By-product metals are technologically essential but have problematic supply
By N. Nassar, Thomas E. Graedel, E. Harper. Science Advances, 2015
387 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Metals that are obtained largely or entirely as by-products are essential to modern technology, but their supplies may be constrained due to a variety of factors. The growth in technological innovation that has occurred over the past decades has, in part, been possible because an increasing number of metals of the periodic table are used to perform specialized functions. However, there have been increasing concerns regarding the reliability of supply of some of these metals. A main contributor to these concerns is the fact that many of these metals are recovered only as by-products from a limited number of geopolitically concentrated ore deposits, rendering their supplies unable to respond to rapid changes in demand. Companionality is the degree to which a metal is obtained largely or entirely as a by-product of one or more host metals from geologic ores. The dependence of companion metal availability on the production of the host metals introduces a new facet of supply risk to modern technology. We evaluated companionality for 62 different metals and metalloids, and show that 61% (38 of 62) have companionality greater than 50%. Eighteen of the 38—including such technologically essential elements as germanium, terbium, and dysprosium—are further characterized as having geopolitically concentrated production and extremely low rates of end-of-life recycling. It is this subset of companion metals—vital in current technologies such as electronics, solar energy, medical imaging, energy-efficient lighting, and other state-of-the-art products—that may be at the greatest risk of supply constraints in the coming decades.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bfd5182fd37f293574bd2ee8756a77d74f275de4
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In Biomedical Engineering
In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
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Citations in the corpus
- The world's by-product and critical metal resources part III: A global assessment of indium (2017, background): “There are also uncertainties relating to the In supply chain, which is complicated by its strong dependence on Zn production (Nassar et al., 2015), and the fact that future demand for In might necessitate an oversupply of Zn and/or greater energy required for extraction than could be recovered by…”