The metals in your smartphone may be irreplaceable

Shades of 60 elements that make up a computer chip.

intelfreepress

A few centuries ago, there were just a few widely used materials: wood, brick, iron, copper, gold, and silver. Today’s material diversity is astounding. A chip in your smartphone, for instance, contains 60 different elements. Our lives are so dependent on these materials that a scarcity of a handful of elements could send us back in time by decades.

If we do ever face such scarcity, what can be done? Not a lot, according to a paper published in PNAS. Thomas Graedel of Yale University and his colleagues decided to investigate the materials we rely on. They chose to restrict the analysis to metals and metalloids, which could face more critical constraints because many of them are relatively rare.

The authors’ first task was to make a comprehensive list of uses for these 62 elements, which was surprisingly difficult. Much of the modern use of metals happens behind closed doors in corporations under the veil of trade secrets. Even if we can find out how certain metals are used, it may not always be possible to determine the proportions they are used in. The researchers' compromise was to account for the use of 80 percent of the material that is made available each year through extraction and recycling.