People across the world are leading increasingly technologybased lifestyles, and this comes at a cost to the Earth’s limited resources. In the 1980s, a desktop computer would contain around 12 chemical elements and (by today’s standards) had limited processing power — around 2 MHz. As processing power has increased, so has the number of elements used in the manufacture of computers. By the mid-2000s there were 60 elements in a high-speed processor (operating in the GHz range) and now the latest smartphones can contain up to 70 elements (see CHEMISTRY REVIEW, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 16–17).
The periodic table on this page provides an estimate of how long our known reserves of these elements will last at our current rate of usage. It is evident that unless we do something, our technological progress could grind to a halt due to the lack of materials.
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