From a Copenhagen jewelry shop founded in 1982 to a global leader in recycled metals and lab-grown diamonds, here’s how Pandora became the most sustainable consumer brand in the world.
In 1982 in Copenhagen, a goldsmith named Per Enevoldsen and his wife Winnie open a small jewelry shop, importing pieces from Thailand and selling them to local customers. The work was tactile, unhurried, rooted in craft. Per’s training as a goldsmith shaped how he thought about materials, about making things well, about what a piece of jewelry is actually worth. Nobody, at that point, would have called it a sustainability philosophy. It was just how a craftsman ran his shop.
Forty-four years later, the company that shop became walked into Davos and was named the most sustainable consumer brand on the planet.
Corporate Knights, the respected Canadian sustainable-economy research organization that has ranked the world’s most sustainable corporations since 2005, placed Pandora second overall in its 2026 Global 100 index — assessed against more than 8,000 publicly traded companies across every sector on earth. The only company that ranked higher was ERG SpA, an Italian renewable energy producer. Every fashion house, every beauty giant, every luxury goods group on the planet placed below the Danish jewelry brand best known for sterling silver charm bracelets.
As outgoing CEO Alexander Lacik noted, sustainability was something Per Enevoldsen “had in his genes and to quite a large extent, our activities always were in the spirit of sustainability.” That spirit, however, took decades to become strategy.
The turnaround that changed everything
By 2019, Pandora was struggling. Sales had stagnated, the brand felt overexposed, and its share price had lost nearly 80 percent of its value in the years following a disastrous pivot toward higher-end designs that alienated its core customers. When Lacik arrived as CEO that year, he launched what the company called its Phoenix plan — a comprehensive restructuring built on three pillars: cutting costs, reinvesting in marketing, and placing sustainability at the center of the business model.
“We’re not doing it as a marketing play. That’s not what it’s there for. This is about being a company that investors want to invest in. It’s about being a company that employees want to work for,” Mads Twomey-Madsen, Pandora’s senior vice president of global communications and sustainability, told Harper’s Bazaar Australia. “We want to build a company that is here in the future.”
The Phoenix plan was working by nearly every financial metric — revenue rose 49 percent between 2019 and the time of the Corporate Knights ranking, and the brand’s share price climbed to record highs. But what makes the Pandora story genuinely unusual is what happened to its carbon footprint during the same period: it dropped 17 percent. Growing revenue while shrinking emissions is the kind of result that sustainability economists used to argue was structurally impossible for a scaled consumer goods company. Pandora went and did it anyway.
Lab grown, recycled, and powered by the sun
The mechanics of how Pandora achieved its ranking come down to three concrete shifts, each of which required years of supply chain work, supplier negotiations, and significant upfront investment.
The first, and most symbolic, was diamonds. In May 2021, Pandora announced it would stop using mined diamonds entirely and launch a new line — called Pandora Brilliance — featuring only lab-grown stones. Lacik called it “the right thing to do” and framed the move as inseparable from the brand’s larger ambitions: “Lab-created diamonds are just as beautiful as mined diamonds, but available to more people and with lower carbon emissions,” he said at the launch. The carbon footprint of a Pandora lab-grown diamond is approximately five percent of that of a comparably sized mined diamond, and each stone is grown, cut, and polished using 100 percent renewable electricity.
The diamond industry hit back quickly. A coalition of organizations including the Responsible Jewellery Council, the World Diamond Council, and the Natural Diamond Council issued a joint statement attacking what it called a “false and misleading narrative” in Pandora’s announcement — a sign of how much disruption the move represented to an industry built on centuries of mined-stone dominance. Pandora held its position. And Lacik, speaking to Fortune, made clear he saw the conflict as inevitable but ultimately beside the point: “It’s safe to say that lab-created diamonds are here to stay. So we better figure out a way to coexist in a positive way together.”
The second transformation was metals — and this one was operationally far more complex. Silver accounts for roughly 81 percent of the material in a Pandora piece, and less than 20 percent of the world’s silver supply comes from recycled sources. Pivoting to 100 percent recycled silver and gold meant rebuilding an entire supply chain from scratch: auditing more than 40 supplier sites, convincing multinational metals refiners to change their processing operations, requiring new furnaces and separate production lines to keep recycled and virgin materials apart, and certifying the entire chain under the Responsible Jewellery Council’s Chain of Custody standard.
More than 100 Pandora employees worked on the transition for four years. Twomey-Madsen described the scale of what it required: “We had to define the right operating model, engage with all our silver and gold suppliers, and audit more than 40 sites to see who could meet our high standards. For suppliers, it meant switching their operations to source from [Responsible Jewellery Council Chain of Custody] certified recycled materials. This meant introducing additional processes and equipment, especially to ensure they segregate any mined or non-certified materials from ours,” he told WWD.
Pandora stopped sourcing newly mined silver and gold in December 2023 — a full year ahead of its original 2025 target. “Silver and gold are our most important raw materials, and by moving to 100% recycled we reduce our climate impact significantly without compromising on quality or craftsmanship. This achievement is unparallelled in the industry and a major step towards a more circular business model,” Lacik said when the milestone was announced. By switching away from newly mined metals entirely, Pandora now avoids approximately 58,000 tons of CO₂ per year — the equivalent of taking 6,000 gasoline-powered cars off the road annually. The additional cost to Pandora of using recycled metals: approximately $10 million per year. A sum Twomey-Madsen described as “the necessary and right thing to do.”
The third pillar is energy. Every Pandora crafting facility now runs on 100 percent renewable electricity.
Why Corporate Knights ranked Pandora this high
The 2026 Corporate Knights methodology introduced a new scoring criterion that reshuffled the entire list: “sustainable revenue momentum,” defined as the annualized growth in sustainable revenue between 2022 and 2024. That metric now accounts for one-third of a company’s total score. “We’re firing a shot across the bow that speed matters,” Corporate Knights CEO Toby Heaps said when the methodology was unveiled. The change sent Pandora from 48th place in the 2025 ranking to second overall in a single year.
Corporate Knights assessed Pandora on three equally weighted metrics: the proportion of its total revenues classified as sustainable, the proportion of its total investments classified as sustainable, and sustainable revenue momentum. Pandora scored 100 percent — a full percentile rank relative to its sectoral peers — across all three. It also earned a bonus score for what Corporate Knights calls a “sustainability pay link”: executive compensation at Pandora is formally connected to hitting sustainability targets. The company received no deductions for fines, sanctions, or fatalities.
Among the 1,476 companies assessed in the Consumer Discretionary sector, Pandora ranked first. Kering, the French luxury conglomerate behind Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Bottega Veneta, also appeared on the Global 100 — in 43rd place. The separation between them is a measure of how far Pandora has moved, and how fast.
What it means for the industry
Pandora is not a small player making admirable niche choices. It is the world’s largest jewelry brand by volume, selling more than 100 million pieces per year through 6,800 points of sale in more than 100 countries, employing 37,000 people. The scale of its recycled metals program has already had an effect beyond its own production: because Pandora’s purchasing volume was large enough to justify suppliers investing in new recycled processing infrastructure, those same suppliers can now offer certified recycled silver and gold to other companies. “It’s available now for other companies that want to do the same. And I think that’s something that you encounter in these circularity changes,” Twomey-Madsen told Corporate Knights. “These value streams aren’t really established yet. So when you go first, you need to invest in making that happen.”
The lab-grown diamond market tells a similar story. When Pandora made the switch in 2021, very few jewelers had committed to lab-grown stones. The global market for lab-grown diamonds is now expected to reach $55.5 billion by 2031, according to market research cited by Sustainability Magazine, more than doubling from current levels. Pandora didn’t just respond to that shift — it helped cause it.
“It is extra pleasing for us to be a consumer brand that sits highly ranked among companies whose business it is to really introduce green energy,” Twomey-Madsen told WWD. “It’s a high-caliber group of peers.”
New CEO Berta de Pablos-Barbier, who stepped into the role on Jan. 1, has made clear the work is not finished. “We are proud to be among the world’s most sustainable companies. By spearheading recycling and innovative materials, we have been able to grow our business while bringing down our environmental footprint,” she said. “We will continue to transform the way we craft our jewellery and reduce our impact on the planet — this is part of futureproofing Pandora.”
Pandora has set a target to halve greenhouse gas emissions across its full value chain by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2040. Per Enevoldsen’s little Copenhagen shop was never going to stay small. Turns out, neither were its ambitions.
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