Rare Earths
Do you know the term?
Rare earths are valuable raw materials. There are 17 of them. Rare earths are only used in very small quantities, but without them some things simply wouldn’t work. Whether LEDs, smartphones / iPhones, notebooks / MacBooks, computers / iMacs, electric motors and many other high-tech products. Most manufacturers are supplied from China with rare earths. The rare-earth metals themselves are not actually rare – but they only occur in small quantities everywhere. Mining rare earths is very complex and unfortunately often problematic for our environment. Of course, there are regulations for mining metals all over the world, but these are often not observed. The metals are extracted using acid, which washes the metals out of the boreholes; as a result, the resulting waste products often seep into the groundwater and contaminate it.
What can we do? What can you do?
Recycle instead of supporting.
If you refurbished when you buy devices, you protect the environment, conserve resources, and save money. Use your devices until they really are no longer usable, try to repair them instead of immediately buying a new one, or opt for a used device. And even if you dispose of a broken device properly, for most manufacturers it’s too much effort and too expensive to extract and reuse the rare earths from old devices. That’s where refurbishing comes in: by reconditioning and cleaning older models, they can be used for many more years.
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Refurbished is as good as new, cheaper than new and better for the environment – if that’s not enough of an argument.
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