With the global push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it’s ironic that several energy- or resource-saving technologies aren’t being used to the fullest simply because we don’t have enough raw materials to make them. When they tried to make that switch in 2009, companies such as General Electric cried foul: They wouldn’t be able to get hold of enough rare earths to make the new bulbs.
The move toward new and better technologies — from smart phones to electric cars — means an ever-increasing demand for exotic metals that are scarce thanks to both geology and politics. Thin, cheap solar panels need tellurium, which makes up a scant 0.0000001 percent of the earth’s crust, making it three times rarer than gold. High-performance batteries need lithium, which is only easily extracted from briny pools in the Andes. Platinum, needed as a catalyst in fuel cells that turn hydrogen into energy, comes almost exclusively from South Africa.
Researchers and industry workers alike woke with a shock to the problems caused by these dodgy supply chains in 2011, when the average price of “rare earths” — including terbium and europium, used in fluorescent bulbs; and neodymium, used in the powerful magnets that help to drive wind turbines and electric engines — shot up by as much as 750 percent in a year. The problem was that China, which controlled 97 percent of global rare earth production, had clamped down on trade. A solution was brokered and the price shock faded, but the threat of future supply problems for rare earths and other so-called “critical elements” still looms.
Promising solutions
That’s why the Critical Materials Institute, at the DOE’s Ames Laboratory, was created. The institute opened in June, and the official ribbon-cutting was in September. Its mission is to predict which materials will become problems next, work to improve supply chains and try to invent alternative materials that don’t need so many critical elements in the first place. The institute is one of a handful of organizations worldwide trying to tackle the problem of critical elements, which organizations like the American Physical Society have been calling attention to for years. “It’s a hot topic in Europe right now,” said Olivier Vidal, coordinator of a European Commission project called ERA-MIN — one of a handful of European initiatives that are ramping up.
“It’s really urgent,” said institute director Alex King. “We’re facing real challenges today — we need solutions tomorrow, not the day after.” Mixed electronic waste (Credit: KYTan via Shutterstock)
Despite the high cost and high demand of metals critical for energy technologies, very little of this metal is recycled: In 2009, it was estimated that less than 1 percent of rare earth metals was recovered. Ruediger Kuehr, head of the Solving the E-waste Problem (StEP) initiative in Bonn, said that 49 million tons of e-waste are produced each year, from cell phones to refrigerators. Of that, perhaps 10 percent is recycled. It’s ridiculous to simply throw so much valuable material away, said Diran Apelian, founding director of the Metal Processing Institute in Worcester, Mass. “There’s something like 32 tons of gold in all the world’s cell phones,” said Apelian. “There’s a huge goldmine in our urban landfills.”
Getting the metals out of modern technology is a pain, as they are incorporated in tiny amounts into increasingly complex devices. A circa-2000 cell phone used about two dozen elements; a modern smart phone uses more than 60. “We’re making things more difficult for ourselves,” said King. Despite the relatively high concentrations of rare earths in technology, he said, it’s actually chemically easier to separate them from the surrounding material in simple rocks than in complicated phones.
Source: Green Biz
By Nicola Jones