![]() “Our goal within the next five to seven years is to increase our production footprint to such a degree that we as a single entity will remove enough carbon dioxide from the air to essentially make the entire diamond trade carbon neutral globally,” Shearman adds. Working together, Aether and Helena’s joint mission is much bigger than just bringing a new jewelry product to market, though the better it does in the market, the more it can effect the ultimate mission: to turn back the clock on climate change. Together, we create circularity so that more R&D funds can go back into the hands of carbon capture companies so they can scale and address climate change in a big way.” We needed to find a company that can profitably take this carbon and turn it into something valuable that people will buy. “Climeworks was the first that could suck carbon dioxide out of the air and then sequester it in rock to go back into the ground,” Elkus shares. However, Helena’s involvement with Climeworks was non-profit in nature and included no financial investment, though Elkus realized the potential. One of Helena’s non-profit projects that intrigued Shearman was Climeworks, which developed and built the carbon capture plant in Switzerland. “When we undertake a profit project, it’s because we passionately believe in its problem-solving mission that requires capitalism to scale.” “We are not just a traditional investor,” he says. ![]() Helena is nearing $250 million in assets under management to invest in profit-making ventures where capitalism is the most appropriate solution to accelerate change. He formed Helena to apply parallel-processing to 21st century problems, using non-profit and profit means where appropriate. “The institutions we’ve relied upon in the past, like government, think tanks and corporations, were built on those archaic models.” ![]() We need to be preventative,” Elkus explains. “We can’t solve the 21st century’s exponential problems, like climate change and global pandemics, with 20th century archaic models that wait for problems to happen, before reacting to them. Helena is described as a “global problem-solving organization” which wears two hats, one for non-profit activities and the other for profit. That’s where the partnership with Elkus and Helena comes in. First, it needs a reactor to extract CO 2 out of the air which becomes the raw material placed into a second reactor where the diamonds are grown. Producing an Aether diamond is a two-step process. “It gets down to both mined- and lab-grown diamonds taking sides about which harms the environment less. “And we are addressing the lab-grown market in a new way, since there is some level of emissions and environmental impact from the fossil-fuel production used for lab-growns,” he continues. “Now with Aether, we are addressing some of the historical issues that have plagued the mined diamond industry, both from an environmental and societal human rights perspective,” Shearman shares. At the time, Wojno had moved onto Pandora jewelry, heading up its quality assurance department, so both had their feet in the two worlds of technology and jewelry. On the other hand, labs have to source their carbon from somewhere-and more often than not, it’s from fossil fuels via oil drilling or fracking.He called on Wojno, who he’d worked with at David Yurman before founding and selling a company that made technologically-advanced safety helmets for motorcyclists. ![]() Diamond companies have even started using the term “natural diamonds,” a marketing play that omits the damaging aspects of mining (and likely confuses some consumers into thinking lab-grown diamonds are fake they are scientifically identical). Traditional diamond suppliers insist their stones have a lower carbon footprint, as labs require intense machines and chemicals to “grow” slivers of carbon into stones. In recent years, that lack of traceability has inspired a new wave of lab-grown diamond brands-and a contentious debate over which type of diamond is more virtuous. Human rights abuses just fly under the radar.” You can’t catch them all, and the organizations don’t define conflict diamonds appropriately. “To an insane degree, conflict diamonds make it onto the market every day. “There are processes in place to ensure conflict diamonds don’t enter the market, but they don’t work,” Shearman explains. After spending their careers at major jewelry brands, Ryan Shearman and Dan Wojno became acutely aware of the myriad issues involved with diamond mining: the energy-intensive process of carving gems from the earth (typically involving heavy machinery and explosives), unreliable certifications, and forced or unfair labor.
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