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Rare Earths

The term rare earths refers to a group of minerals with chemically similar properties that are important in the manufacture of a wide range of high-technology products. They are used to make a wide variety of electronic goods, including mobile phones and flat-screen televisions and can be found in specialized industrial products like drills, components for electric automobiles and military equipment. They are also crucial to new clean energy technologies from compact fluorescent light bulbs to electric cars to giant wind turbines.

Though the minerals are not strictly speaking rare – and are metals, not dirt – they have become a significant trade issue with China, which mines 95 to 97 percent of the world's supply.

China sharply reduced its export quotas for them in 2009 and again in 2010, despite the World Trade Organization's ban on most export restrictions.. Then, underscoring the rest of the world's vulnerability to disruptions in supply, Chinese customs officials began stopping all shipments to Japan in September 2010, during a dispute over the two countries’ territorial claims to a cluster of remote islands, and briefly blocked many shipments to the United States and Europe.

In 2011, prices soared on top of the previous sharp increases, doubling in the first four months of the year.

Efforts to find alternative supplies have been complicated by the pollution that rare earth mining and processing creates -- a factor generally overlooked by China's producers. A giant rare earths refinery in Malaysia was to have been ready for production in August 2011, but it fell behind schedule due to public opposition and regulatory reviews of the disposal plans for thousands of tons of low-level radioactive waste the plant would produce annually.

At the same time, Japanese companies were finding it harder than originally hoped to recycle rare earths from electronics and to begin rare earth mining and refining in Vietnam.

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