Philosophical Vegan Forum

The one thing that concerns me the most about the future of humanity, even above climate change, is the scarcity of elements.

While I'm excited in the role of technologies to improve human life (for example machines with AI to replace the most boring and/or dangerous jobs and thus improving overall human welfare) at the same time I'm obligated to face an inconvenient truth: these technologies require specific elements to exist, and exploitable sources of them are of limited quantities, because recycling is not 100% effective. And if it wasn't enough, extracting them can be a source of geopolitical conflict and is often bad for the environment and human health.

Link to the American Chemical Society: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/greenchemistry/research-innovation/research-topics/endangered-elements.html

If these elements become so scarce we run out of them, then it looks like we might abandon technologies that improve our lives, and could lead to an overall decrease of human well-being on the planet. For example indium is used in touchscreens because of its unique property of both being a conductor and transparent. No more indium ⇒ no more touchscreens, and that one is in red in the table in the link (which means it is critically endangered in the upcoming century).

Asides from extracting elements from concentrated ore mines, what can we do?
- recycling, but as I already mntioned it's not 100% effective, preventing us to fully close the cycle;
- extracting from seawater: because they make up for the majority of our planet's surface, and because of surface runoff, we might expect a huge quantity of elements to be found in seawater. The problem is dillution, which makes inconvenient to extract it.
This article is not optimistic: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4558
It shows worry about uranium too, but I'm pretty sure advanced reactors actually have the potential to use power from uranium much more effectively to the point we could use much less of it to produce much more energy, making necessary uranium extraction from seawater (after we deplete everyting from concentrated mines) a far future problem. But what about other materials? We'll likely deplate concentrated sources of them well before uranium;
- bioacculumation: we could design plants to produce chemicals that bioaccumulate critical elements with easy extraction afterwards. However, if done on land, then it could be bad for the environment: we exploit some land to extract the element we want, then we leave it when there's no more of this material to extract, and the soil's chemical composition has been profoundly changed, perturbing rewiling in that land. This maybe isn't a big deal for elements that are not used for any biological process, but it might actually be dangerous if we're extracting something essential to life like zinc. Or we may combine bioaccumulation with sea extraction using algae, this wouldn't be as much of a problem as on land because dilluted elements move more freely in water;
- asteroid mining: a way that could actually increase the total amount of critical elements on Earth. But the costs would probably make it prohibitive;
- nuclear "alchemy": changing elements into others using our knowledge of what are atoms made of. If we can master it, then rather than playing with dozens of different elements of different availability, we could only have to play with three (protons, neutrons and electrons) that all are abundant. The tricky part is of course to arrange these three building blocks of atoms in the way we want... and it sounds like doing so would require a prohibitive amount of energy;
- lower the demand: this sounds reasonable but we live in a society that promotes comsumption beyond sustainability, maybe as individuals we should think twice before buying electronics that use endangered elements.

I don't pretend to be well informed on this particular issue, and most of what I wrote is personal speculation based on my limited knowledge and intuition. Regardless, I think this is something important to discuss.

It's not something I worry about.

It might be a concern if humanity went extinct and had to start over, though.

Recycling is not 100% recovery because it's only economical *now* to recover 99% or so. There are only a few places for the elements to go, though; they can't really disappear (except by radioactive decay). Do things like sweep up the dust (and filter it out of the air), and spend more time and energy recovering smaller traces and you can get virtually all of it to the point loss doesn't really matter.

To account for the fraction of a percentage loss each generation, we can do a little mining from poor sources (expensive, but it doesn't matter if we're just getting a little bit), and we can improve our devices to need less each generation.

Fissile materials is a legitimate concern, but we have hundreds of years of supply, and much longer with breeder reactors.
By then we should be able to master nuclear fusion.

I am worried about the helium supply. Even though it's abundant in the atmosphere, it's too difficult and expensive to extract and must be extracted from terrestrial sources. It's a very important coolant, and its limited supply "may affect the development of fusion power," (https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/green.2013.3.issue-2/green-2013-0014/green-2013-0014.xml). Yet, we love putting it in balloons that sea turtles eat and choke on...

meganisoptera wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2018 12:24 am I am worried about the helium supply.

I meat to mention that the first time I read, but forgot in the reply.

I think we can resolve that by not using it in party balloons... such a frivolous use of our reserves.

meganisoptera wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2018 12:24 am Even though it's abundant in the atmosphere, it's too difficult and expensive to extract and must be extracted from terrestrial sources.

I thought it was carried off in the upper atmosphere?
AFAIK the only helium we have is being produced by ongoing radioactive decay in the Earth and leaking from underground. I didn't think it lingered in the atmosphere long.

I thought it was carried off in the upper atmosphere?
AFAIK the only helium we have is being produced by ongoing radioactive decay in the Earth and leaking from underground. I didn't think it lingered in the atmosphere long.

Yes, you are right! I was apprently too tired to post on this last night and think I was mixing info from another element I was reading about. Sorry!

This issue is also something young-earth creationists use (or used? this article is pretty old) http://www.icr.org/article/age-earth-atmosphere-helium/

brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Thu Jan 04, 2018 8:20 pm It's not something I worry about.

It might be a concern if humanity went extinct and had to start over, though.

Recycling is not 100% recovery because it's only economical *now* to recover 99% or so. There are only a few places for the elements to go, though; they can't really disappear (except by radioactive decay). Do things like sweep up the dust (and filter it out of the air), and spend more time and energy recovering smaller traces and you can get virtually all of it to the point loss doesn't really matter.

To account for the fraction of a percentage loss each generation, we can do a little mining from poor sources (expensive, but it doesn't matter if we're just getting a little bit), and we can improve our devices to need less each generation.

Fissile materials is a legitimate concern, but we have hundreds of years of supply, and much longer with breeder reactors.
By then we should be able to master nuclear fusion.

Thanks for you input.

Getting elements from dust of all things sounds very exotic to me, and also like it's going to be very expensive, both in energy and economical cost.
For me to be more confident about the issue of critical elements I would need to be aware of a technological proof of concept, like how learning about the potential of new generation nuclear fission reactors made me much more confident in our ability to supply clean energy in the future. To give you an idea using the same scale as the one I used for the poll it made my worry about clean energy go from "likely going to be an existential crisis for humanity" to "a little" at most, and the same kind of proof of concept would make me reconsider my vote on element scarcity.

You mention dust, but could elements be obtained from the waste stream too? This would have the added benefit of avoiding heavy metal toxicity if we want to use composted human waste as fertilizer, something we discussed in the thread about sustainable vegan agriculture. There are Google results but I'm not sure how to separate the hype from legitimate validation of technological maturity or feasability.

Talking about nuclear, I know that there's a huge amount of uranium in seawater. Here's what the pessimistic article I linked above has to say about its extraction:

The pessimistic article wrote:However, note also that, in order to obtain sufficient fiber for supplying enough uranium for the production of the total of the electric energy today, we'd need about 2-3 billion barrels of oil per year. This is a small amount compared to the present production (more than 30 billion barrels per year) but not negligible and would become more and more important as oil production dwindles down because of depletion.

While this sounds bad, I assume the type of nuclear power mentioned in this article is the traditional fission which has the reputation of generating a lot of waste said to be radioactive for thousands of years, but I'm pretty sure breeder reactors are incredibly more efficient than that. Uranium extraction also seems to have been improved since that article, here's a more recent one: https://news.stanford.edu/2017/02/17/uranium-seawater-factors-nuclear-power/

What’s more, the electrified fiber captured three times as much uranyl during an 11-hour test using seawater from Half Moon Bay, about an hour from Stanford, and had three times the useful lifespan of the standard amidoxime.

Assuming Wikipedia's number of an efficiency multiplied by 100 compared to traditional nuclear power, as well as amidoxime fiber being three times more effective, that would divide the number of oil barrels by 300 and we would only need 10,000 barrels per year which comparatively sounds impressive. I guess we could also make them from bioplastics, but that would compete with other uses of agricultural waste like biofuel, or even the benefits of leaving straw on the field after harvest
(https://www.agriculture.com/crops/wheat/baling-wheat-straw-think-of-positives_144-ar49434 although that sounds more like a thing to talk about in the thread where I discuss to add infos to the sustainable vegan agriculture page, we should use that other thread if we want to continue the discussion about it).

Nuclear fusion would be even better, but taking technological maturity into account advanced fission seems to be the best right now.

Canastenard wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2018 2:03 pm Getting elements from dust of all things sounds very exotic to me, and also like it's going to be very expensive,

I mean factory dust, which is recovered by cyclonic (I think) filtering systems that settle it out of the air.

I'm pretty sure this is already done. It's just where things are being cut and worked on.

Canastenard wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2018 2:03 pmYou mention dust, but could elements be obtained from the waste stream too?

It could be recovered from any materials that come out of the factory, sure including waste water used to wash the floors, etc.

But I don't think from human waste; we're not really licking our electronics. I don't think that's where the rare elements are going. I think the loss is just in processing.

Canastenard wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2018 2:03 pmWhile this sounds bad, I assume the type of nuclear power mentioned in this article is the traditional fission which has the reputation of generating a lot of waste said to be radioactive for thousands of years, but I'm pretty sure breeder reactors are incredibly more efficient than that.

You're probably right about that.

Canastenard wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2018 2:03 pmthat would divide the number of oil barrels by 300 and we would only need 10,000 barrels per year which comparatively sounds impressive.

That's great. It might be worth looking into those numbers.

Canastenard wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2018 2:03 pmI guess we could also make them from bioplastics, but that would compete with other uses of agricultural waste like biofuel, or even the benefits of leaving straw on the field after harvest

Once we go nuclear and switch to electric vehicles, we won't need that amount of biofuel. That will be some time off, so no reason to think existing gas powered vehicles would still be around.

Canastenard wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2018 2:03 pm Nuclear fusion would be even better, but taking technological maturity into account advanced fission seems to be the best right now.

Yes, I don't think we'll have fusion for a while, and it will probably come from one of the other methods being experimented with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus#Fusion_power

brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2018 6:54 pm

Canastenard wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2018 2:03 pm Getting elements from dust of all things sounds very exotic to me, and also like it's going to be very expensive,

I mean factory dust, which is recovered by cyclonic (I think) filtering systems that settle it out of the air.

I'm pretty sure this is already done. It's just where things are being cut and worked on.

I suppose you're talking about something like this?
https://steelplantech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/2011-06_EAF_DustTreatment_forHighMetalRecovery.pdf

brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2018 6:54 pm It could be recovered from any materials that come out of the factory, sure including waste water used to wash the floors, etc.

But I don't think from human waste; we're not really licking our electronics. I don't think that's where the rare elements are going. I think the loss is just in processing.

Elements from human waste is what I mentioned I googled in my previous post, here's an example: http://time.com/3755611/human-waste-gold-sewage-research/
Search "metals human waste" on Google, there are several pages that hype the thing by saying like "gold in human feces worth millions".
If it's doable, then it's a way to make an additional source of elements exploitable, since those elements found in our feces have to come from somewhere — and we are not going to mine our agricultural fields. I guess plants are good at absorbing even elements that aren't needed to support life, and possibly the human digestive system may be good at concentrating them if it excretes more than it absorbs through the intestines. However it's true that compared to industrial waste it's probably not much... it would mostly be a way to make sure human manure isn't too contaminated by heavy metals pollutants that could represent a public health hazard. And of course it has to be doable, because it's something for which I saw more hype than promises of technological feasability.

I also did research about the recycling of rare earths and the problem is that it's impractical. The problem is that once they're in electronics it's hard to separate them so they can be reused. Indeed modern electronics generally aren't designed with recycling in mind. Maybe we should ask electronics companies to make their products easier to recycle, but it might come at the cost of making them less performant for what they are made for. In any case we should improve recycling technologies to make them more efficient and less costly, so fanufacturers don't have to do compromises between efficiency and recyclability.

However my problem is that even with effective recycling not everything is going to be recycled. Most people have used pieces of electronics that don't work anymore in their house, and until they move to deposit them in dedicated places to recycle them they're gonna rest there for a long time. It's stagnating metal. But with a huge campaign of public sensitization and even monetary incentives to get people rid of their old electronics by promising money in exchange for old electronics, we might imagine a higher rate of critical metals entering back in the cycle. But even with that we will still have losses, because collectors aren't going to get rid of their pieces of electronics they're too proud of owning, and losses in nature are always going to be a thing — I once lost a cell phone for example. And those are basically dead metals that are never entering back in the cycle. And with the progress of artificial intelligence which I sincerely think have the potential of liberating humans from work, making it optional rather than the pillar of economics without which you're socially stigmatized, the demand for these critical elements will increase even further. And I'm afraid that the amount of critical elements we need to make that a reality might exceed the amount we can realistically take from nature, especially with the environmental damage of mineral extraction taken into account. It's not for things like aluminium or iron that I'm worried about, because the Earth's crust is so rich in these we'll probably never run out of them, I'm instead talking about things like indium or neodynium that are comparatively scarce in concentrated amounts.

But during my research I was suggested that some elements are not mined for themselves but rather as by-products of other mineral mining, here's an example: https://www.thermofisher.com/blog/mining/will-we-run-out-of-technology-minerals/

Rare earth metals are sparsely distributed in the Earth’s crust and are usually mined as by-products of precious and base metals mining.

This suggests that there are too few actually concentrated sources of rare earth minerals for them to supply our needs so we already depend on dilluted sources. Indeed rare earths are actually not really uncommon, with all of them being more common than iodine on the Earth's crust — with the exception of the radioactive promethium — but rather they're dilluted and hard to separate which makes them expensive. So it's actually reasuring to think that we'll probably never run out of rare earths, although I'm more concerned about the environmental damage which relies on hazardous processes, fortunately more environmentally friendly alternatives are being worked on: http://www.mining.com/harvard-scientists-find-clean-new-way-mining-rare-earths/

When it comes to actually running out I'm still more concerned about thing like gold, platinum or indium. These are much rarer in the Earth's crust, and I could imagine us relying on absurdly dilluted sources if we run out of decently concentrated ones.

Although I'm still concerned, the situation doesn't look as bad as I imagined before doing my research. I lowered the intensity of my worry in the vote (that's why I allowed voter to change their votes to reflect their updated opinion, and hopefully for a consensus to form after much discussion if there are plenty of people willing to participate) and am willing to change my vote again when shown further evidence.

Your outline is in line with my understanding.

Recycling difficulty is just a cost issue, because virgin sources are cheaper.

Losses to nature are interesting, but my guess is very minimal and easy enough to make up with a tiny bit of mining.
Hoarding could be an issue, but people die and their junk gets cycled back in.

Correcting myself on a part I wrote:

Canastenard wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2018 7:30 pm If it's doable, then it's a way to make an additional source of elements exploitable, since those elements found in our feces have to come from somewhere — and we are not going to mine our agricultural fields. I guess plants are good at absorbing even elements that aren't needed to support life, and possibly the human digestive system may be good at concentrating them if it excretes more than it absorbs through the intestines. However it's true that compared to industrial waste it's probably not much... it would mostly be a way to make sure human manure isn't too contaminated by heavy metals pollutants that could represent a public health hazard. And of course it has to be doable, because it's something for which I saw more hype than promises of technological feasability.

That's actually an example of involuntary fallacy of ambiguity. By "human waste" I meant urine and feces, but I then realized that those aren't separated in the waste stream from other domestic waste, and by "human waste" they actually meant general sewage waste.

These two articles mention usage of metals in everyday products that end up in sewage:
http://time.com/3755611/human-waste-gold-sewage-research/
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2015/march/sewage-yes-poop-could-be-a-source-of-valuable-metals-and-critical-elements.html

The first article wrote:Smith says metals are ubiquitous in our sewer drains, ranging from those in our personal grooming products to odor-neutralizing nanoparticles sprayed on socks. These metals crop up in wastewater treatment plants, where they can be recovered through leaching.

The second article wrote:“There are metals everywhere,” Smith says, noting they are “in your hair care products, detergents, even nanoparticles that are put in socks to prevent bad odors.” Whatever their origin, the wastes containing these metals all end up being funneled through wastewater treatment plants, where she says many metals end up in the leftover solid waste.

So I was naive to think that those elements come from our food. Part of it probably does, but not to a huge extent. Which seems a bit worrying because that means most of it doesn't get in by accident (contrary to what I naively assumed in my previous post) but rather industrially, deliberately used elements, which means an overall loss of available material if not recovered.

Now if only we could get the cost of metal extraction from sewage low enough to make it financially interesting, that would be a win-win for both the high-tech and agricultural industries, but there's also the challenge of chemically separating metals bound to organic molecules. Maybe it's something the government should subsidize before it's otherwise economically interesting (either through improved extraction technologies or increase in price of the elements), so we can promote better sustainability as soon as possible, but I hope subsidization will not remove enocomic incentive from the industry to improve element recovery technologies (I don't have the knowledge in economics to do such a prediction).