SWEEPING HER STREET FOR PLATINUM

It's 6:00 in the morning on a blustery November day in 2017 and Melody Millennium is out sweeping her street for grit and grime. As usual.

And, as usual, she sweeps the refuse into a plastic bag, which she turns in to a recycler every Friday.

She also visits construction sites twice a week, looking for spare copper pipes and wire, which she takes to a different recycler.

Melody's already made deals with all her friends and neighbors to cart away their discarded computers so they can avoid a nasty trip to the dump. Melody lugs all their old computers to yet another recycler.

Melody is an underpaid nurse who figures she's been able to increase her income by 60% with her recycling sideline.

What gives?

It all started during the summer of 2017, when Melody's liquid crystal TV went on the blink. When she went to the store to price a new one, she was astounded to find the least expensive one she could find cost $17,999.

She pounced on the store manager, demanding to know how the 37-inch set she'd bought in 2005 for $1,650 had leaped to $17,999 in 2017.

"What happened to the learning curve? Prices for electronics are supposed to go down as the learning curve goes up!" she yelled.

Patiently the manager explained it to her. "The learning curve has been trumped by the raw materials supply curve," he started......

"What raw material curve?"

"The indium supply curve," he said. "The world has gobbled up so much indium in the past ten years that we have plumb run out. And without a plentiful supply of indium, the TV manufacturers can't make many sets."

"You got enough indium to make this $17,000 set," Melody yelped.

"The companies do get some indium from recyclers, but the basic element is simply gone."

"The recyclers?"

"Yes, some people collect old TV monitors and computers. They turn them over to recyclers, who break them down and extract the indium from them."

"Why do people collect old sets for the recyclers?" Melody demanded.

"The recyclers pay a pretty penny for them."

With that information, Melody was off to the races, collecting old TV and computer monitors in every spare moment. And she started to make enough extra cash every week to upgrade her living standard.

When she discovered that home builders were charging a 20% premium for houses with copper pipes, she found some copper recyclers on Google and soon was into the copper collection business. Her income soared.

When she heard a newscast that the world was running short of zinc, she quickly became a zinc collector. Her income kept going up.

Ditto for gallium, which is essential for making the most powerful solar panels.

By November 2017, Melody quit nursing and had formed a start-up employing a dozen collectors. She's making great profits and is rapidly realizing the American Dream.

Then why is she out in the morning sweeping streets?

Well, it seems Melody read in the Wall Street Journal that the world is running out of platinum, which is essential for the manufacturing of catalytic converters and fuel cells. It seems a lady in Britain is working on a way to extract the increasingly rare metal from the grit and grime of city streets. Hazel Bishop, a British geologist, claims that street grit and grime contains 1.5 parts per million of platinum.

If this turns out to be true, Melody will probably go global with a street sweeper company.

If all this seems fanciful to you, just consider the steel industry. At one time, all steel was made out of iron ore. But then some entrepreneurs started collecting scrap metal and recycling it. Now two of the USA's largest steel companies, Nucor and Schnitzer, produce steel made of scrap. As a result, per capita consumption iron ore flattened out in 1980 – before the world was able to run out of iron ore.

If the Melodies of the world can start early enough, they might prevent the world from running out of indium, gallium, zinc, copper, platinum and a whole host of essential materials.

Among other things, liquid crystal TVs might cost less than $1,000 in 2017 instead of $17,999.

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