CaratCarbon-neutral, sanction-locked: Alrosa's green crown has no throne
TÜV Austria has certified all 29.8 million carats of Alrosa's 2025 output carbon-neutral, a second straight year. The footprint improved 60% to −1.18 kg CO2e a carat. G7 sanctions still bar the stones from Western counters.
The greenest certificate in diamond mining now belongs to a company half the market is forbidden to buy from.
Sanctions are a political judgment and carbon is an atmospheric one, and the two do not cancel. Alrosa's certificate will not move a single stone through Antwerp — but it will be quoted in every Mumbai and Dubai showroom that stocks Russian goods, and the Western trade should have an answer ready.
| Figure | |
|---|---|
| 2024 | 37 |
| 2025 | 126 |
IA certificate with an asterisk
TÜV Austria Standards & Compliance has verified Alrosa's operations and its entire 2025 production — 29.8 million carats — as carbon-neutral, the second consecutive year the Russian miner has earned the designation, the company said last week.
IIThe engineering is real
The engineering behind the number is real.
Alrosa completed the gasification of its Udachny division in 2025, moving it off petroleum fuels; 76% of its electricity now comes from renewable sources; and the kimberlite it processes absorbs carbon dioxide as it weathers, a quirk of diamond-bearing ore that the company counts on its side of the ledger.
Its facilities absorbed 126,000 tonnes more CO2 than they emitted last year, up from 37,000 tonnes in 2024, and its footprint per carat improved 60% to minus 1.18 kilograms of CO2 equivalent. Chief executive Pavel Marinychev says no other miner has certified both product and operations.
IIIThe audience is selective
The audience for the certificate is necessarily selective. G7 import restrictions on Russian diamonds, phased in from 2024, keep Alrosa's rough out of American and European pipelines regardless of its carbon math.
The document speaks instead to India, China and the Gulf — the markets that now clear most Russian goods, and where sustainability language increasingly features in trade marketing.
For the wider industry the optics are awkward. Natural diamond marketing leans hard on provenance and planet, usually with the implication that virtue and Western supply chains travel together.
The loudest environmental credential in the mining half of the business now sits with the producer those supply chains excluded — a fact that complicates the pitch for everyone selling 'responsibly sourced' as a bundled promise.
01Method · the desk’s arithmetic+
Kimberlite weathers, gas replaces oil, and the ledger flips further negative
Ekati goes dark: Canada's first diamond mine finds no buyer
The other end of supply: Canada's first mine goes to reclamation
The trade, filed before the New York open.
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