Green Oasis

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)