Consumer Concerns

David Humphreys

Chapter 8 in The Remaking of the Mining Industry, 2015, pp 185-205 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Automobiles manufactured at the start of the twentieth century were composed of about five materials: wood, rubber, steel, glass, and brass. Today, a typical automobile may contain up to 39 different nonfuel minerals in various components, in addition to rubber, plastics, and other organically based materials. … In the 1980s, computer chips were made with a palette of twelve minerals or their elemental components. A decade later, 16 elements were employed. Today, as many as 60 different minerals (or their constituent elements) may be used in fabricating the high-speed, high-capacity integrated circuits that are crucial to this technology.1 Modern economies are highly dependent on regular supplies of a wide range of mineral products. The rapid growth in China’s demand for minerals and the escalation of mineral prices to which this gave rise, while it may have been a boon to mining countries and companies, was a source of growing concern among the traditional mineral-consuming regions, the United States, Western Europe and Japan. These concerns were aggravated by growing evidence of resource nationalism and the increased role of the state in mineral-producing countries.

Keywords: Rare Earth; European Union; Critical Mineral; Consumer Concern; Export Restriction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-44201-7_9

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137442017_9

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