Kira Bindrim: Okay, so we’ve established a baseline. And is this processing and all of this other stuff that has to happen? Is that primarily happening in the same place as as the mine? Or does that just sort of fragment out into the rest of the world? To my little mining knowledge just sounds quite involved. Kira Bindrim: Okay, so it’s quite involved it sounds like. And this is finally sold to firms that need those things to make their rare earth magnets or their batteries, for example. And then finally, you’ve got the pure rare earth metal or rare earth oxides. And there are different ways of separation, one being to precipitate it, which means that you can separate the individual elements out or groups of elements. So you’ve got to try and separate things. At this point the solution is still mixed. And then you leech it with water to flush out the impurities.
#WHEN DOES A LITTLE MORE OBSESSED COME OUT CRACK#
Crack meaning you put in the big oven and you crank up the temperature. So what does what does that process look like right? So you’ve mined that out of the ground, then you need to crush, and grind, and float what you’ve just dug up from the ground to increase the rate of concentration by getting rid of some of the other stuff. What is the process from getting a rare earth from a mine to my phone? Like what is the whole procedure? Kira Bindrim: Here’s another probably dumb question. So that’s why I think rare earths are really quite at the forefront of the global conversation right now. A lot of these rare earths will be needed for things like electric vehicles and wind turbines, which will be very key to getting carbon emissions down. Another reason is because they have just become so much more necessary with high tech manufacturing, and also with the energy transition as we move towards a more renewable economy. We’ve seen how small disruptions in supply chains can really ripple throughout the global economy and cause humongous backlogs and snags, and so that’s one reason. Mary Hui: Well, in large part, I think it’s because the world has began paying much more attention to critical material supply chains. Kira Bindrim: Why am I hearing about them now versus in the past? What’s changed, if anything? They’re electrical and they’re catalytic, meaning that they are catalysts or they make certain chemical reactions go faster. It means that batteries can carry more energy per a given amount of weight. So that makes them good candidates for batteries. Mary Hui: Yeah, it’s really because rare earths have quite unique physical and chemical properties and 4 of them stand out. Kira Bindrim: So what makes rare earths so special why these 17 minerals? What’s so unique about them? Because small doses of rare earths can actually boost performance and a lot of technologies actually wouldn’t work very well without rare earths. Sometimes they’re referred to as industrial vitamins. Mary Hui: It’s really a group of 17 elements with quite similar chemical and physical properties. What exactly are rare earths? Give us the sort of chemistry 101 here. Kira Bindrim: I feel like we must be on very, very different Twitters if you are seeing rare earth sweets on the regular because let me tell you I am not. I wanted to figure that out for myself and saw that as a good way to look at the intersection of geopolitics, economics, and business as well as a good dose of wonkiness which really is kind of ultimate Quartz. Mary Hui: So I kept seeing rare earths in headlines and stories and tweets, but I really couldn’t quite grasp why they were so important or what really the scale or the complexity was.
Now, with more gadgets driving more demand, a lot of countries are wondering how they can get in the game. In 2019, China processed 87% of the world’s rare earths. But only one country has a monopoly on the industry. So it’s safe to say every modern economy needs these metals. Not to mention, more than 90% of electric vehicles use motors with rare earth magnets. There are 55 pounds of rare earths in every Toyota Prius, 920 pounds in an F-35 fighter jet, and 9000 pounds in a nuclear submarine. You can find them in motors, aircraft engines, wind turbines, hard drives, and batteries. And they aren’t just important for phones. Honestly, your phone wouldn’t even be able to vibrate. iPhone screens wouldn’t have their signature polish. But without them, smartphone displays wouldn’t have such vivid colors. These are elements that mostly hang out at the bottom of the periodic table with names like Scandium and Europium. And depending on your phone, between 8 and 16 of them are part of an obscure group known as rare earth metals, or rare earths. See, the average smartphone contains up to 62 different types of metals. But those are the things that make my smartphone mine.
Also truly an embarrassing number of videos of my cat.
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