Diamonds by Pandora is one of the winners of Fast Company’s 2023 World Changing Ideas Awards. Explore the full list of projects we’re honoring for making the world more equitable, accessible, and sustainable.

Mining diamonds involves creating large, destructive holes in the earth and then having people do the dangerous job of digging them out of the ground. So the commercialization of synthetic diamonds—created from carbon in a lab instead of underground—should be a boon for both the environment and worker safety. But that will happen only if jewelry companies adopt the new technology.

In 2022, just 10% of diamonds sold were grown in labs. But a new product line by Pandora, the Danish company that’s the third-largest jewelry retailer in the world, could help change that. Its new Diamonds by Pandora line—the winner of Fast Company’s 2023 World Changing Ideas Award in the Consumer Products category—features only lab-grown diamonds.

“We could see that the interest among consumers was growing. It’s growing faster from a small base, of course, but it’s faster than the diamond market as a whole,” says Mads Twomey-Madsen, Pandora’s SVP of communications and sustainability. “It’s a good example of a technology that matures over many years and then suddenly it reaches this kind inflection point where it can actually transform or expand the market quite a lot.”

The company’s diamonds are grown by third-party suppliers using only renewable energy, and are fitted onto jewelry made with recycled silver and gold, one step in the company’s plan to use recycled metals exclusively by 2025 (the first major jewelry company to make such a commitment). Pandora plans to transition to lab-grown diamonds across all of its products.

The collection’s silver ring with a 0.15-carat lab-created diamond, which retails for $300, has about the same amount of embedded emissions as a T-shirt. Its highest-priced item, a $1,950 1-carat lab-created diamond set in a 14-karat solid-gold ring, has fewer emissions than an average pair of jeans. The lab-grown diamonds themselves have just 5% of the carbon footprint of a mined diamond.

The line is designed to democratize the idea of diamonds, offering them at lower price points and in jewelry beyond fancy engagement rings. But the goal is also to show the jewelry industry that there are alternatives to the ways it has traditionally operated.

“We hope that it’s going to help show other companies: You can do this,” Twomey-Madsen says. “And of course, that’s also interesting for us, because that will help create even better transparency and supply chains and move the way you conduct normal business in this space.”