Die USA haben bereits die kritischen Mineralien, die es braucht – aber sie werden weggeworfen. Neue Analysen zeigen
https://www.minesnewsroom.com/news/us-already-has-critical-minerals-it-needs-theyre-being-thrown-away-new-analysis-shows
Die USA haben bereits die kritischen Mineralien, die es braucht – aber sie werden weggeworfen. Neue Analysen zeigen
https://www.minesnewsroom.com/news/us-already-has-critical-minerals-it-needs-theyre-being-thrown-away-new-analysis-shows
11 Kommentare
landfill mining will become quite lucrative I think
Ah yeah the problem was on the machine that sorts all the minerals it was accidentally set to the throw away position, happens
It was never a question of have, it was a question of cheap labor to mine and refine.
How many times does this need to be pointed out? – The minerals aren’t rare. There are tons of places that have the ore. The problem is refining. It’s expensive and dirty and requires years to build.
The phrase „critical minerals“ is pretty vague. The article says they’re minerals that the U.S. needs annually for energy, defense and technology applications.
For those looking for it, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adw8997
North America has the most abundant mineral and metal reserves on the planet. Heck, there’s probably more oil in the United States than in all of OPEC. We just don’t strip mine our environment every chance we get and a lot of the land is „owned“ by the federal government and not the private sector.
Why would you? When you can buy it cheaper from other countries than it would be to subsidize it here? Or at least, that’s been the mantra since the 70’s/80’s.
The US isnt gunna make it out of this century.
If anyone doubts minerals are “rare” anymore, hasn’t seen the vape waste wave happening. I work on a college campus and easily pick up, half a dozen of these a day and they have circuit boards/batteries/valuable components with good metal like lithium and copper :/ it’s just a shame the replacement for cigarettes is just as bad for human health and even worse for the environment; I hate vapes more than cigarettes
There’s a lot of misinterpretation in the comments and the title of the post is misleading.
„Throw-away“ = not recovered.
Minerals often deposits in groups, so gold or nickel may also occur geologically with copper or cobalt.
It’s usually economical to recover one or a few minerals, but not literally every single mineral in the deposit.
I.g., A gold mine, mill and refinery focuses on recovering gold.
The „throw away“ means the uneconomical minerals get deposited in a tailings storage facility. In the future, it can be reprocessed. Some nickel refineries stored cobalt which recently became more valuable and began refining the cobalt that was mined decades ago and stored in the TSF. It’s costly to rehandle it but not impossible.
I work in mineral processing. Plants are expensive and you’d never build anything if your criteria was to recover 100% of every mineral In the mine.
Nobody read the article as usual. The whole point of this is that *we don’t need new mines.* The mines we *have* are inefficient and wasteful. I honestly thought we’d be tackling wastage of electronics, but this conclusion will be more palatable to the average consumer.