Techfun

Your Stuff’s Backstory: If It Isn’t Grown, It Must Be Mined:

Where does your stuff come from? Before the store, before the factory, where did it really begin? If it isn’t made of wood, cloth, or other living matter, it was dug out of the ground.

Number one of The Natural Step’s four System Conditions is that “In the sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust”. So ultimately, one day our industrial economy will be made up entirely of recycled and biologically grown material. That day, however, may be a long way off. How do we get there, and what is the world of mining like today? How rapidly are we depleting the minerals we have, and how do we get to sustainable mining?

This is a great article  exploring mining’s impact on the world and how we can live better lives with reduced mining if we put the scientific and economic resources into it.  It takes the time to explain exactly how much of a role mining plays in sustaining the lives of people throughout the world. People are starting to talk more about the idea of petroleum production peaking, but less press coverage goes to the fairly unsexy idea of exhausting known deposits of other minerals from antimony to zinc.

It points out that “…minerals are clearly a non-renewable resource on the time scale of our lives…”. It quotes the United States Geological Survey website that states “To maintain our standard of living, each person in the United States requires over 48,000 pounds of minerals each year.” (source: Mineral Information Institute)

There is a more indepth article on that topic called Earth’s natural wealth: an audit available at New Scientist.

This article examines how our current technology is exhausting the known reserves of many minerals at an alarming rate. The stats used are based on our current extraction and consumption levels. As noted in the Your Stuff’s Backstory article, we can recover some of the minerals we need through recycling, but with newer technology like LCD TV’s and computer hard drives driving the problem, many of the finished products using these minerals will not be available for recycling very soon.

The idea of a greener future is taking hold in a big way all around the world. A big problem we may face is availability and the rising cost of minerals needed to bring about that future. The New Scientist article quotes Hazel Prichard, a geologist at the University of Cardiff in the UK as saying: “”I get excited every time I see a street cleaner”. She is looking for ways to economically recover some of the platinum that our catalytic converters dump out our exhaust pipes and onto road. She hopes that street cleaners collection bins will lead to the recovery of some of that platinum.

In his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush announced a $1.2 billion hydrogen fuel initiative to reverse America’s growing dependence on foreign oil. However:

It has been estimated that if all the 500 million vehicles in use today were re-equipped with fuel cells, operating losses would mean that all the world’s sources of platinum would be exhausted within 15 years. Unlike with oil or diamonds, there is no synthetic alternative: platinum is a chemical element, and once we have used it all there is no way on earth of getting any more.

It’s been noted that many of the amount of many of the rarer minerals remaining in the are a mystery to economists, since reserve numbers are a closely guarded secret of the mining companies. There are indications that seem to point to the scarcity problems we are facing.

Armin Reller, a materials chemist at the University of Augsburg in Germany, and his colleagues are among the few groups who have been investigating the problem. He estimates that we have, at best, 10 years before we run out of indium. 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.

A third of the world’s {en:indium} comes from Canada (33%), with the US (7%) and Russia (5%) a distant second and third. Unlike gold and silver, indium is new to humans. It was discovered by Ferdinand Reich and Hieronymous Theodor Richter in 1863. The first large-scale application for indium was as a coating for bearings in high-performance aircraft engines during World War II. Afterwards, production gradually increased as new uses were found in fusible alloys, solders, and electronics. In the 1950s, tiny beads of it were used for the emitters and collectors of alloy junction transistors. In the middle and late 1980s, the development of indium phosphide semiconductors and indium tin oxide thin films for liquid crystal displays (LCD) aroused much interest. By 1992, the thin-film application had become the largest end use.

As recently as 2000 Indium was selling at $190.00/kg. As of last year, its selling for over five times that.

Indium is used to make indium gallium arsenide. This is the semiconducting material at the heart of a new generation of solar cells that promise to be up to twice as efficient as conventional designs. Reserves of both indium and gallium are disputed, but in a recent report René Kleijn, a chemist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, concludes that current reserves “would not allow a substantial contribution of these cells” to the future supply of solar electricity. He estimates gallium and indium will probably contribute to less than 1 per cent of all future solar cells – a limitation imposed purely by a lack of raw material.The Informed Reader blog from the Wall Street Journal has blogged about this problem, as well as the problems facing manufacturers who use hafnium and zinc, of which new supplies may run out in ten and thirty years, respectively.

I try to be optimistic about technology’s role in helping us address environmental problems in the present and the future, but if we don’t have the raw materials we need to build the energy and emission saving products of the future we are in worse shape than I thought.