Carbon-neutral, sanction-locked: Alrosa's green crown has no throne

§1A certificate with an asterisk.

The greenest certificate in diamond mining now belongs to a company half the market is forbidden to buy from. 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.

§2The 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.

§3The 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.