So then, the question is - are were really "diminishing" these resources, or just failing to properly recycle the metals when we move them from one part of the Earth, to another?
@@wallaroo1295 We're making them more sparse. You could say we're making rare earth materials out of some things that weren't considered rare earth materials before. See: because we only require small amounts of this stuff per device, it becomes really hard to recover meaningful amounts of it once these devices became trash. In some sense you could say by putting our electronic waste into landfills we're dissolving those elements in Earth's crust.
@@lonestarr1490 Right, I know that - but, those elements still aren't going anywhere; again with the exception of what we launch into space - they are still contained within Bubble Earth... One way or another. So again - we really aren't "using up" anything - we are just moving it from one place on the earth's crust/atmosphere, to another place. If we do so in an irresponsible manner, that makes it harder to use those elements in the future, then okay - that's on us humans; but there is no Big Bad "OMG we're all gonna die because we used up all of the "rare earth metals" - That is "panic science" and for the most part, it is garbage. So, unless you can undo the laws of conservation of mass and energy... I'm sorry, but there is no reason to panic. I'm not saying, "Ahhh, screw it - let's scrub every square inch for all of the everything!" Just... don't panic.
@@wallaroo1295 That's more or less just terminology. Sure, we're technically not running out of anything. But besides conservation of mass and energy, there is also that thing called entropy (not exactly what it is, but as a comparison). We're breaking it up into tiny pieces and spread them over the world. What is arguably easy to mine today will be hard to regain tomorrow. Therefore, we should start thinking about effective ways of recycling, because the day will come when we totally rely on it. Naming those issues is not panic science - even if the phrasing might be a bit lurid.
"Unrest" is a mild way to describe Belgium hiring mercenaries and bankrolling provincial revolts in their former colony. They were trying to capture the supply of critical metals.
How deep into history and geography do you want this chemistry focused video to go into. Yes they ignored some pretty horrific stuff when they said 'unrest' but this video isn't titled "how Belgium's colonisation and exploitation secrewed over and continues to screw over Congo"
@Jonathan Williams It is still being done, the greatest buyers of Cobalt from DRC keep the war ongoing to ease the negotiations of cobalt, if the territory stabilized, the price of the product would go up.
@@MukumRaiLimbu Yes, genius, this is science show, and it's why it's so bad they are laughably wrong in naming things last thing it should be called...
People often underestimate the energy and machinepower required to move TONS of material, just to find a few fractions of grams of rare earth elements. Once we find a way to make energy costs near to zero, then we're talking. The obvious solution is to not landfill usable stuff but sort recyclables out beforehand, and to ensure products are easy to recycle.
If only they were more accurate and less sensational. Those elements make up a tiny percentage of the crust, but that is still more in total amount than we will be able to use in the next ten thousand years. We will never run out of these. Once the current, most easily accessible deposits are exhausted, we will move on to the next tier of less convenient deposits. And then to the next. And to the next. All the while developing better mining and refining methods and more efficient methods of using and recycling them. The more expensive something gets, the bigger the incentive to develop better tech to make it less expensive again. We will not run out of resources!
ha exactly, just like lithium ion battery packs for tools and such, instead of just cracking them open and swapping out the dead cells (lots of them use 18650s and all of the kobalt brand from chainsaws and lawn mowers are not even spot welded to a bar, its just bent metal flat plate prongs putting pressure on the positive and negative sides, lol, just get a kit of security torx bits and buy a batch of quality Li-Ion cells *or invenst in something like the xtar battery charging units that let you grade them too, so you are using similar mAh cells since they can vary,) and swap out bad for good, (the xtar unit I have has a feature called 0v that attempts to charge batteries that normal chargers show are dead, and I have revived like 8 out of 11 batteries I have tried in it, so there is that too :) )
In Asia we rebuild and repair device For everything you have in USA, there are a thousand times more out in the seven other billion people Everyone in Philippines has a phone, or three. It's not something you can regulate outside the USA, If the poorer people can't afford it, then the regulations are for you
@@asmodeusasteroth7137 I am in Europe. This used to be the case here too, unfortunately they started building gadgets in ways that by designed cannot be repaired without very specific equipment. Nowadays you can't even change your phone battery without voiding the warranty (which is very short anyway). These gadgets tend to be deprecated very early and you are left with buying a new one as the only option in case of e.g. a broken phone.
@@mmxgn that and the stupid notion that you _have to_ have the newest gadget every year. Which costs nearly as much as a monthly rent of a 2 room apartment where I live.
Well let's keep allowing Apple and Microsoft to intentionally brick the hardware their software is on. Running out of resources for electronics doesn't matter when planned obsolescence makes already wealthy people slightly richer.
Funny how people only accuse Apple and Microsoft because they use it, but don't realize other companies like Samsung, Sony, and others also contribute to this.
Narata it's because they like to jump on bandwagons instead of respecting that apple and Microsoft are probably the companies doing the most about these problems and I think both of them will take your old products and recycle them for you, even if it was made by a competitor, and at least apple will also pay you for it. Samsung and other Asian companies usually don't care nearly as much as American companies but since they're smaller and less popular they don't get scrutinised.
Unfortunately it’s the profits and gains of short term goals, with few to none who care about long term goals. Our need for materialism isn’t ending anytime soon, a constant feedback loop. One day the end will come for us all... Mother Nature or our own lack of resolve. Too preoccupied with our own little problems, distracted with technology slowly digging for new ideas and dreams we forget we’re digging our own grave soon too deep to get out.
Planned obsolescence is a natural byproduct of technological innovation; Moore's Law at work. It has nothing to do with actual market manipulation because part of general tech innovation is producing less costly products material wise that can also compete or outdo their predecessors.
Indium is only used in a certain type of solar cell (a typically expensive and subsequently unpopular type). Specifically thin film CIGS. The most common type of solar panels are polycrystalline and monocrystalline, made from silicon. The second most abundant element on the planet.
A big issue with the limited resources we have is also just the fact that producers of gadgets and other products push to sell as much as possible and therefore release a new phone every year instead of waiting a few years and preserving our resources
Lol, Planned obsolescence is a reaction to the rate of speed of technological advancement. Its an effect and not a cause and is exhibited perfectly by Moore's Law.
50k3r2 oh is that why the last couple of phone models have had nothing more than aesthetic adjustments and larger batteries, with minimal increase in performance and the removal of the ability to change your battery?
@@japr1223 Not even close. The tech went from dual core to quad core in a matter of 3 years though the processing power is the same or better. I own all 3 of the last cheapo models made of Samsung, Alcatel and Huawei over the last 7 years; all of them 30 to 40$ phones, and the upgrades involved have been substantial and the battery sizes have remained about the same size. The comparison of the samsung vs huwei is huge in processing power, ram amount and battery life while still running roughly the same 1500 ah battery size.
@@misguidedterror8397 A zinc oxide based semiconductor. A bit harder to apply as it needs to be applied at 200C - close to the melting point of silicon semi conductors.
Aluminum-doped zinc oxide, when produced correctly, is as good as indium tin oxide while being substantially less expensive. It's used extensively by some solar panel manufacturers but many companies are unfamiliar with it. Also, quite a lot of aluminum zinc oxide produced is of a low quality, but that's an issue that would quickly self-correct if companies wanted to move away from ITO.
this is just logical. but because we have $$$$$$$ its not going to happen. get rid of $$$$$$$$$$ and everythings free. aka building a ship. going to Asteroids. get resources. but if it will cost billions. to then bring home what a box of metal. obv not worth it. money is our biggest problem.
@@shawnfoogle920 been saying that for along time. No money, means free labor so we could build/do anything. Just make it so you have to work to get everything for free, If you dont work you would be provided with the basic needs.
I do get that it would be a pain to implement (and yes, it would raise local taxes), but I feel like we should be able to send these items to our local recycling center (perhaps sorted in a separate bin from regular recycling) where they would do some rough sorting to try to weed out anything that shouldn't be in there and collect it together to store until there's enough to ship out to a regional recycling center that specializes in recovering these elements.
Arsenic (CCA would be the technical term) hasn't been used to treat wood, at least not residential lumber, for like 30 years now. It's actually banned and has been for decades precisely because it's so dangerous. The lumber in your deck is likely ACQ, a copper based preservative, or something similar.
Helium is a bit of an odd one seeing as it will continue to be produced as long as there is alpha decay going on. Not certain about industrial levels of it though.
Helium is messed up for a lot of reasons. The US is one of the only places on earth where we can harvest a lot of it from natural gas so we produce a lot of it as a consequence of that. We produce it in so much excess of demand that the government went a billion dollars into debt trying to capture the stuff and piping it around to our repositories. But they've been trying to sell it off for decades to make the program stop hemmoaraging money. That just floods the market that it's so cheap we put it in balloons. At the end of the day, we are producing tons of the stuff now and wasting it because storing it is expensive but once we run out, it becomes super important and hard to get more of in the enormous quantities we need.
Unlike cobalt and cerium and arsenic, we might actually run out of helium. When you release helium, it actually leaves Earth, whereas metals simply get inconvenient to recover.
How can you have international leaders understand about the criticality of running out of crucial elements? So that we can finally do something about it...
In the US, a lot of rare earths can't be mined because of their association with a mild alpha emitter - Thorium. Use Thorium in a MSR, and by necessity change regulation to allow it, then the availability all of a sudden changes. Rare earth mining moved to China because of that regulation. See Thorium documentaries by Gordon McDowell here on youtube.
Everyone says don't throw this or that away and I agree but what am I supposed to do with it? "Recycling" in my area is a joke and there are not many "E-waste" drop offs (even if there were where is it really going?). So for now I just keep it in a box in my closet where it just kind of builds up. I'm starting to get into electronics a little bit so I've managed to salvage somethings for reuse anyway. I'm more than happy to dispose of thing properly but I need a proper way to dispose of things.
I could see us mining landfills in the future. I'd imagine that after burning off any of the plastic, paper, etc, you'd be left with a fairly high value "ore". Processing it might be a pita but I'd never have guessed that 1/5 of the copper mined was from "bioleaching".
Arsenic's use in the pressure-treatment of wood has been prohibited in Canada for over 10 years exactly because it wasn't a good idea to start with by the way!
They do not use aresnic in pressure-treated lumber and have not for basicaly 20 years now. What they used to use was Chromated Copper Arsenate (CCA) it had arsenic in it. It has been replaced with ACQ Alkaline Copper Quat (a mix of copper and a quaternary ammonium) or MCQ Micronized Copper Quaternary.
Things like chips are a lot smaller now and recycling old electronics is a gold mine of huge chips so not really a shortage but an increase otherwise copper would have gone and silver as well
Speaking of recycling the supply we already have, they have these cool things called Eco ATMs at stores and malls. They pay you to reuse the elements inside.
@@Apjooz Well yeah hopefully new materials and manufacturing processes will compensate this but as of now we already see political and economical power struggles such as China using its "monopoly" on rare earth metals to push their interests worldwide.
Bioleching isn’t that big now, but I imagine it’ll explode when we realize the full potential of using Engineered Bacteria to break things down. It’ll probably be handy in mining Asteroids.
I feel like one day we'll be using some kind of genetically engineered fungus or plant capable of growing throughout a landfill, genetically engineered to leech out specific materials or elements and shuttle them to the top for collection. As an oversimplified example to show what I mean, say some kind of tree whose roots spread through the landfill and absorb some kind of element which is sent up and stored in the trunk or leaves. Bacterial solutions could be easier and good too, but it might be harder to guarantee they'd never get out of control.
One thing everyone can do is be mindful of how much they use/switch technology; buying the latest version every year (TV, cell phone, etc.) is highly wasteful.
Consumers also have the power to reduce the impact of such future shortages, you don't need to replace your phone every year with the latest IPhone. I personally buy a new phone every two years and I handover my old one to my younger siblings who can't afford to buy one themselves
Um... Earth is essentially a closed system bubble, floating in a vacuum - aside from launching them into space, we can't "run out" of anything - we can only transform it into some other form. Conservation of energy and matter... Yes, this is Wiki - it is a starting point for your own research - which can start with the references on that page. So, while I'm wrecking things up, let me throw this little bit of "Don't Panic" out there too: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_effects_on_climate
I they ever get fusion reactors working I suppose they’ll produce helium as a byproduct just like the Sun. I have no idea of the quantities that would be produced.
Some of these elements could have their criticality remedied by asteroid mining, an industry expected to arise from the private commercialization of space
Funny they are converting a gold mine mill next to me for Antimony production from Molybdenum production and there are some HUGE open pits being developed on the lead silver in Id in the coming years.
Agent Smith (The Matrix): I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. Best quote ever!
And the quote is totally wrong - all animals (infact all life) expand until they run out of a critical resources or become prey for a better predator. The population either stablizes or if the resource not renewed fast enough or predatory pressure too high the population crashes (followed by the predators population). Humans are apex predators.
@@allangibson8494 You were absolutely right, until that last sentence. Humans are not apex predators. We're omnivores and have a trophic level of about 2.5 while apex predators eat both herbivores and other predators and have a trophic level of 4-5. We're the food web equivalent of raccoons or pigs. We could also be considered mesopredators.
Quote: ETRI and Hanwha said their joint research team succeeded in using graphene to replace indium tin oxide, known as ITO, which has been widely used to make transparent electrodes in OLED panels. ITO is highly fragile, but graphene is flexible and resistant to chipping.
In fact, we are not running out of these element, it just becoming harder to mine them. Time to consider mining the sea floor, as the sea takes up 70% of the Earth’s surface.
A glut of zinc isn't a problem, it's super useful for protecting steel and is a decent metal for casting (check out Zamak). As for the other elements... there are ways of making them at an exorbitant cost in purpose-built nuclear reactors. As long as there is usable energy in the universe, there is a way.
Reuse and recycle is the way but too many countries, especially the US, don’t like to recycle e-waste. New York City allows us to throw out electronics for the city recycle but who knows where it actually ends up.
All I learned was that my school failed me by not teaching the periodic table in common science classes and did not allow me to take Chemistry because they felt I wasn't smart enough for it.
There is ALWAYS more than one way to manufacture the end user experience, be it clear display that responds to specific areas interacted with, or energy storage, or anything else. Often industries have spent a lot to find the cheapest method, and there will be several other methods of filling the product market niche with varying economically positive return, the one used is just the most profitable not the only profitable method. In other words, dont believe the paradigm an industry markets for economic or political reasons. Just my opinion, went to college for product design and have studied this issue a bit.
Am I the only dork who caught the error in the periodic table of elements? Ti is the symbol for Titanium but they mistakenly also included Ti as the symbol for Thallium, which is *TL* . Bad nerds! Bad! 2:16 , green elements, last row, first on the left.
assuming we cant just get them from space in the future once the price is high enough there will be people willing to mine in dangerous conditions to extract the materials even if they try to make doing so illegal, if the price of arsenic was say $200/kg and there were deposits near me with around 1kg of arsenic per ton of ore mined id be right out there with a pick axe and a gas mask id like to think im a decent enough chemist so unless the extraction of the metal requires electrolysis at 2000k ish like with something like sodium or aluminium i could probably do the extraction on a small scale too can't be much worse than working with mercury or lead.
Bs Indium is the 68th most abundant element in Earth's crust at approximately 50 ppb. This is similar to the crustal abundance of silver, bismuth and mercury.
Beside the elements that make up our technology, phosphorus, used in production of fertilizer, is also dominated by a single country, Morocco, making up to about 70% of the world's production.
thorium and uranium are trivially radioactive, there's really no reason that they should be hard to dispose of. Radium on the other hand is a actual radioactivity concern. Maybe if we put a fraction of the money into nuclear research as we have wind or solar we'd have safe reactors to use them as fuel.
Lowkey surprised we haven't figured out how to synthesize these elements, or that the focus on doing as such hasn't yet shifted from mining them naturally, but maybe that's just me reading too much scifi?
China dominates production and as production is government subsidized keeps the price artificially low so it's not economic for anyone to compete with them. If supply drops the price goes up and it'll be economic to process elsewhere. Rare Earth's are difficult to extract and there's plenty of scope for scientific advancements to improve this. Plenty of mines bury rare earth elements in the tailings as it's not worth their while to extract. Some sources have radioactive byproducts which have to be dealt with properly. Arsenic and Antinomy are common byproducts of gold mining and are mostly buried in the tailings.
I worry about the future of space flight. All the rare materials it requires, what if we use it all up before we actually develop the means to get beyond earth?
Thats actually not that big of issue if you know the rough current estimates on materials on earth. Earth is what I classify as a habitable treasure world; a term I adopted from the game Star Control 2.
4:50 "Right now there are people in places willing to do that work" If by "willing to do that work" you mean the US has paid off the gov't to get rid of all protections of health and make sure there's no education about the risks of that work so that our corporations can exploit the cheap labor, then sure...
Soooooooo....... What you're saying is, we're going to all have to learn to share and get along in order to survive and move forward! All right everyone, back to kindergarten we go! Maybe we can learn those lessons the second time around.
Phytomining + Phytoremediation is awesome. Pull toxins out of soil to make it cleaner and then sell the toxins on to an industry that needs them. I say soil, but you can do it with water plants just as easily.
The only rare earth metal processing facility in America was closed because it was hard. China keeps doing it. Now we just throw away most batteries in the landfill and only recycle the rechargeable ones.
One day land fills will be the new rare element mines since almost everything we're diminishing will be found in them.
So then, the question is - are were really "diminishing" these resources, or just failing to properly recycle the metals when we move them from one part of the Earth, to another?
@@wallaroo1295 We're making them more sparse. You could say we're making rare earth materials out of some things that weren't considered rare earth materials before. See: because we only require small amounts of this stuff per device, it becomes really hard to recover meaningful amounts of it once these devices became trash.
In some sense you could say by putting our electronic waste into landfills we're dissolving those elements in Earth's crust.
@@lonestarr1490 Right, I know that - but, those elements still aren't going anywhere; again with the exception of what we launch into space - they are still contained within Bubble Earth... One way or another.
So again - we really aren't "using up" anything - we are just moving it from one place on the earth's crust/atmosphere, to another place.
If we do so in an irresponsible manner, that makes it harder to use those elements in the future, then okay - that's on us humans; but there is no Big Bad "OMG we're all gonna die because we used up all of the "rare earth metals" -
That is "panic science" and for the most part, it is garbage.
So, unless you can undo the laws of conservation of mass and energy... I'm sorry, but there is no reason to panic.
I'm not saying, "Ahhh, screw it - let's scrub every square inch for all of the everything!" Just... don't panic.
@@wallaroo1295 That's more or less just terminology. Sure, we're technically not running out of anything. But besides conservation of mass and energy, there is also that thing called entropy (not exactly what it is, but as a comparison). We're breaking it up into tiny pieces and spread them over the world. What is arguably easy to mine today will be hard to regain tomorrow. Therefore, we should start thinking about effective ways of recycling, because the day will come when we totally rely on it.
Naming those issues is not panic science - even if the phrasing might be a bit lurid.
@@wallaroo1295 nothing leaves this planet. Does that answer your question?
"Unrest" is a mild way to describe Belgium hiring mercenaries and bankrolling provincial revolts in their former colony. They were trying to capture the supply of critical metals.
It’s gonna be a long time before the Congo finally settles down enough to the point where it can fully modernise
How deep into history and geography do you want this chemistry focused video to go into. Yes they ignored some pretty horrific stuff when they said 'unrest' but this video isn't titled "how Belgium's colonisation and exploitation secrewed over and continues to screw over Congo"
This is a science show, not a geopolitics show
@Jonathan Williams It is still being done, the greatest buyers of Cobalt from DRC keep the war ongoing to ease the negotiations of cobalt, if the territory stabilized, the price of the product would go up.
@@MukumRaiLimbu Yes, genius, this is science show, and it's why it's so bad they are laughably wrong in naming things last thing it should be called...
At some point we are going to have to start mining our own land fills to retrieve rare materials from our garbage
yarp had the same thought. I bet it is actually fairly valuable / rich in desirable elements after burning off the plastic, paper, etc.
Hunter Novak
We’ll have to mine landfills for more than just rare earth metals in the coming centuries.
There are some plans of mining old dross heaps.
@@eier3252 it's not cost effective at the moment
People often underestimate the energy and machinepower required to move TONS of material, just to find a few fractions of grams of rare earth elements. Once we find a way to make energy costs near to zero, then we're talking.
The obvious solution is to not landfill usable stuff but sort recyclables out beforehand, and to ensure products are easy to recycle.
these engineering and chemistry focused episodes are great
more plz!
Yeah, but I wish they would've talked about helium.
@@Snappyclipster Bruh, check out periodic videos. Prof Piliakoff has made 3-4 videos on Helium and its scarcity
If only they were more accurate and less sensational.
Those elements make up a tiny percentage of the crust, but that is still more in total amount than we will be able to use in the next ten thousand years.
We will never run out of these. Once the current, most easily accessible deposits are exhausted, we will move on to the next tier of less convenient deposits. And then to the next. And to the next. All the while developing better mining and refining methods and more efficient methods of using and recycling them.
The more expensive something gets, the bigger the incentive to develop better tech to make it less expensive again. We will not run out of resources!
no
SciShow: "The elements inside your phone could literally be priceless!"
Cell carriers: "Trade in your old phone and get $10 off!"
ha exactly, just like lithium ion battery packs for tools and such, instead of just cracking them open and swapping out the dead cells (lots of them use 18650s and all of the kobalt brand from chainsaws and lawn mowers are not even spot welded to a bar, its just bent metal flat plate prongs putting pressure on the positive and negative sides, lol, just get a kit of security torx bits and buy a batch of quality Li-Ion cells *or invenst in something like the xtar battery charging units that let you grade them too, so you are using similar mAh cells since they can vary,) and swap out bad for good, (the xtar unit I have has a feature called 0v that attempts to charge batteries that normal chargers show are dead, and I have revived like 8 out of 11 batteries I have tried in it, so there is that too :) )
You forgot the most important part , quantity
@Fred Flintstone Are you revering to the human brain?
ROFL
@@bamscng2914 shutup loser
How about we start requiring items made form these elements to be long lasting. And non throw away.
Or at least, easily recyclable when that is impractical.
Amen. Also require gadgets to be repairable.
In Asia we rebuild and repair device
For everything you have in USA, there are a thousand times more out in the seven other billion people
Everyone in Philippines has a phone, or three.
It's not something you can regulate outside the USA,
If the poorer people can't afford it, then the regulations are for you
@@asmodeusasteroth7137 I am in Europe. This used to be the case here too, unfortunately they started building gadgets in ways that by designed cannot be repaired without very specific equipment. Nowadays you can't even change your phone battery without voiding the warranty (which is very short anyway). These gadgets tend to be deprecated very early and you are left with buying a new one as the only option in case of e.g. a broken phone.
@@mmxgn that and the stupid notion that you _have to_ have the newest gadget every year. Which costs nearly as much as a monthly rent of a 2 room apartment where I live.
Well let's keep allowing Apple and Microsoft to intentionally brick the hardware their software is on. Running out of resources for electronics doesn't matter when planned obsolescence makes already wealthy people slightly richer.
Don't forget Google. Android phones are like 80% of the market globally, and outnumber traditional PCs.
Funny how people only accuse Apple and Microsoft because they use it, but don't realize other companies like Samsung, Sony, and others also contribute to this.
Narata it's because they like to jump on bandwagons instead of respecting that apple and Microsoft are probably the companies doing the most about these problems and I think both of them will take your old products and recycle them for you, even if it was made by a competitor, and at least apple will also pay you for it. Samsung and other Asian companies usually don't care nearly as much as American companies but since they're smaller and less popular they don't get scrutinised.
Unfortunately it’s the profits and gains of short term goals, with few to none who care about long term goals. Our need for materialism isn’t ending anytime soon, a constant feedback loop.
One day the end will come for us all... Mother Nature or our own lack of resolve. Too preoccupied with our own little problems, distracted with technology slowly digging for new ideas and dreams we forget we’re digging our own grave soon too deep to get out.
Planned obsolescence is a natural byproduct of technological innovation; Moore's Law at work. It has nothing to do with actual market manipulation because part of general tech innovation is producing less costly products material wise that can also compete or outdo their predecessors.
Indium is only used in a certain type of solar cell (a typically expensive and subsequently unpopular type). Specifically thin film CIGS. The most common type of solar panels are polycrystalline and monocrystalline, made from silicon. The second most abundant element on the planet.
A big issue with the limited resources we have is also just the fact that producers of gadgets and other products push to sell as much as possible and therefore release a new phone every year instead of waiting a few years and preserving our resources
getting rid of planned obsolescence would save alot. but that's not good for the bottom line.
Lol, Planned obsolescence is a reaction to the rate of speed of technological advancement. Its an effect and not a cause and is exhibited perfectly by Moore's Law.
50k3r2 oh is that why the last couple of phone models have had nothing more than aesthetic adjustments and larger batteries, with minimal increase in performance and the removal of the ability to change your battery?
@@japr1223 Not even close. The tech went from dual core to quad core in a matter of 3 years though the processing power is the same or better. I own all 3 of the last cheapo models made of Samsung, Alcatel and Huawei over the last 7 years; all of them 30 to 40$ phones, and the upgrades involved have been substantial and the battery sizes have remained about the same size. The comparison of the samsung vs huwei is huge in processing power, ram amount and battery life while still running roughly the same 1500 ah battery size.
People aren’t always willing to mine that stuff for us.
They are often forced to. By powerful people or their dire circumstances.
There's actually a VERY abundant alternative to indium tin oxide: aluminum zinc oxide.
Patrick Lewis Wtf is that? I literally have less than zero understanding of what that is
@@misguidedterror8397 A zinc oxide based semiconductor. A bit harder to apply as it needs to be applied at 200C - close to the melting point of silicon semi conductors.
Is it efficient
Aluminum-doped zinc oxide, when produced correctly, is as good as indium tin oxide while being substantially less expensive. It's used extensively by some solar panel manufacturers but many companies are unfamiliar with it. Also, quite a lot of aluminum zinc oxide produced is of a low quality, but that's an issue that would quickly self-correct if companies wanted to move away from ITO.
@@argentpuck nice
*MINE THE ASTEROIDS !!*
Lol
this is just logical. but because we have $$$$$$$ its not going to happen. get rid of $$$$$$$$$$ and everythings free. aka building a ship. going to Asteroids. get resources. but if it will cost billions. to then bring home what a box of metal. obv not worth it. money is our biggest problem.
@@shawnfoogle920 been saying that for along time. No money, means free labor so we could build/do anything. Just make it so you have to work to get everything for free, If you dont work you would be provided with the basic needs.
Robotic mining of space will flood the market and crash the economy!!! The cabals will be sad....
fr nasa says: _we're going back to the moon... to stay. (and mine.)_
I do get that it would be a pain to implement (and yes, it would raise local taxes), but I feel like we should be able to send these items to our local recycling center (perhaps sorted in a separate bin from regular recycling) where they would do some rough sorting to try to weed out anything that shouldn't be in there and collect it together to store until there's enough to ship out to a regional recycling center that specializes in recovering these elements.
Awesome that you guys are trending!
Arsenic (CCA would be the technical term) hasn't been used to treat wood, at least not residential lumber, for like 30 years now. It's actually banned and has been for decades precisely because it's so dangerous. The lumber in your deck is likely ACQ, a copper based preservative, or something similar.
Helium is a bit of an odd one seeing as it will continue to be produced as long as there is alpha decay going on. Not certain about industrial levels of it though.
Helium is messed up for a lot of reasons. The US is one of the only places on earth where we can harvest a lot of it from natural gas so we produce a lot of it as a consequence of that. We produce it in so much excess of demand that the government went a billion dollars into debt trying to capture the stuff and piping it around to our repositories.
But they've been trying to sell it off for decades to make the program stop hemmoaraging money. That just floods the market that it's so cheap we put it in balloons.
At the end of the day, we are producing tons of the stuff now and wasting it because storing it is expensive but once we run out, it becomes super important and hard to get more of in the enormous quantities we need.
This is one of the reasons why balloons have recently gotten more expensive. That and inflation.
@@tonysoottinanchai501 literally! lol
Unlike cobalt and cerium and arsenic, we might actually run out of helium. When you release helium, it actually leaves Earth, whereas metals simply get inconvenient to recover.
If we ever develop profitable fusion or really really need some helium, we can just make it ourselves though
How can you have international leaders understand about the criticality of running out of crucial elements? So that we can finally do something about it...
leaders barely understand how anything works these days, so i doubt anyone of them understand running out of resources
honestly having an uneducated one is the best thing for governments because it means they can get away with a lot more.
Ilena Starbreeze true
We're nothing but cattle. What you think doesn't matter.
8:45 "Hey look at this thing, it's .... uh... plastic..-ish ... uh science!"
In the US, a lot of rare earths can't be mined because of their association with a mild alpha emitter - Thorium. Use Thorium in a MSR, and by necessity change regulation to allow it, then the availability all of a sudden changes. Rare earth mining moved to China because of that regulation. See Thorium documentaries by Gordon McDowell here on youtube.
Time to go "stabilize" some countries, boys!
Come and get it
america imperialism 102: *electric* boogaloo
Everyone says don't throw this or that away and I agree but what am I supposed to do with it?
"Recycling" in my area is a joke and there are not many "E-waste" drop offs (even if there were where is it really going?). So for now I just keep it in a box in my closet where it just kind of builds up. I'm starting to get into electronics a little bit so I've managed to salvage somethings for reuse anyway. I'm more than happy to dispose of thing properly but I need a proper way to dispose of things.
I could see us mining landfills in the future. I'd imagine that after burning off any of the plastic, paper, etc, you'd be left with a fairly high value "ore". Processing it might be a pita but I'd never have guessed that 1/5 of the copper mined was from "bioleaching".
Arsenic's use in the pressure-treatment of wood has been prohibited in Canada for over 10 years exactly because it wasn't a good idea to start with by the way!
You should read "The Accidental Superpower","The Absent Superpower" and "Disunited Nations" by Peter Zeihan.
4:54 imperialism is not dead, there will always be someone using people in poorer countries as work force. Unless we all sink to the same level.
The American trade empire will be outlasted by its open pit mines visible from orbit.
They do not use aresnic in pressure-treated lumber and have not for basicaly 20 years now. What they used to use was Chromated Copper Arsenate (CCA) it had arsenic in it. It has been replaced with ACQ Alkaline Copper Quat (a mix of copper and a quaternary ammonium) or MCQ Micronized Copper Quaternary.
Things like chips are a lot smaller now and recycling old electronics is a gold mine of huge chips so not really a shortage but an increase otherwise copper would have gone and silver as well
Speaking of recycling the supply we already have, they have these cool things called Eco ATMs at stores and malls. They pay you to reuse the elements inside.
We as humans ain't gonna be happy till we've wiped out everything, sad but true
Wait till electric cars become truly popular and you’ll see rare metals become scarce and super expensive.
And it will be completely compensated by improvements in manufacturing.
@@Apjooz Well yeah hopefully new materials and manufacturing processes will compensate this but as of now we already see political and economical power struggles such as China using its "monopoly" on rare earth metals to push their interests worldwide.
Extremely informative. Thanks Scishow :)
Excellent video. Keep up the great work
Bioleching isn’t that big now, but I imagine it’ll explode when we realize the full potential of using Engineered Bacteria to break things down. It’ll probably be handy in mining Asteroids.
I feel like one day we'll be using some kind of genetically engineered fungus or plant capable of growing throughout a landfill, genetically engineered to leech out specific materials or elements and shuttle them to the top for collection. As an oversimplified example to show what I mean, say some kind of tree whose roots spread through the landfill and absorb some kind of element which is sent up and stored in the trunk or leaves.
Bacterial solutions could be easier and good too, but it might be harder to guarantee they'd never get out of control.
One thing everyone can do is be mindful of how much they use/switch technology; buying the latest version every year (TV, cell phone, etc.) is highly wasteful.
Party Place knows firsthand that the shortage of helium caused around 79 of there store closings.
The mine and mill in California are expected to start production again fairly soon.
Consumers also have the power to reduce the impact of such future shortages, you don't need to replace your phone every year with the latest IPhone. I personally buy a new phone every two years and I handover my old one to my younger siblings who can't afford to buy one themselves
Dude this was so well explained that even after smoking a blunt I understand u
Um... Earth is essentially a closed system bubble, floating in a vacuum - aside from launching them into space, we can't "run out" of anything - we can only transform it into some other form.
Conservation of energy and matter...
Yes, this is Wiki - it is a starting point for your own research - which can start with the references on that page. So, while I'm wrecking things up, let me throw this little bit of "Don't Panic" out there too:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_effects_on_climate
Soon there will be no helium :(
Umm huge pile of alpha emitting heavy elements says... He he he he....
Soon there will be no large deposits of cheap and easy to extract helium in the portion of the Earth we can access.
I they ever get fusion reactors working I suppose they’ll produce helium as a byproduct just like the Sun. I have no idea of the quantities that would be produced.
Some of these elements could have their criticality remedied by asteroid mining, an industry expected to arise from the private commercialization of space
So Thorium and Uranium, maybe we ought to use them...
Funny they are converting a gold mine mill next to me for Antimony production from Molybdenum production and there are some HUGE open pits being developed on the lead silver in Id in the coming years.
Agent Smith (The Matrix): I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.
Best quote ever!
And the quote is totally wrong - all animals (infact all life) expand until they run out of a critical resources or become prey for a better predator. The population either stablizes or if the resource not renewed fast enough or predatory pressure too high the population crashes (followed by the predators population).
Humans are apex predators.
@@allangibson8494 You were absolutely right, until that last sentence. Humans are not apex predators. We're omnivores and have a trophic level of about 2.5 while apex predators eat both herbivores and other predators and have a trophic level of 4-5. We're the food web equivalent of raccoons or pigs. We could also be considered mesopredators.
@@lyreparadox We are apex predators NOW. Their is not much that gets away with eating us that we cannot also hunt more effectively.
Phytomining! Traffic trees to uptake CO
I'm 50, I will be dead long before it happens. Good luck kids :)
Oh, you're going to be seeing a lot within your lifetime, don'tcha worry.
One thing we can do is use tech as long as possible... I have a collection of monitors that go back a decade
There are a couple solutions not mentioned. Space mining. Population control. Dichotomy.
Choose to use projectors instead of LCD TV's, they don't need indium. You only need to replace a bulb every 3-8 years.
Quote: ETRI and Hanwha said their joint research team succeeded in using graphene to replace indium tin oxide, known as ITO, which has been widely used to make transparent electrodes in OLED panels. ITO is highly fragile, but graphene is flexible and resistant to chipping.
Well I've already got a start on not throwing away electronics.
In fact, we are not running out of these element, it just becoming harder to mine them. Time to consider mining the sea floor, as the sea takes up 70% of the Earth’s surface.
solution: we need to ramp up our space programs so we can begin mining the moon, or asteroids.
A glut of zinc isn't a problem, it's super useful for protecting steel and is a decent metal for casting (check out Zamak). As for the other elements... there are ways of making them at an exorbitant cost in purpose-built nuclear reactors. As long as there is usable energy in the universe, there is a way.
Uhh - Lew - Me - Nee - Um !!!!!!
All that said, recycling is significantly more expensive than mining.
Worth it
Reuse and recycle is the way but too many countries, especially the US, don’t like to recycle e-waste. New York City allows us to throw out electronics for the city recycle but who knows where it actually ends up.
All I learned was that my school failed me by not teaching the periodic table in common science classes and did not allow me to take Chemistry because they felt I wasn't smart enough for it.
Time to build the USG Ishimura!
god daaaam i betta start refining old phone screens into itty bitty gallium ingots
I don't think we're going to have to worry about all this electronics and solar panels much longer. Hopefully.
There is ALWAYS more than one way to manufacture the end user experience, be it clear display that responds to specific areas interacted with, or energy storage, or anything else. Often industries have spent a lot to find the cheapest method, and there will be several other methods of filling the product market niche with varying economically positive return, the one used is just the most profitable not the only profitable method. In other words, dont believe the paradigm an industry markets for economic or political reasons. Just my opinion, went to college for product design and have studied this issue a bit.
They haven't used arsenic in pressure treatment wood in the United States for about 20 years.
I wonder if silver is undergoing a supply squeeze. Silver spot price is now going through the roof.
My house is so old that our AC broke due to the decay of an element that supposedly went extinct and that hasn’t been used for years
Transparent. Aluminum?
That's the ticket laddie!
Am I the only dork who caught the error in the periodic table of elements? Ti is the symbol for Titanium but they mistakenly also included Ti as the symbol for Thallium, which is *TL* . Bad nerds! Bad! 2:16 , green elements, last row, first on the left.
~95% of solar panels already use 0 Indium.
Such Irony, the world is running out of rare earths for solar panels and batteries, still we find more Oil and Coal...
LMFAO "peak oil"
SciShow: *Demand for Indium may exceed production by 2030*
Corporations: *Woo Hoo! Another decade of unrestrained profits!*
assuming we cant just get them from space in the future once the price is high enough there will be people willing to mine in dangerous conditions to extract the materials even if they try to make doing so illegal, if the price of arsenic was say $200/kg and there were deposits near me with around 1kg of arsenic per ton of ore mined id be right out there with a pick axe and a gas mask id like to think im a decent enough chemist so unless the extraction of the metal requires electrolysis at 2000k ish like with something like sodium or aluminium i could probably do the extraction on a small scale too can't be much worse than working with mercury or lead.
Bs
Indium is the 68th most abundant element in Earth's crust at approximately 50 ppb. This is similar to the crustal abundance of silver, bismuth and mercury.
Out of curiousity, is it in an economically extractable form or concentration?
Graphene is like really easy to make though
Beside the elements that make up our technology, phosphorus, used in production of fertilizer, is also dominated by a single country, Morocco, making up to about 70% of the world's production.
Somehow in July of 2020, the amount of indium left in the Earth just doesn't seem to be as big of a deal...
thorium and uranium are trivially radioactive, there's really no reason that they should be hard to dispose of. Radium on the other hand is a actual radioactivity concern.
Maybe if we put a fraction of the money into nuclear research as we have wind or solar we'd have safe reactors to use them as fuel.
Lowkey surprised we haven't figured out how to synthesize these elements, or that the focus on doing as such hasn't yet shifted from mining them naturally, but maybe that's just me reading too much scifi?
How many cubic kilometres of ground can be minded?
"The elements inside " My new song title
China dominates production and as production is government subsidized keeps the price artificially low so it's not economic for anyone to compete with them. If supply drops the price goes up and it'll be economic to process elsewhere. Rare Earth's are difficult to extract and there's plenty of scope for scientific advancements to improve this. Plenty of mines bury rare earth elements in the tailings as it's not worth their while to extract. Some sources have radioactive byproducts which have to be dealt with properly. Arsenic and Antinomy are common byproducts of gold mining and are mostly buried in the tailings.
If the cost of an item goes up then the safety to get that item always goes down
I worry about the future of space flight. All the rare materials it requires, what if we use it all up before we actually develop the means to get beyond earth?
Thats actually not that big of issue if you know the rough current estimates on materials on earth. Earth is what I classify as a habitable treasure world; a term I adopted from the game Star Control 2.
Hey guys! Show idea....can we make elements? All need to do is smoosh a certain amount of electrons around some protons and neutrons right?
That's literally what nuclear fusion is. Sadly that takes an absolutely insane amount of energy.
Time to start mining Mars and the asteroid belt!
Better start stacking up on old broken lcds lol
We need to mine!!!!
So basically "These things are running out but not really".
4:50 "Right now there are people in places willing to do that work"
If by "willing to do that work" you mean the US has paid off the gov't to get rid of all protections of health and make sure there's no education about the risks of that work so that our corporations can exploit the cheap labor, then sure...
LOL! MIning is one of the best paying jobs on the entire planet regardless of country.
We have to improve recycling!
Soooooooo....... What you're saying is, we're going to all have to learn to share and get along in order to survive and move forward! All right everyone, back to kindergarten we go! Maybe we can learn those lessons the second time around.
Intense.
Phytomining + Phytoremediation is awesome. Pull toxins out of soil to make it cleaner and then sell the toxins on to an industry that needs them. I say soil, but you can do it with water plants just as easily.
Your old phone can be recycled but it could also be re-used as well.
The only rare earth metal processing facility in America was closed because it was hard. China keeps doing it. Now we just throw away most batteries in the landfill and only recycle the rechargeable ones.
Time to start asteroid mining
Old garbage dumps are the new gold mines.