The feedback control cycle as regulator of past and future mineral supply

Mineral supply is controlled by a feedback mechanism. When there is a shortage of a commodity in a market economy, prices will rise, triggering this mechanism. The expectation of high financial returns will encourage inventiveness and creativity in the quest for new solutions. On the supply side, for primary resources, the appropriate response is to cut losses in the mining process, to lower the cut-off grade, to improve recoveries in the beneficiation and smelting processes, to expand existing production facilities, and to discover and bring into production new deposits. For secondary resources, the key to increasing the supply lies in improving recycling rates by better technology, reprocessing lower-grade scrap which becomes economic because of increased prices, and reducing downgrading to optimize the usefulness of secondary materials. On the demand side, implementation of new and more efficient processes, development of substitution technologies, material savings, and the invention of entirely new technologies that fulfill the same function without the need of using the scarce and suddenly more expensive material are effective reactions to a price rise. The effectiveness of this self-regulating mechanism can be shown by examples of historical price peaks of metals, such as Mo, Co, and Ta, and the current rare earth elements peak. Concerning supply from secondary resources, a model is developed in order to determine how far the supply from this resource domain can be achieved and how the recycling rate is influenced by growth rate and lifetime. The feedback control cycle of mineral supply is influenced on the demand side by ever shorter life cycles, by products getting more complex with ever more elements involved in their production, and by an increase in element dispersion. All these factors have an immediate effect on the feasibility of sourcing raw materials from the technosphere. The supply side of primary materials is influenced by increasing lead times for new production and by relatively low flexibility in responding to changing demand.