Resource efficiency improvements through laser processing of designer materials

Ever-increasing human activity means that we are depleting natural resources at an unprecedented rate. Over recent years the global extraction of natural resources has grown by 45%, from 40bn tonnes in 1980 to 62bn tonnes in 2005, and is forecast to reach 100bn tonnes by 2030. Such dramatic increases in demand have, of course, resulted in the ever increasing price of materials. In the long term price instability is a risk that will become increasingly important for many businesses in their strategic planning. On the other hand, materials security is concerned with the availability and ready access to raw materials, at the time and point of need, and is of fundamental economic importance. A number of industrialised countries have recognised their critical dependence on particular raw materials and in some cases have implemented policies to mitigate this, such as stockpiling at levels that guarantee stock maintenance equivalent to many months of consumption. Materials security is therefore an issue of global importance, not only for rare earths such as neodymium, and dysprosium, or precious metals such as gold, silver and some platinum group metals, but also for the more abundant metals such as cobalt, tin, copper, nickel and zinc. The challenge to manufacturers and product designers is therefore to dramatically improve resource efficiency, and technological innovation has the greatest potential to reduce the impacts of production on resource usage.