Try for a moment to imagine how many different materials there are in the technologies that you use every day. Most cell phones, for example, contain materials like indium, gallium, silicon, tantalum, lithium and nedodymium, which probably didn’t make your list. Moreover, new and complex technologies necessitate the use of increasingly exotic materials; an “exotic” material being located in a zone of the periodic table at which you have probably never looked (neodymium is perhaps one of them!).
Figure 1: Periodic table where critical elements, as determined by recent studies [1, 2, 3], are highlighted. In particular, Rare Earth Elements are shown in green and Platinum Group Metals in yellow.
But why should we care about some elements that many of us didn’t even know existed? We should care because the supply of many of these so-called “critical materials” is constrained or difficult to predict, often due to scarcity, political instability in the countries where they are produced, or environmental concerns related to their extraction. Without action to resolve the issues affecting critical element supply, the technological progress we currently enjoy may be interrupted.
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