The darker side
But, as Patrick Wäger, the initiator of this Technology
Briefing and an expert on scarce metals, explained, everything has
a darker side to it. Raw materials which can only be mined and
refined in a few countries, for which alternatives are not easy to
find and which have a low rate of recycling must are considered to
be critical. China, for example, almost completely controls the
supply of rare earth metals from which high-performance permanent
magnets are manufactured. Wäger, who is a staff member of
Empa’s Technology and Society laboratory, added that by
imposing export restrictions the Chinese government has forced
prices to rise, leading to delivery bottlenecks. Currently great
efforts are being made to reduce this dependency by expanding
supply capacities outside of China, such as in the USA, Australia
or Greenland – with implications also for the environment.
Tantalum, required for high-performance micro-capacitors, is viewed
in the microelectronics industry as a material which is difficult
to substitute, and to date it has not been possible to recover it
from end-of-life products. Particularly worrying are the facts that
tantalum is illegally mined in certain Central African countries
under degrading conditions, and the profits from its sale are used
to finance civil wars.
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