With the development of technology, rare earth mineral, which contains one or more rare earth elements as major metal constituents, plays an important role in the industry around the world, from cellphone manufacture to missile construction. Unlike other minerals, such as copper, which spread around most places, rare earth minerals only distribute in several areas, such as Africa and south Asia. Besides, 43% of the world rare earth mineral storage is in China.
However, rare earth mineral has been facing a lot of issues and is almost at an urgent point of running out.
Hold china as an example, when the world rare earth mineral market first opened, the price of rare earth mineral did not show its real value. Comparing to the price of gold and copper which has tripled, the price of rare earth mineral has only increased 150%. People who live on rare earth mineral exploitation have to extract and sell a huge amount of those mineral to expand interests and gain profits. When the world market continues to develop and people begin to realize the real value of rare earth mineral, the price of rare earth mineral skyrockets. More people see the money underneath their ground and more people start to crazily extract those mineral. Jiangxi, a province in southern China, holds 36% of China's rare earth mineral storage and has encountered severe environmental problems of desertification, soil loss and water pollution. Besides environmental destruction, with the increase of rare earth mineral demand, people who only see the immediate interests smuggle the minerals and cause a huge amount of mineral waste while mining and transporting. Therefore, the storage of rare earth mineral is decreasing sharply.
To eliminate the issues above, rare earth mineral exporting countries begin to put restriction on rare earth mineral exploitation. This directly leads to problems to countries, such as japan, which purely rely on importing minerals to develop technology. With the restriction and decreasing amount, rare earth minerals are more and more difficult to get, but the world cannot stop developing for the shortage of rare earth minerals.
The only ways to solve this problem is to invent substitutes and recycling. Rare earth recovery can be done from extraction from e-waste such as hard-disk drive and Air Condition Compressor. Household trash can also be a source of rare earth recovery that rare earth can be extracted in glass waste.
Charlotte, I think you bring up a really good point. The world relies on precious minerals for almost everyones daily lives they are used in: computers and cell phones. As a teenager in the United States I cannot imagine my life without the use of these products. However, these products come at a price that we are not paying for, the price of the environment. We are extracting, pulverizing and diminishing, the world we and many other animals live for these minerals for products. Products that we replace nearly year in and year out. http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/ne/pdfs/Elemental-table.pdf this link really brings your point out about the mineral excursion that is happening in China, and being an iPhone user it really hits home about how many minerals it takes for such a small device that I have had 4 of.
ReplyDeleteThis was a very interesting article. You should look into the mineral molybdenite which contains the element molybdenum. Many manufacturers are proposing to replace many of these rare earth minerals with molybdenum because of its abundance.
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ReplyDeleteGood research on the subject! Definitely is a big issue currently, especially in 2nd world countries and emerging countries, where the extraction of the minerals in question hasn’t reached yet the normal price levels in huge part due to lack of restrictions by the governments upon discovery of new sites of mineral extraction. Once we start facing the problem of scarcity, a different trend of more regulations usually start to become available. In the long run, more control of the extraction, which together with a strong recycling policy, will be beneficial to a future stable economy in which resources are rather scarce. A prudent society could be the key to succeed in maintaining a sustainable planet.
Not only must we recycle, but we must also reduce and reuse as much as possible, as we talked about in class on Monday. Reducing the amount of electronics we use can help lower the amount of rare earth minerals being used in products we might not really need. Reusing as much as possible can also save rare earth minerals. And then there's recycling. Also, people these days, especially young teenagers, want the best and most up-to-date technology, especially cellphones, computers, and iPods. The media plays a big role in influencing this craving for the best, leading people to think they need the best to be the best. Making people more aware of issues like this could help them reduce the amount of products with rare earth minerals they buy or use, thus saving these minerals for perhaps more important products.
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