Mining’s old guard needs strong medicine
A new report details subpar investor returns in the mining industry over the last decade, particularly big cap diversified companies which have not adapted to new realities.
Aluminum (or aluminium) is the world’s most common metal by crustal abundance, making up 8.2% of mass. It’s more common than iron (5.6%) and a whopping 1200x more abundant than copper.
However, it wasn’t discovered until 1827, and it was too expensive to isolate the metal. That all changed in 1886 when a college student in the US did an experiment in his woodshed.
Aluminum (or aluminium) is the world’s most common metal by crustal abundance, making up 8.2% of mass. It’s more common than iron (5.6%) and a whopping 1200x more abundant than copper.
Despite its prevalence, aluminum was not isolated all the way until 1827. This is because it occurs only in compounds, and never in a free form. It also turns out that removing aluminum from these compounds is quite difficult, and an inexpensive process wasn’t discovered until 1886 by a college student in the United States. Charles Martin Hall was interested in the problem, and ran an electric current through a molten mixture of cryolite and aluminum oxide in a wood shed behind his house.
That dropped the price of aluminum drastically, and it became a household metal. Behind iron, aluminum is now the second most used metal in the world. Aluminum can now be found in everything: transportation (planes, cars, and more), buildings, machinery, consumer durables, packaging, and electrical uses.
Original graphic from: GutterMasters
