A more sustainable way of making diamonds.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lelie Dramale. By one estimate, lab-grown diamonds make up a $14 billion market.

And the world's largest jewelry maker, Pandora,

is betting that that market will only grow.

Pandora says it'll stop selling mined diamonds and is expanding its lab-grown diamond range.

It's time for a new kind of diamond.

One that's made, not mined, and is as unique as you and me.

The brand says growing diamonds in a lab is more environmentally sustainable than mining and that also happens to be more affordable,

thanks to cost-effective production methods.

The BBC's Leanna Byrne has more on how lab-grown diamonds are made and who's buying them.

The idea behind a lab-grown diamond is that they're more sustainable and they're cheaper.

Pandora's lab-grown diamonds start at $290 for not 0.15 of a carrot and go up to 4,450 for a 2 carrot diamond.

It's because making them is a lot less expensive than mining them, says Alexander Lassick, chief executive officer of Pandora.

In terms of production cost, if you take the example of a one carrot versus the other carrot so roughly is a third of the production cost for

the lab grown versus in mind which obviously then ends up in a consumer price.

So how are they made?

Green Lab is based in Surat, the diamond polishing capital of India.

The company's director is Sankit Patel.

He says lab-grown diamonds can be grown from a seed of pure carbon in around six weeks.

Seeds are basically diamonds. It's a single crystal diamond plate. So once the plate is placed in the reactors,

we start to give it the right temperature, pressure, and the right gases.

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