental spur. That era of diamond mining was “so devastatingly ugly Isis will start looking like good guys,” says Weindling. “It was dreadful. It was criminal. It was unforgivable.”

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