Rare Earth Elements
This is something that I’ve worried about on occasion while sitting in computer engineering classes. What happens when we run out of a rare element? What if we exhaust our source of copper? Is making toys out of rare earth magnets a waste of precious resources? Could helium balloons someday be a thing of the past?
It turns out I’m not the only one who worries about stuff like this.
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.
Perhaps our landfills will someday be literal gold mines.
(via kottke.org)
Tags: environment, natural resources, science
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July 8, 2008 @ 10:12 am
In the process of your investigtation did you see anything on deep space mining (what percentage of our rare elements could not be found this way?) or on synthesis of such elements? I’m as concerned as the next guy when it comes to consevation but am also a hopeless optimist when it comes to human ingenutity.
July 8, 2008 @ 10:21 am
Space mining is certainly an option though I couldn’t find any information on rarer elements. It seems like we know the composition of asteroids, for example, only in the broadest terms. If we run out of needed resources, perhaps it will provide enough incentive to boost our anemic space program.
July 8, 2008 @ 12:57 pm
I think landfill mining is on point. I mean, unless I’m really misunderstanding, we’re not actually running out of these elements. Like, we’re not splitting all of these atoms into their component parts, or transmuting them into other elements, right?
So it’s really just a matter of figuring out what we’ve used all of this stuff on and extracting it back out for re-use. Aren’t pennies high in zinc?
July 8, 2008 @ 1:34 pm
My chief worry about landfill mining is that while we may not have destroyed these elements, we may have put them in a chemical state that would require a lot of energy to reclaim the material. It may be very expensive to get gallium back out of our old computer monitors, for example.