Toward affordable and sustainable use of precious metals in catalysis and nanomedicine
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oduction In conjunction with an ever-growing global population, resource scarcity has become a global challenge that deserves attention. Resource scarcity was ranked No. 4 among the top 10 global trends in a survey conducted by the World Economic Forum Network of Global Agenda Councils.1 Our research over the past decade has centered on the development of effective strategies for achieving affordable and sustainable use of precious metals (Table I). While these elements only exist at a level of parts per billion (ppb) in the earth’s crust, they play critical roles in the economically important automobile, chemical, pharmaceutical, petroleum, and energy industries.2 Furthermore, due to the ever-increasing demands from both existing and emerging applications, their long-term sustainability has emerged as a major societal concern.
Platinum (Pt), for example, has a crustal abundance of 37 ppb.3 It takes almost five months to produce 30 g of Pt from about 10 metric tons of ore. If all of the Pt that had been mined in human history were collected and formed into a cube, the side of the cube would only measure 7.2 m. It is therefore unsurprising that the price of Pt has reached $USD30 per gram and doubled (and even tripled or quadrupled at certain points) over the past two decades.4 As one of the most versatile catalytic materials, Pt is widely used in the chemical industry (e.g., for the synthesis of nitric acid), petroleum industry (e.g., for both hydrogenation and dehydrogenation reactions), and the automobile industry (e.g., in catalytic converters). Since the last century, a grand challenge has been launched to identify cost-effective and sustainable products based on Pt. Proton-exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs),5 a technology that has been around
Younan Xia, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA; [email protected] Ming Zhao, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA; [email protected] Xue Wang, University of Toronto, Canada; [email protected] Da Huo, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA; [email protected] doi:10.1557/mrs.2018.262
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• VOLUME 43 • NOVEMBERUniversity 2018 • www.mrs.org/bulletin ©available 2018 Materials Downloaded MRS fromBULLETIN https://www.cambridge.org/core. of Winnipeg, on 10 Nov 2018 at 20:43:21, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1557/mrs.2018.262
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TOWARD AFFORDABLE AND SUSTAINABLE USE OF PRECIOUS METALS IN CATALYSIS AND NANOMEDICINE
Table I. Partial list of precious metals widely used for catalytic and plasmonic applications, including their abundances in the earth’s crust, current prices, and total amounts mined in human history. Element
Ru
Rh
Pd
Ag
Ir
Pt
Au
Abundance (ppb)
1.0
0.7
6.3
79
0.4
37
3.1
Current price ($USD/g*)
9.7
79.4
33.8
0.6
50.3
30.5
44.9
1.3 × 103
1.5 × 103
1.2 × 104
1.7 × 106
2.2 × 102
8.8 × 103
1.9 × 105
Amount mined (metric ton*)
*Based upon data released in July 2018.
for many decades and is widely recognized as the cleanest (zero e
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