Perth-based provenance verification technology expert Source Certain International (SCI) will partner with SCS Global Services and provide the company’s provenance verification technology for SCS’s newly formed Global Services Certification Standard for Sustainable Diamonds (SCS-007).
The standard establishes a leading benchmark of sustainable accountability, transparency and provenance assurance for the gemstone diamond industry, and is the first unified framework for assessing natural and laboratory-grown diamonds.
The standard is the first global ESG certification across any industry including diamonds, mining, seafood or agriculture that has implemented scientific provenance verification technology to underpin its Chain of Custody requirement.
SCI is providing the scientific provenance verification component, with its proprietary TSW Trace® technology, which will form an essential part of the requirement for certification.
Stanley Mathuram, Executive Vice-President of SCS Global Services, said, “Our standard utilises SCI’s scientific provenance verification techniques and chemical profiling to document a natural diamond’s or lab-grown diamond’s mine or lab of origin.”
SCI’s technology analyses the naturally occurring chemical and trace metal markers present in natural and lab-grown diamonds which allows the provenance of diamonds to be verified down to a mine or lab level. Dr John Watling, Chief Scientist, SCI, noted, “Everything we need to know about a diamond’s origin is already present in it. We study the unique relationships between selected trace and ultra-trace elements to establish a ‘fingerprint’ used to identify the trace elemental signature unique to the mineralising event in which the diamond was formed. These fingerprints are imprinted on natural diamonds when they were formed, millions of years ago, and similarly are imprinted on lab-grown diamonds when they are produced.”