Now hold on people, this really is serious. Rare earth metals are called that for a reason: They are rare. Some of these metals come only from a handfull of mines. There are no other known sources in the entire world. Understand?
We are rapidly depleting the entire world’s supply of several of these metals. The next generation of integrated circuits is going to be based on a rare earth metal (forgot which one) that will run out in 5 years or less.
Poopooing recycling and the United Nations isn’t going to produce any more tantalum. We do need to recycle what we have. However, the problem is that such a tiny amount of these rare earth metals are used in an individual product like a cell phone that it isn’t profitable or even possible to recycle.
China’s industrial demands are sucking up the majority of the supply of rare earth metals. Their demand is sucking up the supply of metals in general. They have already bought most of the US’s steel production for the near future.
The inevitable complete depletion of some of the rare earth in the next 5 years will cause us to take a step backward in some technologies as we are forced to used less exotic materials.
Well... anything not recycled is being put in landfills, thereby collecting all these various elements in one place. Recycling is good, but figuring out how to recover materials from landfills would yield eventually near 100% recycling. It can’t be much harder than strip mining. :-)