The Misconceptions of Geological Scarcity

Minerals have a huge impact on our everyday lives. In fact, each of us depends on more than 38,000 pounds of minerals annually—that’s more than 100 pounds per day! The website Minerals Make Life highlights some of the key minerals we take for granted. For example, thanks to iron ore we can make steel, which is the backbone of basically every industry from energy and construction to transportation and equipment manufacturing. We also have copper to thank for our electronics and, more recently, its contribution to advanced technology. And it’s in our recent technological advancements that we find a wide variety of minerals, some of which had previously seen little use. In fact, a computer chip today consists of more than 60 different elements. Naturally, some minerals are more useful to us than others, and it’s the ones that have especially important uses for modern society that we call “critical minerals” due to both their importance and rarity compared to other minerals. However, despite the term’s impression of scarcity, our planet itself is not running out of minerals—critical or otherwise.

When it comes to geological scarcity, we’re not likely to run out of minerals anytime soon. We definitely use a lot more minerals than ever before, especially in our age of growing technology, but the minerals we tend to use the most are very abundant in Earth’s crust. Shortages, on the other hand, are something different. They result from the imbalance between supply and demand, such as when the means of extraction cannot keep up, but this doesn’t inherently reflect Earth’s supply. “If you go to the kitchen and discover you have run out of salt, it does not mean that salt does not exist on planet Earth, or in the US, or at your local store,” says Dr Lawrence Meinert of the US Geological Survey (USGS). As mentioned before, things like computer chips need an assortment of raw materials in order to be made, and many of these minerals have only been given industrial uses incredibly recently, meaning that there has not been as much time for the supply to keep up with demand. So while our planet might not be running out of minerals, it can feel like it when these kinds of shortages happen.

Fear of running out of these resources is not new by any means. In his article, Pforzheim University professor Mario Schmidt gives an overview of the past and present discussions over the scarcity and environmental impact of mineral resources. According to Schmidt, mankind has worried over this for centuries. For a long time we have made estimates as to how much we have left—only for those estimates to later be significantly surpassed. For example, in 1950, it was estimated that the global copper reserves would sit at about 100 million metric tons, but 50 years later, world copper producers ended up extracting 339 million tons instead. This means that, by 1950 estimates, we should have run out of zinc long before the year 2000. Estimates fluctuate all the time, which leads mining reserves to be an overall poor indicator of global mineral supply.

Similarly, the true scope of the impact of extracting minerals is also incredibly difficult to quantitatively measure; that is, to put it into terms that is measurable by its quantity. Schmidt explains that environmental factors such as water, energy, and land are considered in the modern standard of this kind of evaluation, but there are also factors we don’t know much about, such as the act of extracting minerals from the crust. Does this makes an impact to our planet in and of itself; and if so, how? And even if we grasp that, how can this be measured and quantitatively applied to the evaluation of minerals and their extraction? This complexity is a reason why there is such intense debate over this kind of subject.

There is also a moral obligation to look out for future generations as well. After all, minerals can possibly become more difficult and costly to extract in the future. Even if there were still minerals in Earth’s crust, there may come a time where it isn’t worth the cost of extraction. This is what M.L.C.M. Henckens et al. argue in their article on mineral scarcity and sustainability. They claim that, like other scarce resources, minerals should be used as efficiently as possible as to not deprive them from future generations. Mainly, they suggest that international policy measures should be put in place to increase the prices of scarcer minerals as to reflect their value, as this is currently not the case. This would encourage us to make the most out of these minerals as well as further promote things such as recycling. We should not be careless with what we have, even if minerals seem relatively plentiful for us now.

The minerals on Earth may be finite, but that alone is not cause for concern; it’s the extraction of those resources that we need to be mindful of. Our mineral reserves are not an accurate representation of Earth’s entire supply, nor are mineral shortages an indication of geological scarcity. But just because we seemingly have a lot of minerals on this planet does not mean that we can afford to take it for granted. Minerals can become more difficult and costly to extract, while also affecting the environment at a scope we can’t yet comprehend. It’s on us to look out for the future generation as best as we can and work towards an efficient and sustainable way of life so that we can all benefit from our planet’s incredible resource.