Wonderful presentation, I completely agree with it. One interesting things that people overlook (that were mentioned in the presentation a bit) is the finite amount of matter on Earth. In “New Scientist” a couple of months back there was an article about how the plants minerals are being used and lost forever. Think about this: a chunk of metal is mined, put in to a cell phone, and put in the trash two years later. The metal it basically lost forever. There are metals we use that are rare but essential, like ones used in electronics, but the supply is limited. So unless we start mining the moon, we have to ensure that the material can be reused. The “New Scientist” article stated that 20% of all the copper that existed on Earth has oxidizes, in other words, rusted into the atmosphere or into minute pieces.
Zntrip | 12.12.07 - 5:18 pm | #

that's why we have to recycle!
cyberen | 12.13.07 - 6:34 pm | #

Some people have theorized that people will mine our present-day waste dumps in the future to find raw materials.

There are also some neat bacteria that can harvest metal out of soils and rocks by essentially eating the rock out from around the metal, or oxidizing or reducing the metal to make it soluble and flow out of the rock. There are some refineries in Africa that harvest gold from fool's gold (aka pyrite, iron sulfide) using iron-sulfide eating microbes. Wow, that was redundant.

You can read about them in Extremophiles and other journals :
http://www.springerlink.com/cont...x3awqfdgrl78m7/
http://www.blackwell- synergy.com....1994.tb06858.x
http://mic.sgmjournals.org/cgi/c...tract/153/2/ 315
http:// arjournals.annualreviews....6.012302.161052

If you don't have a subscription, this is a pretty decent article on it:
http://www.copper.org/ innovation...ioleaching.html
teh_guy | 12.15.07 - 12:16 am | #