Supplies of Rare Earth Elements Exhausted By 2017 958
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."
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.
We're running out of 'X'! News at 11... (Score:2, Interesting)
Guess what, humans are using up precious resources in their inventive quest for more tools/toys/and other environmental "improvements". No sh*t we are going to run out of some of the more unique elements. But as usual, when something gets scarce, it gets expensive and we find other materials as a substitute.
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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
Matter assembly (Score:3, Interesting)
One has to wonder how many of the world's problems could be solved if we'd just invest the money for the Iraq war into R&D instead. The research will still take time, but at least it'll get done.
Scaremongering... (Score:3, Interesting)
The elements are not "destroyed" by being put into electronics — or anything else, that does not leave the planet. They don't disappear from Earth.
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.
hmmm, tell the metal dealers about this (Score:3, Interesting)
apparently the metal dealers, the guys whose livelyhood depends on knowing what's up with metals, they don't know that these elements are kaput.
a little googling shows that Hafnium you can buy on the internet, no sweat, at about $12 a gram. Many times cheaper than HP printer ink.
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.
carbon carbon carbon (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:supply and demand - no real problem (Score:3, Interesting)
The real question isn't when we'll run out of oil (or other non-replenishable goods), but if we'll be forced to use horses and carts before we reach the point where the alternatives are preferable over oil.
Re:supply and demand - no real problem (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.)
Re:Dont believe the hype (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't be too sure about that [wikipedia.org].
Myth of sufficient plenty (Score:2, Interesting)
It's called the myth of sufficient plenty.
The thought that we can just keep on using more and more of something at an increasing rate and other countries can increase their rate of consumption without any problems because we can always dig up and refine more oil/copper/zinc/or whatever. Don't worry, there will always be gas in your pump, someone will find a new oil field.
People need to change. Consumers should be demanding 100+mpg cars, fully recycled products, whole life cycle design. Engineers and scientists need to step up and provide these solutions.
The glass is either half empty and we are all doomed or half full and we are just waiting for these great strides.
Re:Recycling (Score:3, Interesting)
How many of this stuff can be recovered by recycling?
Every last bit. In fact, even if we just throw the stuff away, mining it from trash dumps will be cheaper than mining it from the ground.
Regarding ubiquitous LCD displays making all of the world's Gallium in-use (non recyclable because it's being used)... By the time people in third world countries all have an LCD TV, first-world citizens will be watching laser-eye displays or jacking into the cyber-inter-virtual-web-net.
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:4, Interesting)
It shouldn't be too difficult to recover metals from the landfill sites. If it is possible to turn bodies into dust using "promession [dailymail.co.uk]" or deep freezing, surely it would be possible to do the same with landfill sites?
You would take out a container load of debris, freeze to -196C, shake the contents until they disintegrate into a powder. Then you can extract the metals using electromagnets?
Re:Recycling (Score:1, Interesting)
There are thousands of tons of scrap zinc and copper just lying around in the form of Lincoln Cents, too bad its currently illegal to convert them to something more useful and profit.
Re:Dont believe the hype (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure there's a cycle, it just takes millions of years.
Once our trash enters a magma pool the elements will sort themselves out under extreme heat and pressure, and then be spewed back out, as they always do.
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree, scaremongering to the max.
How about the simplest solution... open more fricken mines. Problem solved. The hippies closed all the strip mines, we'll just need more -- who cares?
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Copper, plumbing, thefts (Score:3, Interesting)
Happening here in Mobile as well... We also have a number of people stealing airconditioner condensers from businesses that are closed for extended periods... Churches, daycares, schools. It makes it convienient for them that the breaker is usually right there with the unit. Cut power, a few bolts and load it up. They are discussing a law where the recycling companies have to hold anything for 3 days before they issue payment. That should cut way back if it can be enforced.
There was recently a story about where the phone company left a huge spool of fiber cable at a dig site. The kind that you tow behind a truck. The guy hooked it to his truck and was on his way to the recycling center. He was arrested on the way there. Told them he thought it was cable, couldn't understand how they could make wires out of glass.
Re:What can and cant be done. (Score:5, Interesting)
In Italy, before WW2, they mined iron from the slag heaps of Roman-era smelters - it had a higher iron concentration than any ore that could then be found in Italy.
50.000 cell phones = 1 kilo of gold (Score:3, Interesting)
linky: link [nytimes.com]
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but as we're finding out with oil - the period of adjustment can be pretty painful.
This is the government's role in the economy. It should provide the "seed research" for things which will become problems in 10 years, but aren't economically feasible to solve now.
By funding forward-looking research, the government can help ease transition shocks for the population.
Just like they should have slowly deflated the housing bubble starting in 2003, they should have been working on alternate energy back in the 90s so the new tech would be available for businesses now.
The government funding alternate energy sources now is just silly - businesses are doing that much more efficiently because it's economically feasible. The time for the government to make that pain go away was 5-10 years ago.
Re:*Ding* Correct Answer. (Score:3, Interesting)
You're not exactly right about decomposition of organic matter. I recall reading that people were able to pull out a package of hotdogs years old, and they were still in a completely recognizable form.
The various conditions found near the bottoms of landfills tend to preserve organic matter quite well; we're kinda working on making oil (over hundreds of thousands of years), rather than dirt or similar that might come from regular decomposition. I suspect the biggest reason is the lack of oxygen shortly after they're buried.
Still, disposing of organic matter is probably quite a bit easier than actually separating the many inorganic types of waste, or finding a way of crushing up a monitor and the small amounts of each element.
Re:*Ding* Correct Answer. (Score:2, Interesting)
Carbon Fibre (Score:4, Interesting)
We desperately need good manufacturing techniques for carbon fibre. With good techniques, just about everything we move around could be made with it, and energy costs would go down.
This ought to be as X-prize-worthy a topic as good solar or good batteries.
But how does it hold up to seawater? Will we need to coat the boats every year with something in short supply?
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:2, Interesting)
Do flat panel TVs destroy the Gallium, Indium, Hafnium or whatever else is used in them?
We use zinc instead of copper to make pennies, so, when we run out of zinc and copper, we just search in everyone's couches and junk drawers and under their car seats for however much we need.
Problem solved. Where's my Nobel Peace Prize?
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not true - this kind of thing is done with extremely high efficiency all the time in industry. The term you are missing is "regeneration" - the idea is very simple: Take this very cold stuff and use it to pre-cool the stuff coming into the plant. As it warms up, it cools the incoming feed material lowering the energy required to get it to final temperature.
The only real limits on this is volume and time - if you can wait days, and can use space-shuttle tile class insulators, a C cell battery could power it!
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed.
I was thinking the exact same thing. Mining copper, zinc, rare elements, Heck, even IRON is a labor-intensive and expensive process. It seems to me that Landfills are concentrated piles of these materials all mixed in with other detrius. Seems to me it would be more practical to set up massive recycling plants next to the dumps, and begin excavating the oldest parts of the dumps where the organics have largely broken down into dirt again, and just separating the synthetics and smelting the rest.
Seriously. Have any of your ever SEEN a mining or a recycling operation? I have. They are HUGE endeavors, and the recycling plants are mostly automated nowadays. I seriously doubt it would be much MORE of an expense to "mine" a dump than it is to mine a section of regular land.
Once the economys of scale come into play, I'm sure that dumps and junkyeards will become the new motherlodes of all the materials we need to continue our daily lives.
Now we just need to get into space and start grinding up those mineral-rich asteroids! (Ok, maybe I've been playing too much EVE Online...)
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:3, Interesting)
There are already specialized recycling plants that scavenge gold from electronic waste. When the semiconductors become expensive, they will be recycled as well - simply because it will become profitable to do so. The cost of electronics won't increase dramatically, because the raw materials account for a tiny fraction of the cost.
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:2, Interesting)
Basically, usage patterns and needs are NOT some constant C times the size of the population. C is itself a function of time and population. Almost invariably doomsday scenarios assume that doubling the population will double demand, which is not what actually happens. If you examine general human wealth rather than some particular item, then things are consistently improving on average. As a particular resource becomes harder and harder to get, prices will rise, making it economical to switch.
Re:Recycling (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:3, Interesting)
Technically speaking, EVERYTHING is a finite resource. We'll run out of sunlight in a few billion years. What do we do then?
As the parent pointed out, we haven't even tapped much of the available oil. Current estimates of "peak oil" are based on oil which is easily accessible with current methods - it does NOT take into account the various oil sands and shales which exist around the world. When you factor in those deposits it becomes obvious that oil will still last us for a long, LONG time. I'd be very surprised if we haven't switched entirely to alternate fuels by the time we start to run low on oil.
Best Business Plan Ever (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Buy cheap land.
2. Create a landfill and make people pay you for dumping their waste there.
3. Profit (for the first time)!
4. Wait until it's profitable to mine your landfill for rare elements.
5. Open a mining operation and have people pay you for things you extract from their waste.
6. Profit (for the second time)!
Re:Copper, plumbing, thefts (Score:4, Interesting)
Hah, copper is always in risk of theft, even before the current metal boom. Whats interesting is that even steel is worth stealing now. Here in sweden, a few km of railroad was stolen in broad daylight recently.
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:2, Interesting)
Whenever you see a scare-monger story like this, remember: economics is designed to fix stuff like this. As zinc becomes harder to get, zinc becomes more expensive.
Yet what you don't take into account is some fool congressman calling a hearing from the heads of the zinc industry (which will be collectively termed "Big Zinc") asking them how they can justify the high prices -- and thus high profits -- of zinc when people are having to make hard choices between food and a new flat screen television.
Big Zinc will respond that prices are high because demand is high and supply is low, but the congressmen will ignore that obviously-logical argument.
Big Zinc will say it would like to increase supply, but all attempts to open new mines are being stymied by environmentalists, bureaucrats, and tax laws but congress will ignore this as well.
In the end, congress will pass a "windfall profits tax" on Big Zinc, which will be passed along (as all corporate taxes are) to the end consumer -- that being us. Yet there will be much fanfare for the congressmen who pass this tax since they will be perceived Standing Up For The Little Guy Against Big Zinc. Many votes and campaign contributions will flow to them, and in the meantime nothing will have been done to fix the problem.
Not gonna happen, you say? It's already happened. Just replace "zinc" with "oil" and compare it with contemporary headlines.
Re:The U.S. should have abolished pennies long ago (Score:3, Interesting)
.
It would be just as foolish for me to do this as it is for the U.S. mint to spend 1.17 cents producing a coin worth 1 cent. Money only has value if it is more an asset than a burden.
.
As for the other points: No the U.S. mint cannot tell states what to set their tax rates at, but it also shouldn't be obligated to indulge them with a subsidized coin either. And by recycling, I mean that you can't just toss pennies into a recycle bin because it is illegal for a recycler to scrap them for copper.
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:3, Interesting)
True, but why could they not grow more food? I believe you will find that those reasons were political, not economics. I agree that politics can kill economics and make it ineffective, but not that economics couldn't solve the problem. (In this case, starving people could have grown food themselves but chose not to due to political concerns.)
Re:What can and cant be done. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
I hate to sound like some crazy rightist, but I really think the market will sort this one out - as raw materials get rarer and more expensive, the cost of new products will rise to the point where it becomes economic to repair the old ones again.
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Interesting)
Easter Island. When they cut down the last tree (for moving those carved heads around on rollers), they couldn't build boats to go fish with, or leave. Invoking economics will not always get you out of a man-made catastrophe - global warming anyone?
Near-sight (Score:3, Interesting)
spend some money on recycling tech.
I think you've just hit the very reason wy it hasn't been done: Too few people want to make the effort, and no one wants to foot the bill.
As you say, separating kinds of trash before burying it would be a great investment for the future, but making an effort or spending money now for something that will be beneficial in the future doesn't get anyone elected. Promises to give you tax refunds checks NOW gets votes.
Re:Then you are not reading (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact when I got a tour of Quincy Shaft #2 (the deepest hole in the U.S. at 9672 feet) the guide told us about a single, solid column of copper that's still in the mine, 50 feet across and over 20 feet high. That's about 21 million pounds of copper in a single formation on a single level of the mine. (The mine had nearly 100 levels and stretched for several miles.) That block of copper alone is about 1% of the copper usage in the U.S. annually. They never removed it, because in 1930, they didn't have the tools to tear it apart.
Maybe zinc is running short, but there's still gobs of copper around.
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is basisically technical sounding nonsense that just obscures the fact of what is happening. If a resource gets to the point where there is not enough to meet demand, or it is no longer economical, it doesnt matter if there is still a little left, the effect is basically that you cant use it anymore, so you can say it has run out. You are just using slippery words to try to obscure this fact.
I dont think that your idea that current ways and habits, can be sustained in their current form, or that technologies to replace these will magically appear. Furthermore, if we can be more efficient, we should eb done so now rather than just going on business as usual. If we improve our efficiecy, we can extend the life of the resources that we have now and help mitigate problems in the future. This is called planning ahead, and it is often alien to the chaos of free markets, which is not driven by foresight by immediate profits and greed. Such as oil, if we cared about the future, and we wanted to take action that would help us reduce problems in the future and avoid them, we would not be using oil now. We are using it still because of short term greed of oil companies, and the immature behaviouer of the people that keeps us from more responsible long term alternatives that could stop global warming adn supply us with clean energy. We should not keep using oil, we should leave it in the ground where it belongs and stop adding to the climate change mess. But only foresight and planning can get that done, and that means not a chaotic market driven trends but us deciding to implement goals and objectives, and a plan.
We should be pushing much more for sequestering and recycling of all electronics, conservation, renewable energy and so on, but its not happening because private industry isnt interested, and we have a conservative government that is basically a lapdog of private corporations.
Another thing that needs to be done is to educate people globally to encourage more sustainable population trends. We really need to encourage people through education amd with contraception and abstinance to engage in family planning and decide to limit themselves to two children per family, and perhaps 1 per family in many cases, and with a target of 0% and in certain cases a temporary period of negative population growth. Population growth simply adds to demand, and if we want to give ourselves the best chance of solving our problems we should hold demand at the level it is at now, this will give us a better chance of eliminating poverty and would likely save many lives. Such would actually prevent overpopulation problems, which are real since the earths resources are finite, and nothing can change that, no matter what you do eventually you will reach the point of exhausting those resources. Eventually, if population growth continued, the earth would end up covered in a 100 foot thick deep layer of human beings. Long before, environmental quality of life will be greatly degraded as food becomes more difficult to acquire and quality of life suffers as it does when population density increases (better environment for diseases, a loss of scenic beauty, supply problems get worse, sewage problems worsen, etc). If you doubt that overpopulation causes a debasement of living conditions, I suggest you visit india where families live in crowded slums of cardboard boxes and see it for yourself. The fact that overpopulation is a problem is undeniable, its a physical law. The earth isnt getting bigger, You cant magically increase the size of the earth or its finite resources but many people delude themselves into thinking that somehow we can keep reproducing like we are now. No technology can escape this problem. Technology in agriculture has only worsened the quality of food and has caused soil desertification due to intensive agricultural practices and increases pesticide exposure. None of these things are good. Those who would want us to do nothing to help educate people to help them understand the economic realities of overpopul
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:3, Interesting)
"If we can not increase production at $140 per barrel over that when it was $50...."
Can't? Or won't? The oil industry is making record profits. What real incentive do they have to do more work and sell more oil at a reduced price when they can sell what they have at record prices?
The recent moves by the Saudis tend to validate this, along with their growing realization that maybe they've gone just a bit too far this time. More and more of their end-users are buying more efficient vehicles and looking for ways (electric, hydrogen) to do without them altogether.
Re:I'm not worried in the least because I plan to (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta [wikipedia.org]
(no one knows how to make it)
Terra preta soils are of pre-Columbian nature and were created by man between 7000 BP[3] and 500 BP ("Before Present"). The soil's depth can reach 2 metres (6 feet). Thousands of years after its creation it is reputedly known as self-regenerating at the rate of 1 centimetre per year[4] by the local farmers and caboclos in Brazil's Amazonian basin, and they seek it out for use and for sale as valuable compost (see Pedology).
Re:Scaremongering... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:extinction of zinc? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh really. Now explain to me what you think is limiting our production capacity by -- oh, let's say, coal liquefaction. Steel, with all of those steel mills shuttered across Appalachia? Unskilled labor, with huge unemployment in said regions and elsewhere? Engineers, with huge numbers in places like India and China trying to get visas? Rates of coal extraction, when China is mining through their their more-difficult-to-get reserves mostly by manual labor three times faster than we are (on a percentage basis)? Tell me, what do you think is the limiting factor?
Here's some things that should clue you in on oil prices. Oil companies aren't being valued by the market as though oil was $140+ a barrel; they're being priced as though it was $50-70 a barrel. Oil companies aren't betting on projects with expected oil prices at $140+ a barrel; the most expensive I've seen them undertake are the Bakken (~$50/barrel) and Greenland (~$50/barrel), and in the former case, it's only small oil companies, and in the latter case, it's only very preliminary work. The people who should know what they're talking about are *not* betting on these prices being sustained, or anythign close to them. Only the futures market is way up. Now, if that doesn't look like a standard commodities bubble, I don't know what does. Well, that and perhaps this: have you checked out prices of rents in oil exploration and transportation? Drilling ship rents are 3-4 times what they were a year ago. Fine, that's to be expected. Rig rents are 3-4 times what they were a year ago. Again, that's to be expected. But *tankers*, too, are renting at 3-4 times what they were a year ago. Go on, explain that one under the "scarcity" theory. If there's a scarcity, where's all of this oil coming from? Iran and Venezuela are both known to be renting tankers and just storing oil in them. In Iran's case, a slowdown in demand in India has lead a refiner there to stop buying their sour crude, only needing their more local sweet crude. They're looking for a new buyer, and in the meantime, they're stockpiling. The situation is such that a company with oil in a tanker, even with the current high prices, is paying less on the rent for the tanker than they're gaining by holding onto the oil as prices rise.
The exact same thing happened in the last oil spike. When prices collapsed, they all rushed to port to unload as fast as possible, furthering the price fall. Bubbles work that way.
The Simon-Ehlrich Wager [wikipedia.org] wasn't a fluke. For more detail, I've written a fair bit on the concept of peak oil [daughtersoftiresias.org] (w/references).
Re:Recycling (Score:1, Interesting)
Are you crazy? The demand for these substances is growing at an exponential rate. No amount of so called conservation or recycling is going to 'satisfy' the demand, not to mention the growth of that demand. The only answer is supply! We have a whole solar system full of supply. When we or parts of 'we' that are darwinian survivors, get hungry enough, and enough so called 'environmentalists' have been liquidated, we will go there in nuclear ships and mine it. Then we will be a truly spacefaring species.
Re:What can and cant be done. (Score:3, Interesting)
There are companies doing the same thing with silver mining and processing tailings in Nevada today. And in the 60's Hanford processed tailings from WWII and late 40's Plutonium enrichment because they were handy, being more-or-less next door to the processing plant.
But neither condition (high concentration or handily located) applies to landfills... Not to mention the problem of the biological and chemical nasties in the landfill alongside the small quantity of materials of interest.
Deman erosion... (Score:3, Interesting)
I heard on the radio today that the demand for gasoline in the USA has dropped by 2% over last year.
It's happening. It took a bit to find how elastic our demand for gasoline is, but we've hit it.
I see gasoline still going to go up for the next few years, mostly because it takes time to rework fleets - Hybrids and small cars are selling like hotcakes, but the average lifespan for a car is 5-10 years. We're about 2-3 years from when hybrids were mostly special purpose, sold for government fleets or for (as coined on another board) the smug factor.
Still, there's going to be substantial upward pressure in the form of China and India industrializing and developing a middle class capable of affording vehicles - like the Tata. The vehicles can sipp fuel like a moped and the sheer fact that there's more than 10X of them will swamp anything Americans, Europeans, Russians can do in the form of near-term conservation.
Darn it, can't anybody invent a battery that stores twice as much power at half the cost with a decent lifespan? ;)
Re:Much less energy to return to Earth (Score:3, Interesting)
Theoretically, the energy to get to the Moon is a one-time energy expense...
Read Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" for some interesting insights on shipping items from the moon. Think physics for the economics -- solar to electric to mass drivers. Just don't get on the wrong side of the Loonies, they'll have the high ground.
The Asteroids are another "convenient" source in the long term, too. As Dr. Pournelle kindly pointed out some years ago, say it takes 10 years to get a shipment from the Belt to LEO - send one per year, and after 10 years you'll have one per year forever. Of course this presumes the elements will even be out there, but it could turn out to be profitable to find out.
This also presumes a long-term approach to the survival of civilisation, and an assumption that humanity as a whole would find this a good thing.