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.

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

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

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Damn we should have just made a iron farm

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

I thought the same. Are we missing something?

Which is the most valuable?

Batteries don't use much lithium

The lithium in batteries is in the form of thin films

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

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.

Yes, big time. If you’re interested, here’s a podcast with a minerals/mining expert who is wondering the same thing.

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.

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

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.

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.

great now we have to worry about sand going extinct

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

Exactly what I was thinking.

I need this in football fields or bananas

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.

It was diamond, now it's netherite I think.

melt rock, pour into cast, voilà.

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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.

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.