We used to have several companies in the US that mined and refined the materials. They shut down because they couldn't compete with China, but if supply became constrained over a long period of time they could restart operations.
It's one reason the Chinese threats of cutting off rare earths is not quite as scary as the media makes it out to be. They can't do it for too long before alternatives get spun up and they lose their leverage entirely.
Future generations will blame us for damning them out of rare earths to build yet another cellphone. This is like us today with severely diminished whale populations just so Victorians could read the bible for another 2 hours a night. Was it worth it? Most would say no, save for the people who made a fortune off of it I'm sure.
That makes no sense whatsoever. We are not consuming rare earths; only moving them from one place to another.
Arguably, future generations would find it easier to mine them from former landfill sites, where they would be present in concentrated form, than from some distant mine in the middle of nowhere.
> Future generations will blame us for damning them out of rare earths to build yet another cellphone.
We’ll be out of many elements before we run out of rare earths. They are not actually that rare, they are mostly inconvenient to extract because they are distributed everywhere as minor elements rather than concentrated into ores. Things like cobalt, nickel, the platinum group metals, or even copper, are more worrying from a sustainable production point of view.
jandrese|4 months ago
It's one reason the Chinese threats of cutting off rare earths is not quite as scary as the media makes it out to be. They can't do it for too long before alternatives get spun up and they lose their leverage entirely.
asdff|4 months ago
deepspace|4 months ago
Arguably, future generations would find it easier to mine them from former landfill sites, where they would be present in concentrated form, than from some distant mine in the middle of nowhere.
kergonath|4 months ago
We’ll be out of many elements before we run out of rare earths. They are not actually that rare, they are mostly inconvenient to extract because they are distributed everywhere as minor elements rather than concentrated into ores. Things like cobalt, nickel, the platinum group metals, or even copper, are more worrying from a sustainable production point of view.