Supply Risk, Scarcity, and Cellphones [the data]

Wale University industrial ecologist Thomas E. Graedel likes to point out in his lectures that when you hold a cellphone, you're holding half the periodic table of elements in your hand. The number of minerals used in electronics has ballooned over the years, and now the industry finds itself highly dependent on some substances whose supply is more precarious than we'd like. Graedel was part of a U.S. government committee that looked at the "criticality" - the combination of importance and supply risk -of a number of key minerals. Some of the most critical are found in cellphones. The ones to worry about, says Graedel, are difficult to find substitutes for and are produced only as by-products of something else, so their own supplies are constrained. Gallium and indium fall into that category. Graedel has also been examining the fact that a more affluent global population may cause even common minerals like copper to become scarce.