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233C t1_iti74ba wrote

This is a picture of the volume of copper recovered from a copper mine; and what it took to extract it on site.
Keeping in mind that copper mine have rather high content compared to other metals, for all the others (except iron), the "ball" would be even smaller.

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adarkuccio t1_iti8n5e wrote

That really looks like a ball, scary how nature does that

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233C t1_iticbzr wrote

You'd be surprised at the number of people still expecting that iron is found in ingot form in mines.

In pictures, the literal specks of metal have to be mechanically grinned down and then undertake several chemical processes (each metal having its own specific processes and industries), all of this very energy intensive and with considerable waste and environmental impacts.

The bottle necks we're facing go far beyond metals.

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Emergency-Wave-5335 t1_itk8sm8 wrote

Everyone knows you have to put it in a furnace with some coal and then you can take the iron bars to the crafting table and make some tools and armor

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233C t1_itk9hny wrote

melt rock, pour into cast, voilà.

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imbiandneedmonynow t1_itk36z9 wrote

great now we have to worry about sand going extinct

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233C t1_itkc3l8 wrote

Climate change is just the get away crisis.
Sand, and other raw material bottle necks are "only" jeopardizing modern economical/technical development (on which our entire world economies are based).
Meanwhile, the year isn't over yet and we've already crossed 2 more planetary boundaries. Each one having the potential to render human life on earth fairly unpleasant.

Sand? We've reached the grotesque when Saudi Arabia has to import its sand from the other side of the planet.
And yet, this pale in consequences compared to, say, the Nitrogen and phosphorus cycles which threaten nothing less than our ability to feed ourselves.

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ralanr t1_itjmagv wrote

I’ve just never seen metal smooth in the wild before.

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knselektor t1_itiyvhw wrote

it seems very little lithium for all the things that needs batteries

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cptnobveus t1_itiztto wrote

I thought the same. Are we missing something?

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strabad t1_itjj3fh wrote

One part of it seeming strange is how freakishly light lithium is, as this info graphic is measured in tonnes, it skews the perspective. That much lithium is 7 million cubic feet in volume.

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fiendishrabbit t1_itjw3d7 wrote

Which would be about 200000 cubic meters.

Lithium weighs just 530 kg per cubic meter. Which means if you coated lithium with a polymer (to avoid the very intense reaction lithium has with water) it would easily float.

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Emergency-Wave-5335 t1_itk8vf4 wrote

I need this in football fields or bananas

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fiendishrabbit t1_itko84i wrote

If we stacked all of the lithium mined in 2021 in a single american football field the resulting cuboid would be about as tall as a 4 story building.

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_AlreadyTaken_ t1_itj5j13 wrote

One thing I learned about steel recycling is that copper contamination is a growing problem. It is impossible to completely remove all copper from recycled scrap and everytime more scrap is put into the mix the steel gets more and more contaminated. The end result is steel gets brittle. There is no economically viable way to remove it so the fix is to keep watering it down with virgin iron from ore.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b00997

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qhartman t1_itjbt9s wrote

This is true of a lot of materials that get recycled by melting. The recycled content nearly always has some amount of impurities that have to be offset by using virgin material, or using it only in an application where the flaws introduced by the contaminants don't really matter. Like those 100% recycled plastic benches you see from time to time. Generally though, it's one of the reasons it's so rare to see a product that has 100% recycled content. Steel, plastics, and glass are all affected by this. Aluminum is a notable exception.

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Emergency-Wave-5335 t1_itk8z5c wrote

Pvc contamination is really bad. That's why we make so much new plastic. It's cheaper than dealing with all the pvc contaminated hdpe, pp, etc.

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fiendishrabbit t1_itjwenb wrote

That's mostly because iron is really cheap. Copper and Iron have vastly different properties, including melting points and densities, so at a certain price point the problem becomes a non-issue.

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dedog1238495 t1_itioji0 wrote

Didn't even loose a bead of sweat during that.

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