In 2008, chemical engineer Alicia Valero studied the Earth’s mineral capital for her doctoral thesis conducted at the Research Centre for Energy Resources and Consumption (CIRCE) of the University of Zaragoza. Her studies on the depletion of mineral reserves were published in a summarized form in an award-winning article by the International Scientific Committee of the 5th conference on Sustainable Development in Energy, Water and Environment held in Dubrovnik (Croatia). A. Valero states that during the 21st century we will exhaust the planet’s most important mineral reserves unless the recycling of metals and other strategic minerals is rigorously promoted and the Earth’s mineral capital is managed transparently.
In reality, materials do not disappear when used. For example, the aluminum in a can does not disappear when it becomes waste. There is no scarcity of materials, but a scarcity of concentrated raw materials. A mine is a very rare occurrence in the vastness of the Earth’s crust (a geochemical anomaly). When extracting materials, their concentration decreases, and the energy required to extract the next ton increases exponentially, as does the associated environmental impact. The same happens when dispersing materials as waste, which can be solved by collecting all the cans from the example, as we already discussed in the article on recycling.
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According to the author’s estimates, 92% of mercury reserves, 79% of silver, 75% of gold, 75% of arsenic… would already be depleted. As for the most used minerals, the depletion rate of iron would be 28% and that of aluminum 15%, while that of copper would exceed 50%.
With aluminum, iron, and copper, the chemical engineer also applied the Hubbert model to, similar to what has been estimated for oil or other energy minerals, calculate when the production peak would be reached, after which it would begin to decline.
The result she found is that, while this peak would have already been reached for oil in 2008 and would arrive for natural gas in 2023 and for coal in 2060, in the case of copper this would happen in 2024, for aluminum in 2057, and for iron in 2068.
At current rates of raw material consumption, even if twice what is known today as the Earth’s exploitable resources were discovered, the consumption peaks would only shift by about thirty years on average. Even if the problem is pushed back one or two generations, that is nothing even on the human timescale.
Additionally, the global demand for rare earths for microelectronics, phosphates for agriculture, metals for infrastructure construction, etc., is growing exponentially. Furthermore, the scale of demands clashes with that of technological supply. For example, there is not enough platinum or rare earths to store the hydrogen that would power a possible hydrogen-based society, nor enough lithium to store a small part of all the electrical energy consumed worldwide today. Turning bare rock into a vast mine will always be technologically possible, but the economic, energy, and environmental cost makes and will make it unfeasible. Clearing forests, mountains, oceans, and landscapes to search for the last tons of strategic minerals, as is done today with gold, diamonds, or coltan, is not the best planetary future that should await us.
As a final conclusion, the author emphasizes the need for global institutions that provide transparency and promote the rational management of the planet’s mineral resources. The study highlights the importance of recycling and a global awareness among all citizens of the planet of the need to address the environmental problem responsibly, with a commitment to reduce society’s energy and material consumption.
