Will it run out?

[Big A.T]

We are all told to recycle metal tins etc and I always put old metal in the appropriate places. There are a lot of people, however, who just discard it etc. My question is this ; will metal ever run out?. No one ever talks of shortages but we must be using it at one heck of a rate

[brachiopod]

In terms of there natural distribution, metals are all around us.

It is economics that governs whether a given concentration of metal (in an ore, or sediment deposit) is worth exploiting or not.

As existing deposits are depleted, the market price of the metal will rise. This will mean that previously-known lower concentration deposits will now become workable in an economic sense.

At some point it will also mean that the scrap value of a given metal is sufficiently high to make recovery from waste / refuse etc, a viable proposition, irrespective of the complications of its recovery.

Who knows, we may end up 'mining' old landfill sites.

What we are effectively doing now is extracting tonnes of earth/rock/whatever, concentrating the metal out of it, using, and then redistributing it again.

It will always be there, and never 'run out' as such, but it's a case of how economically viable the concentrations are to mine or otherwise recover.

[BillyBB]

There are large quantities of iron and aluminium in the earths crust and there's lots of crust. As ever it's the energy required to extract and purify metal ore that is the main issue.

As with any finite resource we should try not to waste it.