Reduce, reuse, recycle
Could we really be running out of gallium, indium, hafnium, zinc, and even copper?!
A piece in Asimov’s Science Fiction this month argues just this point. Reflections: The Death of Gallium makes the case that we’re quickly running out of a few rare elements whose existence makes modern electronic innovations possible.
Even some not-so-rare elements are on the endangered species list: zinc? COPPER?! Whatever will we make our pennies out of? Back to steel?
The problem is one of basic chemistry.
The elements are the basic building blocks of, well, everything. The periodic table lists the elements and does a pretty good job of organizing them according to their similarities.
But here’s the thing with elements — you can’t produce them. Once we’ve used up all the copper available on Earth, that’s it. It’s impossible to manufacture more copper. (Excepting nuclear transmutation, but that can’t be done on a large scale, and usually the end result is radioactive anyway.)
Other materials that we must recycle — plastics, glass, and paper — are made up of many elements. Plastics are primarily hydrocarbon chains created from petroleum products. Glass is mostly silicon and oxygen, both available in abundance on the earth. Paper is an organic material derived from wood pulp. All of these materials are fairly readily obtained, at least as of now.
Generally, it’s relatively easy to put elements together to make compounds, or to pull compounds apart to get to their constituent elements. But if you don’t have the source elements to begin with, you’re out of luck.
Recycle those electronics, kids.
Tags: chemistry, chickenlittle, copper, elements, gallium, hafnium, indium, zinc
July 5th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Around here, there is no doubt that metals (particularly copper) are highly valuable for recycling.
There have been cases of people stealing cable from power substations to get the copper for resale.
There is also the issue of catalytic converter theft because of the metals in them.
July 5th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Hmm, copper on the way out. Bad news for the rest of the world, good news for my ever-expanding penny collection. I thought they were dumping the penny anyway? If I knew anything about HTML, I’d link to a story…that I can’t find anyway. Oh, well.
Well, if they plan on keeping it, I’m all for this transmutation plan, and bah to the radioactive warnings. What’s the worst that could happen, I grow another pair of arms? Bonus: now I can play both guitar and drums on Rock Band at the same time! Yay, nuclear power!
July 6th, 2008 at 12:00 am
@Annie: I was aware of extensive copper theft, but I figured the rising resale value was due to increasing oil prices and scarcity due to India and China’s development rather than an outright shortage of Cu atoms. That was news to me.
July 6th, 2008 at 12:06 am
@Pat R.: A copper shortage would certainly suck, but at least we would have other alternatives. Copper just tends to have the best conductance to cost ratio.
I think we’ll actually see landfill mining at some point during our lives. Since it’s more likely that electronics are “buried” there for all eternity, it makes sense to recapture many of these elements at our beautiful neighborhood dumps.
Hmm… your Rock Band argument is a good one for the pros of free-range radioactivity. Get on the horn to the people at Harmonix and see if you can get them to start spreading radioactive materials everywhere. Talk about a viral marketing campaign…