Where Does Metal Come From?

Have you ever thought about where metal comes from?

Most people don’t. And now you’ve thought about it you’ll probably say, rocks. The right rocks are buried, inaccessible and largely invisible to us, without the right tools. How do metals get from the underground into our everyday lives?

This talk is about mining, mineral processing and the unfathomable amounts of effort and energy that go into refining metals from rocks. The requirement to meet our demands for more mobile phones, cars, planes, medical machinery, ‘cloud’ storage, charging points on buses, and even the aluminium foil for your turkey is unprecedented.

Just as the Bronze Age was a step up from stones, our ability to mine and use the metals around us will be the defining activity of our age once again.

This talk is not about rocks.

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