Rare earths: the secret ingredients of smartphones, missiles and much more

They are essential chemical elements to produce many high-tech objects, from TV screens to hybrid cars. And they almost always come from China. Environmental damage included. Let’s see these secrets ingredients!

Samarium is one of the 17 elements called rare earths. Among its industrial uses: it helps to convert sound into electricity in the magnetic pick-ups of electric guitars and is contained in the moderation bars of some nuclear reactors. Many of us would find it difficult to locate Inner Mongolia, Jiangxi or Guangdong on a map. Yet most of the high-tech devices we depend on - cell phones, laptops and hundreds of others - would not exist without some chemical elements that come, sometimes illegally, from those and other regions of China.

Discovered in the late eighteenth century as oxidized minerals, these elements were called rare earths. In reality they are metals, and they are not actually rare, but they are scattered around the world. A handful of soil collected in your yard probably contains some, maybe a few parts per million. The less common rare earth is almost 200 times more abundant than gold. Rather large deposits are rare enough to allow mining.

The list of objects that contain rare earths is almost infinite.