In 2015, after her return from London, investment banker Pooja Sheth was scouting for an opportunity to start her entrepreneurial journey in India when a meeting with Bakul Limbasiya, a leading manufacturer of lab-grown diamonds, provided her with a direction and purpose.

Since the first Earth Day a half-century ago, large industries have grown from the widespread conviction that “natural” foods, fibers, cosmetics and other products are better for people and the planet. It’s an attitude that dates back to the 18th- and 19th-century Romantics, who rejected industrialism in favor of sublime landscapes and rural nostalgia: What’s given is good; what’s made is suspicious, especially if it’s of recent origin.

Lab-grown diamonds or synthetic diamonds are purer, cheaper and more sustainable than natural diamonds, so why are we still mining them? New technologies are opening the door to new hi-tech applications and a more sustainable production process. We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What can we do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.

Lab growns withstood the mined diamond interest’s attempt to delegitimize the category to being recognized as real as anything that comes out of the ground. And because carat-for-carat they are priced about 30% below mined diamonds, consumers are driving demand for this new precious stone.

The FT travels to the Cardiff Diamond Foundry to see how a diamond is grown in a chemical vapour deposition system, and how lab-grown diamonds differ from natural ones.

Invented by Nature - Perfected by Science

grown diamonds are just what they sound like. They are diamonds that are grown inside a laboratory using pure carbon in a process that simulates what happens in nature but just speeds up the process by a few thousand years.