Supplies of Rare Earth Elements Exhausted By 2017

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."

Recycling

How many of this stuff can be recovered by recycling? In the EU, companies now have to recycle old electronic equipment [wikipedia.org], which will surely extend the availability of these materials.

Re:Recycling

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.

Re:Recycling

I think were all right with plastic we can always 'grown' it from biofeuls once we sort out this pesky demand for oil thing.

copper

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

Pennies are zinc.

Maybe that's another good reason to stop making pennies.

What can and cant be done.

They can dig tons of soil, call them ore, smelt them, refine them, separate the rare-earth material from all other contaminants, purify them and make LCD displays.

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.

And landfills will become valuable commercial property.

Re:What can and cant be done.

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.

Total ignorance of economics?

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?

find a substitute

I hear Quake 5 for the abacus is going to be awesome!

Re:Total ignorance of economics?

Yep, clueless, check this story [idtechex.com]
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

Re:Total ignorance of economics?

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.

Have no fear

We still haven't even begun to use our Upsidasium supply.
Surely it will last us forever.

Re:Have no fear

I'm setting up a massive stockpile of unobtanium against the day that it becomes useful.

A world without Zinc!?

*Tries to shoot self but fails due to gun not functioning without Zinc*

Rare Earth Elements?

Apparently Gallium isn't a Rare Earth Element [wikipedia.org].

Actually, neither is Hafnium, Indium, Zinc or Copper. Does the article have any connection to the rare earth elements at all?

Gone?

Something tells me that "the world's supply" of these elements isn't actually going down. Unless Ye Olde Alchemical Procefes (sorry, Mr. Stephenson) are actually transmuting, say, indium, into gold... it's just a question of where the elements are. Which is to say that I'm sure there's lots of it sitting right there in landfills, probably easier to get to than it is when bound up in 100 tons of rock and dirt in a mine. I mean, we didn't ship THAT much of the stuff to Mars yet, did we?

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

mining our landfills will begin...

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

Every few weeks we have to endure this kind of drivel. Doom and gloom to sell news, get grant dollars, whatever. Last week's scare mongering wearing thing? Just trot out the latest manbearpig. In cases such as this, past performance IS a pretty good indicator of the future. We, mankind, make improvements, overcome shortfalls, etc. OLEDs will surpass LCDs in price/performance. Then the next. And the next. And so on. I'm damn sick of the media (ALL of the media be it online, print, radio, conservative, liberal, "Fair and Balanced", whatever) basing 95% of their reporting on sensationalism to pump up non-news.

I wasn't aware we were sending Iridium into space

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."

Re:extinction of zinc?

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...

Re:extinction of zinc?

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.

Re:Scaremongering...

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.

Re:I have a secret supply

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.

Re:supply and demand - no real problem

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.