The 'Electronification' of Everything - electric toothbrush

About 150, almost all the materials of the aperson family came from nearby forests or quarries.
By the age of 1960, with more developed product lines and more consumer appliances, the average American family contains about 20 different elements.
Since then, a revolution has changed the products we use and the materials that allow them to work.
Today's products depend on elements that were once scientific quirks decades ago.
Intel uses only 15 components in 1990 of its computer chips.
Now the company is asking for close to 60 elements.
Although rare metals have existed since the beginning, most have been discovered in the past few hundred years, and some have been discovered in the past century.
This shift in the products we use seems subtle to untrained eyes.
For example, modern lights emit slightly different shades from previous ones.
But these subtle changes mask profound changes in the use of resources.
Despite the fact that Edison's light bulb contains a simple wire of metal, the resources in today's LED lights are more like computer hardware. earth elements.
Today, the collective impact of our individual purchasing decisions and the technologies we use has had a significant impact on the resources we use, especially rare --metal supplies.
From 1980 to now, the number of rare metals produced by mining companies is four times that of their production from the dawn of civilization to 1980, if not all.
These metals bring digital technology that not only changes the way we travel, communicate and shop, but also changes our expectations.
We have begun to demand that technology will become cheaper, lighter, easier to access and more powerful each year ---
They do things far more than once.
Even though the many features of our new device seem to offer the opportunity to use less raw materials ---
After all, the iPhone is a computer, a book, and a music player. -
The reality is that we use a lot more resources.
By 2017, it is estimated that there will be 1.
5 billion smartphones worldwide.
They have more metals, more quantities and higher grades than their predecessors.
For example, a few years ago, 4g smartphones used six to ten times more gallium than regular phones.
In fact, some new products use less rare metals than previous iterations.
LED display is rarely used, for example
The Earth elements of each lamp are more than their fluorescent brothers.
But other times, a significant reduction in material use is just a displacement.
Laptop, new solid-state drives --
Store data on a flash memory chip-
Replacing the hard drive.
Because two rare hard drives are used
Earth magnet, a magnet that helps spin the magnetic field
To code the data on it, switching to a flash drive seems to reduce the demand for 10,000 tons of rare metal
We use earth magnets every year to store pictures and files.
However, while flash drives are getting faster and faster, in 2014, the same amount of memory, the cost of flash drives is almost eight times that of hard drives.
As a result, computer companies are making laptops with less memory.
To offset this smaller memory, people are turning to cloud storage, where hard disk drives take their rare-
The earth magnet is spinning to form the backbone of remote storage.
So when we see a reduction in rare earth used in laptops, we see a rare earth explosion
Earth magnets used in cloud hard drives-
Data storage center.
We're talking more than just relatively new inventions that use rare metals.
The "electronic" of once simple products is now embedded in rare metals.
Take the evolution of the toothbrush, which was originally a worn-out branch of the ancient Babylonian period.
In the 1500 s, the Chinese made toothbrushes with carved bones and bamboo that had to be fixed with pigs.
Four centuries later, they were made of plastic and nylon.
The first commercially successful electric toothbrush came out in 1960.
They are everywhere today.
Except for the battery-
Electric products with applications
Cleaners who collect health data are enabled.
Manufacturers like Royal Philips Sonicare need dozens of components for their products.
Electric toothbrushes alone need circuit boards with ta materials to help them store energy in capacitors;
It requires a rare earth, boron and iron magnet made of materials from southern China to provide the power of a rotating brush with more than 31,000 bars per minute;
It requires a battery made of nickel, cadmium, or lithium.
About 35 kinds of metal needed to supply electric toothbrushes, need a wide supply chain: miners like Xiamen Tungsten Industry in China to supply metal;
Processing in a factory in Estonia;
Metal traders in New York provide alloy to component manufacturers who sell their products to toothbrush manufacturers.
It is a network spanning six continents.
Unfortunately, we rarely consider the fragile supply lines that support our habits, which make small, powerful equipment cheap enough that billions of people can afford it.
Countless governments and ideas
Tank research reveals the risk of shortages over the next decade or more.
Although the production level of many elements will increase to meet demand, the American Chemical Society has found that 44 of the 94 naturally present elements will face supply risks in the next century.
At our current rare rate
The production of metal resources and our consumption model, we can have the rare earth needed to make an MRI machine;
Key to cobalt for electric vehicle batteries
Or the rhenium we need for our aircraft engines. New high-
Technological inventions will only increase the urgency of expanding the restricted supply chain.
The most pressing problem is not that we run out of resources;
We're not investing in the supply chain to bring costs.
Effective materials to market.
High-future
The technology products we Westerners crave, and those in developing countries that need to help them out of poverty, may not be in the limits of our minds, but we have the ability to ensure the safety of producing these ingredients.
Because the industry as a whole is based on a small number of rare metals, supply disruptions can have a profound impact on the world and give resources-
Rich countries have great influence. Billion-
Dollar companies tend to be only for one country, such as Congo or Kazakhstan. -
Even a special mine.
An important advanced metal.
Since these metals are critical to green technology, as well as complex weapon systems, and ultimately national defense, they are more important than rotating toothbrushes.
As we will see in the third part of my book, some countries and companies are realigning their relationship to ensure a reliable supply of rare metals.
That means understanding China's bold attempt to have an entire high-end market.
Technology supply chain, from rare-
From metal mining to finished products. (
The Elements of Power: Gadgets, guns and fighting for a sustainable future in the era of rare metals are the second of three excerpts. " Read Part 1. )
Contact the author of this story: David Abraham at David Abraham @ yahoo.
ComTo contacted the editor in charge of the story: Katie Roberts of kroberts29 @ bloomberg.