Much of the conversation about ethics in the diamond industry focuses on the process of operating a mine — but it's just as important to consider what happens when one closes.
Author:Whitney BauckPublish date:Dec 4, 2019When Kanye West dropped the music video for "Diamonds from Sierra Leone" in 2005, he was inviting viewers to engage with perhaps the most salient fashion ethics issue of the mid-aughts: conflict diamonds. His video, filled with images of blood-spurting diamond jewelry and forlorn-looking child miners, provided a graphic introduction to the moral questions embedded in our supply chains.
The second reason planning ahead is crucial is that closing a diamond mine isn't quite as simple as shuttering something like an apparel factory. Diamond mines mark the landscapes they inhabit as noticeably as something like a mountain or lake would, which means that opening and closing them can have serious ramifications for natural ecosystems.
"Saying 'we'll just put the trees [that were there before the mine] back,' maybe that's okay, but will the ducks come back, will the wildlife repopulate?" she asks. "In the case of the Arctic where people actually rely on some of the animals for food, that's quite serious." But Dr. Power and his fellow researchers have proven that some kinds of mine tailings also have the potential to capture carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases contributing to global warming.
"You shouldn't be getting to the end [of a mine's existence] and suddenly have these really significant environmental liabilities to remediate, which is what would have happened in mining about 50 to 100 years ago," says Fergusson. The shadow side of this, though, is that any slowdown or shutdown of mines has the potential to hurt the country's economy in a significant way. A similar effect can be seen on a micro level. Mini economies often spring up around a mine, which can go from being a hole in "the middle of nowhere" to a bustling hub of activity and commerce in a very short span of time.
At Victor, a De Beers-operated mine in Canada that shut down this year, the company hosted a job fair that Fergusson described as "hugely successful" in placing a "majority" of former mine employees in new non-mining positions. De Beers' aggregation, cutting and polishing facility, which processes diamonds from all over the world, was relocated from London to Botswana to create more jobs that aren't directly dependent on Botswana's own mining output.
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