‘In our world we see a lot of people in the media and policy makers worrying about physical exhaustion of metals. For example, Gardner is aware of cases where an academic project on a new use for an element lost funding after it appeared on a critical list. ‘What’s critical for one person is an opportunity for someone else.’ Listing an element as critical can have knock-on effects. ‘It gives the wrong emphasis,’ says David Gardner from Innovate UK’s Knowledge Transfer Network. Many now object to the term ‘critical’, which depends on a range of factors, from geological abundance to the potential for substitution and even geopolitical factors. Following a World Trade Organisation ruling, China dropped the export quotas in 2015. China is the leading global producer of 23 of 41 elements and element groups in the British Geological Survey’s ‘risk list’. The year 2010 saw a media frenzy surrounding certain raw materials, exacerbated when China chose to restrict the supply of the rare earth metals, plus tungsten and molybdenum, used in smartphones. Experts have been discussing the supply issue for almost a decade yet little has changed except perceptions. Mobile phone manufacturing brings well-documented concerns over supply of so-called critical raw materials, from precious metals to rare earths. Although such complexity makes recycling a challenge, the relatively high concentrations of valuable metals mean it is ‘economically attractive’, suggests Müller. Now at the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Müller is the first to admit that his analyses are only ‘semi-scientific’ but they illustrate perfectly how complex phones are. He identified over 60 elements in the phones, all of which contained high levels of gold, silver, copper, tin, indium, tantalum, and nickel compared with the average composition in the Earth’s crust. In a later study, yet to be published, Müller went on to use liquid nitrogen to freeze phones before crushing them. There’s gold – and other precious metals – in them there phones
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