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Supplies of Rare Earth Elements Exhausted By 2017
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Jul 02, 2008 07:11 AM
from the they-don't-call-them-rare-for-nothing dept.
from the they-don't-call-them-rare-for-nothing dept.
tomhudson writes "While we bemoan the current oil crisis, I ran across an editorial that led me to research a more immediate threat. Ramped-up production of flat-panel displays means the material to make them will be 'extinct' by 2017. This goes for other electronics as well. Quoting: 'The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany's University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet's stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.' More links at the journal entry."
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Recycling (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Recycling (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, im not sure about all these -iums, which are no doubt toxic to us anyways... but zinc and copper is pretty easy to recycle, and in a decade, we might not need the -iums we (dont really) need now...
Especially if we upgrade all the phone and cable lines to optical, and recycle those trillion miles of copper, and as we move away from coin money (another debate unto itself) there's also that (both copper and zinc), replacing copper pipes with plastic, etc, etc, etc... although, all that plastic is also another debate.
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Re:Recycling (Score:5, Insightful)
I think were all right with plastic we can always 'grown' it from biofeuls once we sort out this pesky demand for oil thing.
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Re:Recycling (Score:5, Insightful)
With population growth and new countries wanting to raise their standard of living, we will run out of these elements even faster.
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Re:Recycling (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not scaremongering, it is just cry from people that the game is changing but they don't know themselves in which way. The issue boils down to investments. Plenty of alternatives, enough undiscovered country (as you said, ocean floor) and many old mines will become economically viable again. BUT, you do need investments for those, and people do need to realize the consequences.
8 to 10 years ago, you could here these same stories about the oil demand outgrowing the oil supply due to lack of investments and geopolitical issues. Now that that time is here, politicians act like they didn't see it coming and consumers are complaining they can't afford to fill up their SUV's.
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Re:Recycling (Score:5, Informative)
It seems that way.
Indium, for example, is more common than silver, and the only reason for the supposed scarcity on the market is that the Chinese mining companies stopped extracting it from their zinc tailings.
I suspect a large proportion of the fear mongering derives from the way mining companies define resources and reserves. The type of exploration required to turn a mineral resource (what miners expect to find) into an ore reserve (what they have proved to be there) is expensive. It doesn't make sense to prove up more ore than is needed for the immediate continuity of the company.
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copper (Score:5, Insightful)
is by far the most serious in the above list. Ok, so flat panel manufacturers and researchers would have to pay top dollar, no biggie. But copper is going to get more and more crucial as the combined crunch of oil shortage and increased electrical demands are going to combine.
Re:copper (Score:5, Informative)
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Copper, plumbing, thefts (Score:5, Interesting)
Copper prices are now high enough that it's worth trying to steal. Here in Boston, at least once a month there's a story about someone killed trying to steal copper from power lines that turn out to be, y'know, active.
Construction sites now have to be locked up tightly. It's not just the tools that get stolen; it's the pipes and the wire spools.
I assume this will get worse as copper gets scarcer and, thus, more expensive.
The OP mentions plumbing, but I'm not sure that plastic is a viable alternative yet. I've built a few houses, and always used copper, at least for the main plumbing. I remember in the 1990s, the industry tried using PVC, but had problems of some kind, and went back to copper. Today, you can use PEX or Hep2O flexible tubing for heating, but I don't know if it's approved for drinking yet - and we probably don't know its long term stability. Copper is still the gold standard (sorry!) for plumbing.
(Side rant: When copper pipes freeze, you can use an arc welder to heat them back up. You can't do that with PEX, since it's plastic, not metal. So if it gets too cold, your heat stops working... which means the air can't warm up enough to melt the ice... shampoo, rinse, repeat. Make sure your PEX is in a well-insulated wall.)
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Re:copper (Score:5, Funny)
Pennies are zinc.
Maybe that's another good reason to stop making pennies.
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Re:copper (Score:5, Funny)
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What can and cant be done. (Score:5, Interesting)
When an LCD display breaksdown, they won't be able to crush them into tiny bits, smelt them and recover the material? All it means is your 50" LCD monitor will have some significant residual value and you will sell the dead monitor for some money instead of throwing it in the dumpster.
Re:What can and cant be done. (Score:5, Insightful)
And landfills will become valuable commercial property.
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Re:What can and cant be done. (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, I've often wondered when "landfill mining" was going to take off as a viable enterprise, as the higher cost of materials justifies the complicated means.
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Re:What can and cant be done. (Score:5, Insightful)
Likewise. There's a whole world of landfill sites (a whole western world, at least) full of things we didn't recycle efficiently, either because we didn't know how or we just didn't bother. I don't know enough about the techniques involved to judge this, but it seems that if deep mining operations are commercially viable today, landfill mining could become commercially viable in the not-too-distant future.
I think the other thing that will have to change is this idea that you buy something but then "upgrade" it after only a very short period of use and throw the old one away, even though the old one still worked perfectly well or needed only routine maintenance to repair. Our culture has become terribly wasteful, because today's economics (and poor customer service when it comes to getting things repaired) practically force anyone sensible to buy a new replacement for things. That's just crazy.
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*Ding* Correct Answer. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been saying this for years. We'll be exploring landfills soon after they're no longer viable for producing methane gas. Meanwhile, states that refused to bury, and opted to dump their garbage elsewhere will be kicking themselves - hard.
Such "exhausted" landfills will be packed with little more than inorganic waste, like easily harvested metals. Point at anything on the periodic table and it'll exist in a landfill at concentrations far higher than what exists in ore deposits we're mining today; so this will be ridiculously profitable. Add to that the fact that they're all close to home, and you have yourself an industry that does a brisk business in mining landfills. And since all the stinky stuff has long since decomposed, you only have heavy-metals and toxic runoff to worry about (read: just like a normal mine).
After that, companies will look to cut out the middle man and buy back everyone's e-waste after the recycling plant has sorted it out. So the landfill will dissapear, leaving a closed loop from the recovery of raw materials all the way to the consumer and back again.
"SQL Error", you have the board. Pick a category.
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Total ignorance of economics? (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be mighty surprising if this chicken-little themed story was correct.
Most things when in short supply, their price goes up. People notice this and they either cut back on their use of the stuff, find a substitute, or go out digging for it.
We do have a terrible shortage of celluloid shirt collars, ivory piano keys, whale oil and pyramid shims. Who cares?
Re:Total ignorance of economics? (Score:5, Funny)
find a substitute
I hear Quake 5 for the abacus is going to be awesome!
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Re:Total ignorance of economics? (Score:5, Interesting)
The authors apparently do not realize that the available amount of Gallium depend on the price:
Its impending scarcity could already be reflected in its price: in January 2003 the metal sold for around $60 per kilogram; by August 2006 the price had shot up to over $1000 per kilogram
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Re:Total ignorance of economics? (Score:5, Insightful)
But the price of gallium will affect the availability of gallium in a form that humans find easily useable.
An increase in price means an increase in resources that can be devoted to extracting gallium and still leave the extractor with a profit.
An increase in price also means that alternatives that used to be more expensive could be less expensive now, which lowers demand for gallium.
Economics isn't a perfect science, and it often heavily relies on imperfect data from a biased world. But I wouldn't put it in the same realm as reading tea leaves.
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Re:Total ignorance of economics? (Score:5, Interesting)
Stop treating economics like its a theory of everything.
The problem isn't economics, it's the idiots that try to invoke it in the way we see them doing here. The fact that the price of a commodity increases when it's in short supply doesn't cure the shortage or make it less of a problem; it merely allocates what supplies remain to those who are willing to pay the most. It's a manifestation of the shortage, not an explanation of it.
In a severe food shortage, yes, the price of food shoots up. People who can afford it continue to eat well (albeit at the expense of other things), but others starve. As far as your typical affluent conservative is concerned, the market has efficiently "solved" the problem.
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Re:Total ignorance of economics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bah, We don't need "technology". We can just use Economics instead.
Can't reach that can on the top shelf? Economics can help!
Is that lump in your armpit getting bigger? Don't worry; Economics will have it out in a jiffy.
Fallen down a gully in the mountains and shattered your pelvis, hundreds of miles from help, with no ways of communicating with anyone? Just chant "Economics" three times, for a speedy and efficient rescue.
Economics is the new God of the Gaps. You don't know the answer? Silly old physical laws getting in the way? No problem; Economics dictates that someone else will be motivated to come up with a solution. It's impossible? Why, that just makes it more valuable!
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Have no fear (Score:5, Funny)
We still haven't even begun to use our Upsidasium supply.
Surely it will last us forever.
Re:Have no fear (Score:5, Funny)
I'm setting up a massive stockpile of unobtanium against the day that it becomes useful.
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A world without Zinc!? (Score:5, Funny)
Rare Earth Elements? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, neither is Hafnium, Indium, Zinc or Copper. Does the article have any connection to the rare earth elements at all?
Gone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, if the point is that all of these elements are bound up in in-use devices, and always will be, then that's another matter. But I'd be a bit surprised to find that we've actually touched even close to all of the deposits available. Just the cheap ones. And recycling will probably be cheaper than, say, mining it on the moon or the ocean floor.
And this is where the beginning of (Score:5, Interesting)
It was going to have to happen eventually. One thing i've always thought to myself is, that if the earth is here 50,000 years from now and some cognitive being starts exploring, everything will be told in our landfills... They may not be able to know what we did at this time, but they will know the materials we used - at least Styrofoam
OftLoG (Score:5, Insightful)
I wasn't aware we were sending Iridium into space (Score:5, Insightful)
All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc.
We are of course not shooting our rare Earth elements into space, they won't be gone, they will be sitting in waste dumps in China and elsewhere.
Maybe the headline should have been "We will be mining landfills by 2017 for Rare Earths."
not rare Earth, and not rare (Score:5, Informative)
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Insightful)
We arent doomed, zinc will still exist, the amount we consume/need is fractional and exists all over the surface of the planet...
Its just not "farmable" in large amounts that way, therefore they say its "all gone" as far as electronics and such go...
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Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds like you just contradicted yourself there. The loss of feasibly mineable zinc deposits will spell disaster for applications that use it. We should be recycling zinc from batteries, from electronics, everything, but we arent! Will by the time we realise this is a problem will it be too late? Even with recycling, there may not be enough materials avialable for recycling to supply new demand. So it is a serious problem, and like peak oil, there it is human nature to try to avoid looking at the problem because it is too painful to look at reality, so people have to try to desperately convince themselves it doesnt exist and detach themselves from reality, like the ostrich sticking its head in the sand. But this does not make our problems go away. They say, ignorance is bliss, but only for so long.
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Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Informative)
that depends how much do you rely on goods that travel by ship on salt water?
Zinc anodes are used as an corrosion point for salt water. So Instead of eating the steel hulls in the ships Zinc anodes take the damage. On salt water boats they have to be replaced annually or more.
without zinc world wide shipping will come to a halt a decade later.
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Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Informative)
T'ain't necessarily so. Are we running out of Aluminium? Al works just fine as a sacrifical anode.
Have a look here [offshoreanodes.com] for starters...
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Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Informative)
Zinc is old-tech for an anode.
The Army Corps of Engineers (at a lab I used to work at) invented a Ceramic Anode.
A 20oz Ceramic anode does the job of a 50lb Metalic one, huge-huge improvement.
Read all about it.
http://www.erdc.usace.army.mil/pls/erdcpub/docs/erdc/images/ERDCFactSheet_Product_CeramicAnodes.pdf [army.mil]
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Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Insightful)
Zinc anodes are a CHEAP solution for corrosion. they are not the ONLY solution.
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Re:Scaremongering... (Score:5, Insightful)
They disappear in a usable format for electronics though. It will prove interesting to see what happens when it truly does disappear (I'm not sure if 2017 is an accurate date). Either we'll develop vastly different technologies, recycle somehow, somehow create the elements synthetically or mine the stuff from asteroids.
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Re:Scaremongering... (Score:5, Insightful)
somehow create the elements synthetically
Let me go fire up my heavy fusion reactor and get to work on that.
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Re:Scaremongering... (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is getting them back, recycling them, thats the problem. Its not scaremongering at all. THis will reduce progress and economic growth, there is no doubt about that. Without an easy supply of thse materials manufacturing will be capped and we probably wont be able to get enough from recycling to meet demand, considering we are recycling AT ALL. We could have had recycling programs for electronics in place years ago and could have recollected electronic equipment for recycling, but our arrogant and idiotic, shortsighted governments have been too slow to do this, as they have been with renewable energy. There should be HUGE fines for throwing anything metal or electronic into the garbage, including batteries that are filled witn metals. How many people recycle their alkaline batteries I ask? How many cities have curbside recycling pickup for batteries and electronic waste, cable, etc? Now with much of these materials buried in landfills, it will be a impractical idea to try to recover them. Duh! How could we be so stupid.
Given even with recycling we still will not get enough metals to meet demand, this is a HUGE problem. Given depleation of other resources such as iron and copper, oil, phosphorus (fertilizer, CRT displays), we are seeing serious trouble ahead. To avert this will take action now but do to the lack of action things are a lot worse than they could have been, since so many materials have already been sent to landfills.
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Re:Scaremongering... (Score:5, Insightful)
The premise of this article, and your post as well, are both rooted in a fundamental economic misunderstanding.
It is almost impossible for a resource to suddenly go extinct. What happens is that as available stocks shrink, and the cost of mining more increases, the cost of that resource also goes up. This provides a natural economic incentive both to find alternatives, and to recycle, at the point where it is economically feasible.
Gallium and zinc will never be used up. They will simply go up in cost and end up used for more important applications while enterprising individuals and companies discover and develop alternatives, and consumers shift their buying habits to products that use less of them.
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Re:Scaremongering... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? It seems to me that landfills would be more concentrated and easier to mine than natural ores are!
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Re:I have a secret supply (Score:5, Funny)
actually vacuum tubes were depleting our reserves of vacuum. By the time they went out of use, there was no vacuum left on earth! Some proposed mining vacuum from deep space, but it wasn't practical.
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Re:supply and demand - no real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
You should be modded redundant because this is now the third time in this discussion I've had to tear down this ideological pop-economic BULLSHIT.
The market doesn't govern the physical universe. At all. The amounts of material and energy present on Earth are in no way related to the laws of supply and demand. The universe is indifferent to your over-applied, unfalsifiable theories. Applying your (almost certainly feeble) understanding of economics implies the universe responds like a rational actor, an idiotic notion that underpins most religion and superstition.
Sometimes 'cheaper alternatives' just don't exist. This is why your precious markets have never got to grips with spaceflight. The markets reaction has always been "Wait till it is cheaper" on the assumption that all technology gets cheaper - ignoring the fact that there is a physical constraint on what you must do to get into orbit. The required delta-V isn't going to change just because it would be financially efficient for it to do so.
If you are a true economist, then fuck off and play with your stock markets and leave actual science to actual scientists.
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Re:Dont believe the hype (Score:5, Informative)
no its not, there is no cycle for copper, zinc, etc they've just sat in rocks in mineral form since the earth was created and now are being used. If they are going to be recycled its got to be done by us!
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Re:eek! (Score:5, Funny)
So that's it then: we HAVE to go discover Rare Moon elements, Rare Mars elements, Rare Ganymede elements, ad infinitum...
It's all a cunning plan by NASA to stay employed!
(do I really NEED to put a '/sarc' after this?)
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Re:eek! (Score:5, Funny)
ad infinitum
It's a good thing we have plenty of infinitum.
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Re:I'm not worried in the least because I plan to (Score:5, Funny)
Food is becoming extinct as well. We're starting to burn everything we grow.
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Re:Heard it before (Score:5, Informative)
What makes you think that, for practical purposes, rare elements will always be available for use? What makes you think that the definition of "supply" means all the stock of an element on the planet?
"Supply" in this sense is used to refer to the stock of a material available for use. Do you seriously think (for example) that all the gallium used in consumer electronics is recoverable? Or that it's cost-effective to do so?
Are you retarded enough to think that economics cannot be used to analyze the markets for raw materials used for production of electronics, and that the available supply of a raw material does not affect the price people will pay for that raw material, and that this will not affect the cost and availability of finished goods that use that raw material?
Or are you saying that cost of recovery of a raw material is meaningless?
Why does crap such as you wrote keep getting modded insightful? Presumably it's by the armchair logicians who equate total amount of an element on the planet with the amount available for use (the supply).
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