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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."
We're a bit stuffed then, whilst zinc is a nice-to-have with electronic stuff, its reasonably important for the well being of humans. Is the story scaremongering, or are we all doomed?
How many of this stuff can be recovered by recycling? In the EU, companies now have to recycle old electronic equipment, which will surely extend the availability of these materials.
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.
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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?
Had the transistor not come along, doubtless by now the computer industry would have run out of the molybdenum for vacuum tubes.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
And landfills will become valuable commercial property.
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.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
At some point and it seems that point is soon, we are going to have to crack open all those old landfills. Think of how much has been tossed in there before we really started to pay attention to reuse.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
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."
A frew decades ago the supply of copper seemed to run out. This resulted in a large hike in copper prices that made the copper in AT&T's wires in the US more valueble than the stocks of the entire company. Then a bunch of people opened new copper mines that extracted copper ore that was not profitable to extract at the earlier lower price.
Then the price fell again, but to a higher level than it was before.
This is what happens with all kinds of raw materials. The price goes up, but the supply doesn't try out.
Oil has the same tendency, the oil that they have started digging now is much more expensive to get out of the ground than the 20$ a barrel they used to dig out a few years ago. (Ofcause the oil fields that were profitable at 20$ a barrel are now astronomically profitable at 130$ a barrel!)
and without more Illudium how will we make moreQ-36 Explosive Space Modulators
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.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
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.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Sod the asteroids...
We've got a huuuuge chunk of something derived from the same material as our planet a few hundred thousand miles away. Why go millions when the moon is right on our doorstep?
Both sides should get a grip! While it is clear that economy does not magically conjure materials in demand it is merely a human made factor that creates incentives for use of not so easy to extract sources of the materials as well as research into possible alternative. TRue it is a human invention but so what, it works.
Assuming we have enough resources to create the solution when the market gets 'desperate' enough to register a serious problem at all.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
somehow create the elements synthetically
Let me go fire up my heavy fusion reactor and get to work on that.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
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.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
My 6 year old has the solution for you. He just went to see wall-e... A few autonomous robots, pointed at a land fill, zinc over here, lead over there... problem solved.
I think at some point we will realize that our materials are scare and landfills will start to look good as a mining operation. The trick is to develop efficient ways to harvest.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Why? It seems to me that landfills would be more concentrated and easier to mine than natural ores are!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Number one solution to using less isn't 100+mpg cars, fully recycled products, etc. but simply fewer people.
If global population continues climbing then it overwhelms anything else you can do.
Now how you get population to level out or even decline is another can of worms.
Life is short: void the warranty.
It's embarrassing to have to throw the things in the trash because they're completely useless and (by law) can't be recycled. Usually, I just refuse them when I get them. But on the rare occasions when I end up with them, I would rather throw them in a recycle bin than the trash.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You make a valid point. Perhaps in the future instead of mining the earth for natural elements, we will be mining landfills for all the things we didn't bother recycling.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
It's a good thing plastic isn't made out of something that's becoming more scarce and expensive by the day. :)
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
There are many environmental concerns regarding this. In digging up a landfill, you are also exposing potentially harmful waste. The electronics itself are harmful wastes so there will be great concerns about how to process these without leaking toxics into the environment. Many electronics contain plastics that emit dioxins and other toxic chemicals when incinerated. All of this will be complicated by the fact that oil is also running out, so to do this all in an environmentally responsible way becomes more difficult.
As I said, there is also the issue that the amount recoverable from landfills might not be enough to meet demand, and that might see a drop off in supply. This spells economic problems and scarcity, and a partial regression for many people back into a less technological lifestyle. Also, the oil which is going to run out soon is going to combine with the other resources problems, since recycling is very energy intensive.
If we were smart we would have been placing metal bearing items and electronics, etc into seperate storage areas, and mandated that consumers properly dispose of electronics.
To say private corporations will do this is pretty naive. It usually takes a penalty, fines, of some sort to force people to recycle. Its just human nature that they wont bother to if you dont. Government can put in a legal mandate that can get this done. If we leave it to corporations it may never happen. Corporations are driven mainly by profit. This does not always lead to the best outcomes and can lead to serious problems. The chaos of market systems can often lead to unnecessary shortsightedness and lack of long term planning that worsens our future condition. Right now, it might seem cheapest just to dump electronics into the trash and not worrry about storing it seperately. The profit motivations, adn peoples lazy habits, are driven by short term interests, greed and a lack of long term perspective. Recycling and seperating electronics from other junk doesnt really have a profit interest for private corporations so they arent encouraged to do it.
Governments do have to play a role in mandating the recycling. It often takes government initiative and often we cant wait for private industry to do it.
For instance, with oil, we cant afford to wait until market forces decide oil is no longer affordable, and consumers get too fed up with oil prices. First of all, the oil companies have such a monopoly on the market, and really dont want to start offering alternatives now, and that it is too capital intensiv for smaller companies to offer renewable technology . Oil company solutions have been to keep drilling for more oil, which is doing more of exactly what got us into this mess in the first place. Drilling for oil will not solve the problem in the long run. Oil drilling will not solve it at all in the US because the amount of oil in the US is so small it could only supply a small percentage of our energy needs.
Then you have the environmental impact from polluted land, ruined landscapes, polluted water which always happens with oil. Big oil likes to present themselves as environmentally friendly. Dont believe it. Its marketing propoganda. Oil companies hide the true nature of their operations and hide and cover up the pollution that it causes so they can present the pretty delusion to the public. OIl companies will not admit they pollute the environment, when in fact they almost always do and cause health dangers for nearby communities. They will pollute the environment and then to the public they put out propoganda about how clean and wonderful they are, while at the same time they are basically destroying water supplies, peoples homes, well being, and health.
Market forces tend to be chaotic and not to have much long term vision or planning. In order to plan for the future we often have to look past what is more profitable in the short term. We often need to develop a plan rather than to leave it to chance and the chaos of markets. Government often is the only en
Brazil has used methanol as fuel for about 20yrs now, and there is NO food shortage here. Actually, there is so much food here that we export it to USA, Europe, China... And this having the greatest number of cars using biofuel in the world.
Brazil has a rainforest shortage - the Amazon is on the verge of collapse.
This is allegedly done for grazing cattle, not for sugar. I don't believe it. I remember reading that Brazilian ethanol imports were increasing; where's it coming from?
Topsoil-based fuels are basically wrongheaded because as your energy consumption rises you need more acres of land which you would rather use for something else. "Green Revolution" architecture is horribly destructive to the land and the soil.
And what are they fertilizing with?
Anyway, you have an incredibly simplistic view of the situation. Although there is no "food shortage" in the US (you can walk into any supermarket and buy the necessities) we have shortages of corn and barley right now because we are making ethanol from them. The former has seriously harmed the average Mexican and the latter has driven up the price of beer. (Especially on top of the hops shortage.) Clearly you don't understand the concept of shortages. Incidentally, though, world food supplies are in trouble. Meat is doing pretty well, but plants are having problems all over. This last season's weather was troublesome all over the world. Year before last the grape vines on the front porch were just covered in grapes; this year it got warm early and the grapes leafed out and prepared to put on a big fruit set, then got frozen hard. This happened over much of the world, and it happened to the grape and nut crops this year in particular. Most vineyards around my area - did I mention that the next county to the south is Napa, and Mendocino is to the West? - aren't even going to bother to harvest anything this year. It's not worth the trouble.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The reality of it is that as we run low on various elements, the price will go up due to factors of supply and demand. This will help drive efforts to find alternatives, reduce the amount needed, and where feasible, recover/recycle those elements. We will never actually run out, but it may simply become too expensive to build TV's out of. Then we'll have to find another way to do it. If there's enough need and the price is worth it, we might end up prospecting asteroids to get the minerals we need.
As for peak oil, we don't know if we've hit it yet because there's historically been an incentive for many oil producers to keep their reserve numbers a secret. We don't know if they've artificially inflated or deflated their numbers for a variety of reasons. Being at peak oil does not mean we aren't going to discover more oil. What it means is that in the future, the oil we discover will be harder to get to, harder to produce, and will not sufficiently replace all the easy to drill oil we have had in the past. It will become impossible to increase oil production and we'll see a decline that will lead to drastic price increases, a switch to alternatives, and overall a decline in demand for it.
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It happens here in Minneapolis, but the bonus for us is since we are a cold weather climate and natural gas is the predominate heating method and even foreclosed houses are nominally heated to keep the pipes from freezing, we get houses that BLOW UP because there's often soft copper used to plumb the gas to hot water heaters and the dumb tweakers stealing the pipe don't know and leave the gas open.
A 3 day hold period is a great idea, even better would be 7 day jail sentences for owners, officer or other officials of recycling companies on a per-offense basis for accepting stolen copper. I have a hard time seeing how they "don't know its stolen" when 2 tweakers in a '93 Pontiac show up with 400 lbs of brand-new 3/0 copper wire. I think they just don't care.
ETHANOL..Alcol is made from sugar cane which Brazil has plenty of due to climate. Ethanol from Sugar Cane is much cheaper to produce than the corn-based version made in the USA. The only reason Ethanol is "popular" in the USA is the farming lobby and the enviro-radicals. Using corn for ethaonol production is driving the price of food for animals higher thus driving food prices higher. By the time you calculate the energy needed to grow the corn (which needs high nitrogen fertlizer, fungicides and pesticides made from petrochemicals) and refine it into ethanol is is enegy NEGATIVE. We'd be wiser to import it from Brazil. Also, due to demand for corn for Ethanol animal growers have switched to other grains driving those prices up and the surplus which we used to export or give away to starving countries has dissapeared. It's a very bad cycle to be in but unless we get smart and start producing more oil domestically, or start burning coal in our cars we are heading for a crash and burn energy wise in 20 yrs.
Most of the major gold deposits now being mined are low-grade, broadly disseminated Carlin-type deposits, where the gold is found in iron sulfides as ions or sub-micron particles.
Vein-type deposits may be high-grade, but the typical total recoverable amount of gold is relatively tiny, not to mention the fact that the majority of the readily accessible veins have already been exploited, meaning that you have to use expensive underground mining tech instead of a cheap pit.
So, circuit boards are actually a really good source of gold. Hell, you could probably throw them in a cyanide heap leach and get a pile of copper out as well.
The price of commodities will have to go up to make new mines economical. The deposits that are profitable at current prices are already being exploited. As prices rise, the deposits that the mining companies are holding in reserve will go into production.
Also, despite what Fox News may tell you, complying with environmental regulations isn't usually a deal-breaker for opening a mine. Mitigation & remediation are relatively inexpensive when you plan for them ahead of time, but the impacts of not doing so can be terrible. Have you ever seen the impact of a major mine dump from a mine that was developed before the current regs were put in place? Take a trip up past Leadville, CO some time. You've got a huge valley full of cyanide-soaked mud and rock to deal with, right up in the top of the watershed. The thing with screwing up the environment is that we're screwing up *our* environment.
I'm all for mining (used to be a geologist) but as a society it doesn't make sense to allow mining companies to externalize their cleanup costs onto the rest of us. If they're going to create problems that the rest of us ae going to have to deal with, they need to pay to make sure that those problems are solved.
"They disappear in a usable format for electronics though."
So, you really believe Zn, Ga, In etc. were found somewhere in the ground as nice ingots of pure metal ?
Did you just use the costs of getting something up off the ground to claim that dropping something down to the ground would be too expensive? Semms to me that launch costs would be needed upfront to establish space-based industry, true. But once done, launch costs would have to little to do with the per ton cost of extracting and returning rare and valuable metals.
It's like saying that because it costs a fortune upfront to dig a diamond mine, the diamonds will be too expensive, irregardless of how many there are or how cheap it is to get them back to the world. Quite wrong, because those other two things really do affect the bottom line.
Dyolf Knip
Of course it's *exactly* the things that others have no cost incentive to pursue that governments have to do. What else are governments good for? Any kind of social organization and government is only there for things that are either not profitable (but necessary) or where profits are not leading to what's in the public interest.
Industries don't care the fuck for what happens to your children later. Governments should and if they don't, go and fuck *them*.
Actually, January 2008 is the new May 2005.