Things You Can't Live Without

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Smartphones, reading glasses, cooking equipment. These are just some of the items from our daily lives that our guests simply cannot live without. And on this podcast, we dig deep, quite literally to find out how these items came into existence and the impact on our planet of our obsessions. I'm material scientist Dr Anna Ploszajski, and my guest today is one of the world's leading lexicographers. She's written 13 books, hosts an award-winning podcast, is a viral tweeter of words and has been on our TV screens for the last 30 years appearing in dictionary corner on the beloved TV program Countdown. Even more impressively, she has been recreated as a Barbie, a piñata, a lollipop and even that most British of party decorations, bunting. It is, of course, Susie Dent.

Susie Dent: Hello. Yes, I have to say it's not that impressive that I have a Barbie because it didn't exactly go on the production line. It was just a prop for the comedy version of Countdown. So it belongs to me and me only but she is sitting on my shelf looking down at me.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: In pride of place, I'm sure. Yeah. So Suzy, this is a podcast about the items that you can't live without. So tell me what is the one thing that you can't live without?

Susie Dent: Well, it's a very nerdy answer, and probably a very predictable one. But I spend my life with my nose buried in a historical dictionary, and specifically the Oxford English Dictionary, which is my Bible. And actually, I say my nose. But nowadays, I am consulting it almost exclusively online, though it is available as a 20 volume collection, but it's much, much quicker, obviously just to look something up. And because it's an ongoing enterprise, things are updated all the time as well. So I have to say, I have never Anna really considered the cost to the planet of that specific passion and, you know, mainstay of my life. And so I'd be really interested to hear whether I should be going back to the books that are weighing heavily on my shelves.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, so we're going to be digging deep into all of this. Since I'm a scientist, and since we're going to be looking into the science of words and dictionaries and materials today. I was wondering if you could give us an insight into any particularly interesting scientific words and some of their journeys.

Susie Dent: Well, I love science itself, actually, I mean, I have to put my hand up and say science was not my forte at school, I was always drawn towards words and language and literature. And I did a podcast with Gyles Brandreth, where we talk about words. And whenever we hit a scientific subject, we're both painfully aware as our listeners that we don't really know what we're talking about. But we can kind of focus on the language at least. But science itself is a beauty really, because it began with the Latin scire meaning, or scire, meaning to know. So science is knowledge. And actually, it first applied to all areas of learning, much as grammar actually did the same thing. Grammar was learning it was education, and it was only later that it focused on a specific area. So they both narrowed in their meaning, which is really interesting, actually, because often it works the other way around. So I love that and it means that science is actually linked to conscience, but we don't see the link because it's pronounced very differently. But a conscience is your inner knowledge, if you like. What was once called your inwit and your outwit was your outer perception of the world, your external perception of it. And if you would like me to give you my favourite word linked with science, and so many of your listeners will be fully aware of this and you will know it yourself because it is pulled out every single summer. But it's petrichor, which always goes viral on social media and petrichor is that really gorgeous, distinctive smell of rain after a long hot, dry spell. And it was coined by two, I don’t know, I’m not sure if they were physicists or geologists but in the 1960s and I just, well, I love the fact that there is a word that describes that really sort of musky, musty smell, but also the kind of process by which they chose the name because petri looks back to ancient languages really for stone. And ichor, even more beautiful is from mythology and ichor was the ethereal essence that was said to flow like blood through the veins of the gods. So they thought it was this really magical, mystical thing that was permeating the earth. I think it's a compound called geosmin, which produces that smell. But it's just it's just beautiful. It fills a gap and also, as I say, it has the most beautiful story behind it.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I love that. Yeah, really beautiful. And from the gods to the devils. I remember writing a article a while ago about the metal nickel. Yes, reading about the origin of that name. Can you remind me the story?

Susie Dent: Yes. So nickel began as Kupfernickel in German, which was copper demon. And it was because miners would chance upon nickel thinking it was very precious copper because it looks like copper only to be disappointed. So it was it was a demon because it kind of thwarted their ambitions if you like. So yeah, Kupfernickel is a lovely one and actually that nickel, you will also find in the bread pumpernickel believe it or not, which if you trace it back to its German ancestry means farting demon. So the demon is still there. So, you know, the idea is that as it produces slightly windy qualities in the person that eats it, so, yeah, so nickel and pumpernickel, believe it or not are related.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Love that, very cheeky, both very cheeky in a geological and flatulence sense. So it's funny, you should mention copper, it's almost as if we planned this listeners, because that's the material that we're going to be talking about today. So the first printing machines were Chinese printing presses, these were developed ever since around the 9th century. And initially, what they did was they carved entire pages of text into a single block of wood, covered that with wet ink and then pressed paper, which was another Chinese invention, onto it to transfer the design. So you would make loads and loads and loads of page one, and then you'd make loads and loads of page two etcetera. Later on, they developed what we call movable type. So they would just have individual characters made from individual blocks of wood, or sometimes clay. And these blocks are assembled in the right order to create the desired meaning. All of that came to Europe in the mid-15th century, you've probably heard of Johannes Gutenberg, the Gutenberg Press. He was a German Goldsmith, who his kind of major development was to make those individual movable characters not out of wood or clay, but out of brass. And brass is an alloy of….

Susie Dent: Copper, is it?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, copper and zinc, exactly.

Susie Dent: Amazing.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So the early dictionaries, the only kind of printed forms of the dictionaries owed absolutely everything to copper. And, you know, it was what kind of democratised I guess, dictionaries and language, in general, to the masses.

Susie Dent: Yes, it had a huge impact. If you take William Caxton on spelling, for example, because before he came along, and his team, you know, spelling was all over the shop. And William Shakespeare spelled his own name differently twice on the same document, which was his Will. And there were, I think, 13 different spellings of his name in his lifetime, and something like that. And it really was crazy. But because, as you say, you know, suddenly the written word could go to the masses. It had to be standardised because people up north had to understand people down south etcetera. So yeah, massive impact.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: The problem though, with paper dictionaries, as you've laid out, you know, if he was to put all of the words in the dictionary, it's, you know, today 20 volumes. So this data storage issue, massively difficult to overcome. Out of interest, how many words are there in today's OED?

Susie Dent: Oh, that's a really good question. And, do you know what, there's never an easy answer to this. Because people always say, 'Well, how many words are there in English?' And we can never really answer it. Because if you take the word run, are you going with runs, running, ran, etcetera, etcetera. There are so many different forms of each word as well. But we're looking at certainly the dictionary that I use, I think on Countdown, we're looking at about 300 to 500,000 words and phrases, depending on how you count them. So you know, it's a lot.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: That is a lot. So to solve this data storage issue, I guess, one option is to just type in increasingly smaller fonts, that after a while, obviously, we needed a much more practical solution. And then fast forward a few centuries. And we have, of course, digital data storage, and your computerised form of your dictionary on your smartphone that contains so many more materials than just paper that's been printed on right. Yeah, there's the screen that lights up. There's the ones that make the sensors. There's the battery, there's all the materials that store and process the digital information itself. Modern smartphones have over 90 elements from the periodic table inside them. Yeah. So very, very complex mix of lots and lots of different materials. And all of these different components of the computerised dictionary talk to each other using the material of copper that we're talking about today. [musical interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So you've heard about the origins of our words, we've heard about the origins of the dictionary itself. Now it's time to turn to the origins of the materials that make up our digital dictionaries. And to take us through this material world, we're joined by mining expert and Chief Scientist at Rio Tinto, Nigel Steward, welcome, Nigel.

Nigel Steward: Hi, Anna. Hi, Susie. Good to meet you both.

Susie Dent: Likewise.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Nigel, can you first outline for us why copper is such a critical material in the creation of the computerised dictionary?

Nigel Steward: Well, I think it all comes down to electricity, and you know, the invention of electricity by Edison and Tesla and that was commercialised by Westinghouse that really launched copper as we electrified the world with lighting and things like that. And it's really electricity that enables a modern computer to work. So when you think about the elements that sit within a computer, there's the silicon in the chips, there's the power to the chips, which comes quite often from a lithium ion battery. In the case of tablets and portable computers. We have things like indium tin oxide on the touch screens so that we can navigate the computer. We have rare earth metals that are going into the various memory devices within the computer. But all of that needs to be connected and all of it functions because of electricity. And that electricity is conveyed with copper. And you really see a huge growth in copper when the electrification of the world happened at the beginning of the last century. And that's where most of the copper has been produced during that period of the last 120 years or so.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Right. But we knew about copper for many, many millennia before that, right? Because copper is one of those rare metals that actually can be dug out of the ground on its own, not wrapped up in ores, right?

Nigel Steward: Yeah, that's right. So when you when you think about it, we had the Stone Age, and after the Stone Age, we had the Bronze Age. And bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. And that was really the first metal that we used as human civilization. So that dates back sort of 5000 years before Christ. So it's been around for a long, long time. And you're right that first copper that existed, you could literally pull it out of the ground. It's what we call native copper. So it existed as copper metal as we see it today. Today, things have changed all of that easy to grab copper has been found. And we now have to mine minerals in the form of ores, which contains different forms of copper. So copper and sulphides or oxides, for example.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay, I really like thinking about copper as sort of the metal that kind of taught us metallurgy really, because that smelting that you describe of getting the copper metal out of rocks, essentially, that must have been an early example of how we learned to do that technology, not to mention the kind of melting it down, casting it into moulds metalworking itself.

Nigel Steward: Exactly, yeah, bronze was the first alloy. And then after the Bronze Age and discovery of how to liberate tin, how to liberate copper, how to combine them together to form an alloy. After that, we get into the Iron Age. And then gradually, with the use of iron over, over many, many years, we eventually get into the production of steel. And that era, then Victorian era, it was all discovered by people like Bessemer, for example, in the UK, very much the birth of metallurgy, as you say.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Right, exactly. So it's kind of taught us how to work with metals. And then that, of course, led on to, you know, much of the modern world that we know today. In terms of the story of copper, you've mentioned that is a very important conductor of electricity, and how we use so much more of it once we developed a kind of electrified society. Is there anything else important that uses copper?

Nigel Steward: I think the other big use is in you think about housing and the water supply, I always say there are two things that you always complain about when they don't work. And they're the things you don't see that's electricity supply and water supply. But certainly we lose those two things, our world certainly changes very dramatically and very quickly. So that's the other big use, I think, is in the conveyance of water plumbing. And that's a big use for copper, both in the form of pure copper tubes, but also in the brass connections that enable us to connect the pipes together. And copper is really quite interesting because it has antibacterial properties. So it also kills bacteria. I know and there have been many cases of communities with without copper piping, where they've had bacterial sort of growth and infections getting into the water system. So copper has that unique property, that antibacterial property too. I think one of the other interesting things for me, it's just the role of copper because it's a very good electronic conductor. So it conducts electricity very well but also conducts heat very well. So it makes it very, very important in heat exchangers, and particularly for refrigeration. So refrigeration really wouldn't happen without copper. And you think about what our world would be like without refrigeration. We might die because of bacterial or fungal infections because our food is not well preserved. We use refrigeration for food and preserving food. And that's really transformed, you know what we eat today as well. We can transport food all over the world, thanks to refrigeration. I think the other thing is, is vaccines. Vaccines are quite often they have to be refrigerated and cooled down to very low temperatures. If you just think about the recent COVID vaccine, what would we have done if we hadn't had copper to enable that refrigeration? So I think those are some of the really significant uses of copper in our world.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, absolutely.

Susie Dent: Can I ask you one question, Nigel?

Nigel Steward: Yeah, sure, Susie.

Susie Dent: You were mentioning copper in terms of plumbing. And I know etymologically speaking this is all I know really is that plumbing goes back to plumbum which was lead for Roman so the Romans used lead piping and I think early British plumbers also used lead piping. Is copper superior to that then did we learn that copper was a better, just material, per se?

Nigel Steward: Yeah, well, the issue with lead is always lead poisoning. So I actually live in a very old house and the municipality where I live they've just surveyed the water, and they wanted to know whether I had any lead plumbing in the house. So I had a water analysis done. And we found out there's no lead plumbing in my house anymore. It's all copper. So that's a relief.

Susie Dent: Gosh, so this was really incredibly toxic. But we didn't discover this for, for quite a while then.

Nigel Steward: Yep, that's right. Yeah.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So for the Romans who didn't know about the dangers of lead, it would actually be a very, very good plumbing material, it's very soft, it's very malleable. It's got pretty low melting temperature as well, which makes it overall very easy for plumbers to work with. It also doesn't rust, like metals, like iron, for example. So for all those workability reasons, corrosion reasons, it's a really good material to be used in plumbing. And it was used up until around 1970, very recently. But around that time, we started to realise that it was contributing to the dangers of lead poisoning. And so around 1970, we started to take lead out of gasoline, other sort of packaging and consumer products. So the good news actually, is that overall, the levels of lead in our blood streams globally has gone down significantly since then.

Susie Dent: That's really interesting. And my other question was, when it comes to electricity, all I know is it goes back to the Greek actually for amber. And it was to do with rubbing amber, wasn't it? I think, but I don't know more than that. Do you get some sort of electrostatic current from amber?

Nigel Steward: Yeah, that's right. If you take a piece of amber and you rub it on wool or you know, on a woollen sweater.

Susie Dent: Yeah, you get that crackle.

Nigel Steward: It will generate static electricity. So these are some of the first sort of revelations that we had of the electrical current and what electrical current could do.

Susie Dent: It's fascinating. Thank you.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So where does that word come from, then? How do you go from amber to electricity?

Susie Dent: Well, it's from the Greek electron, which meant amber. And I think, exactly as Nigel said, I think maybe it was that sort of current or whatever was first discovered, when amber was, was rubbed, hence the name. It goes back a very long way.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Got you. So copper is integral to our digital dictionaries, as we've discussed, but Susie, I want you to imagine a parallel universe in which dictionaries don't exist. What would your life be like without the dictionary?

Susie Dent: Ummm…that's almost an impossible question, Anna. Because I've never been without it. Really, I think, without the dictionary, I would have to resort to word detection in a very different way. I mean, there will probably be some positive aspects that will be more sociable, I probably have to go and talk to people. And I would have to painstakingly charge the beginning of a word through probably what the early lexicographers did 1000s and 1000s of slips of paper, slips of paper of evidence, the first editor of the OED James Murray lived in what he called the script or he didn't live in it. But he worked in the scriptorium, which was essentially originally shed in his garden. And he we talked about this crowdsourcing effort, he received slips from all around the world. There's just been a brilliant book written about actually by Sarah Ogilvy called the dictionary people, in which she uncovered the lives of some of these readers. Some of them were murderers. Some of them were vicars. Some of them were these, oh just, they were just incredible people behind all of them. But yeah, I think we would have to go back to that. And, and then I'm allowed paper aren't in this parallel universe?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yes, yes.

Susie Dent: Okay. So I think it would have to be that way. And then how we would disseminate that, presumably, without being able to print any more, we would have to go back to manuscripts, which literally means writing by hand. So it would all take a very long time.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: That's horrifying. Nobody wants this future. [musical interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Now that we've painted this horrifying picture of the future, we're all having to write things down again. And it's time to face those fears. Because, of course, copper is a finite resource, right? If we want a future full of dictionaries, and computers and vaccines and electricity grids, and healthy running water etcetera we're going to have to start extracting and producing it much more sustainably. So Nigel, you're in the business of extracting and producing copper, what's the biggest challenge for you at the moment?

Nigel Steward: Well, I think if you think about how much copper we've mined to date, most of the copper that was on the surface that you know that especially the native copper that you could just pick up as copper lump that's all disappeared. That's all gone, particularly over the last 120 years when we've had this era of electrification in the world. All of the easy to get copper is really disappeared. And in a way, that's a good thing. Because when we're, we're mining and we're mining lower and lower grades, so a lower percentage of copper in the rock will end up generating more waste. And I think this is one of the big issues, we end up at the surface, we can generate large holes in the ground, we can generate a lot of waste, it consumes a lot of energy. So in the context of climate change, we're generating a lot of CO2. You know, that's really been a challenge for us in recent years. So to find more copper, where do we need to go? And the answer is we need to go deeper underground. So that's going to be a challenge for us as we go deeper underground to find the copper that we need. The good thing is, though, is with underground mining, you can mine an ore body in a very focused way, you don't generate a lot of waste rock. And also those grades deeper down and much higher. So we generate a lot less waste when we extract that copper from these higher grades of ore that we find deeper underground. So that's kind of the direction in which the world is going now, because for the energy transition, this is our big challenge is not just dictionaries. But for the energy transition, we're going to have to, for example, replace a huge amount of energy that's currently delivered to us through fossil fuels. And if we want to electrify that energy to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, we're going to have to multiply the size of our electricity grids by a factor of four. So that's electricity that has to be conveyed by a lot more copper, we also have to generate, produce a lot more renewable electricity, and we've got to multiply the amount of zero carbon electricity that we generate a day by a factor of 16. So again, to generate electricity that requires copper as well. So there's, there’s going to be this huge demand over the next 20 years, we've got to produce as much copper as we've produced in the last 5000 years of human history.

Susie Dent: And that's nothing that can replicate synthetically, which arguably would be a disaster anyway, that can replicate those properties. And there's no sort of quest to try and simulate it in some way.

Nigel Steward: Probably, the elements that come close to copper in terms of electrical conductivity, and thermal conductivity, are silver, gold, and aluminium. So gold and silver, you tend to find with copper. So we're not really solving the problem there. But aluminium is a real sort of use case. So you can use aluminium. So if you think about the overhead cables that you see that are conveying electricity across the country, that sort of rose gold colour of copper, they are silver, so there's a lot of aluminium that goes into those. So we already use a lot of aluminium today as well in combination with copper. But of course, aluminium needs to be mined, refined, smelted as well. So it's just another material.

Susie Dent: So there's nothing we can achieve with 3D printing, or anything, but no. It's all these natural properties, which is incredible all these millennia on, isn't it?

Nigel Steward: Yeah, and I think one of the interesting things about copper is that the reason why you don't see a complete conversion to aluminium, is aluminium is quite a reactive metal. So if you join it to another metal, you create a battery and it corrodes. Whereas copper is quite unique. It's a noble metal, it's almost like gold and silver, it retains a huge amount of stability, chemical stability, and that's what makes it so good for these long use cases in, in water for plumbing, and also for electricity. Because we tend to install these things in our houses, homes, in our cities. And we'd leave them in place for a long, long time, and you want to know that they're going to stay in their original state and not degrade over time. And that's what makes copper really, really unique. Its properties as a noble metal.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So if we can't replace the copper, we just need to find more of it. How do you know where it is, by the way? How do you know where it is underground?

Nigel Steward: Well, we've learned how copper deposits are formed. The principal sources that we use today come from your really old volcanic activity from many, many millions of years ago. So if you think about molten magma between beneath the earth's crust it sort of pushed up through the surface, and what followed that is quite often these metal rich fluids came up to the surface that contained a lot of dissolved metals, things like the copper, the gold, the silver. And when they came up, they then deposited in that host rock that was left by the magma intrusion. So what we do is we search for those. And eventually we find copper, and we start to explore, drill and see if we've really got copper there or not. Sometimes we don't find copper. Sometimes we do.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So what are the big kind of sustainability success stories in copper extraction?

Nigel Steward: Well, I think we're looking more and more at, like I said, going underground and accessing much, much higher-grade ores and mining in a very targeted way. So we reduce the amount waste that we produce, I think that's the first thing in terms of sustainability. And when you start to reduce the amount of waste that you produce, you can start to think about other uses for that waste as well that can actually serve the energy transition. A great example that we're working on at the moment is that when you extract copper, you don't completely extract it, but the technology is, and some of that copper gets left in the waste. So we're going back to the waste, and we've created a process that can extract that last amount of copper from the waste. So that becomes another source of copper. So we can look back at our old closed copper mine sites and think about well, how do I actually go back and they become new resources for us going forward? It's interesting, you talked about a lot of the elements that sit in our computers and tablets and phones. We're beginning to find that those trace elements can also be found with copper. So we're looking at co-extracting those materials. So recently, we've just extracted tellerium from our copper operation, because tellerium was also found with copper. And that's now going to the manufacture of cadmium telluride solar panels in the United States. So I think we're looking at almost like nose to tail mining in a way, let's see what we can extract more completely from these ore bodies to provide us with the materials that we need. And of course, we're going to have to do this with a zero carbon footprint in the context of the energy transition. So otherwise, it makes no sense at all. So we're exploring ways in which our mining equipment will not produce CO2. So like, we have electric cars, we now have some electric vehicles underground in our underground mines. And we're doing that for our surface mines as well. And then in our processing plants, we're looking at how we move towards the smelting process that uses electricity, rather than using fossil fuels. So we're switching these things out as well. So this is the big challenge that we face.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah. And you also have to do that pretty quickly I'd imagine. The climate emergency is not going anywhere.

Nigel Steward: I know, I think, you know, if you just look at copper, the pace is the scary thing that we've got to produce in 20 years, what we've produced in 5000 years of human civilization. So that's the scale of the challenge that we're on as we address climate change.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, would there be any one technology that you don't yet have access to that we haven't quite developed yet? That would change everything that would just make all of these problems kind of go away, any kind of silver bullets that we can hang our hopes on?

Nigel Steward: I think the thing that concerns many people the most is we know that renewable energy, wind and solar, they're not firm. So they're not running all the time, we only generate electricity from solar when the sun shines, and from wind when the wind blows. So how do you firm that because our electricity today runs all the time. So we need some form of storage. We've found that we can use renewable power to store and firm heat economically. But we haven't found a way of doing that for electricity yet. So this is an area of very, very active research with many startups in this field. And that's one of the big challenges that we face. Our other alternative, of course, is nuclear power. And we all hope, keep our fingers crossed that fusion is going to work one day.

Susie Dent: That was James Lovelock's thing, wasn't it? I was tapping away on my computer, I was so fascinated by what Nigel was saying I was just tapping away as he spoke, it's really interesting. And with the storage of electricity, presumably that would also mean that we can get rid of bloomin' chargers for every single thing that we own, would it? Or is that to do with having stronger batteries? I don't know. I find it astonishing that we still have to plug every appliance in to charge it. It just seems so archaic still. Anyway, that's first world problems. That I agree.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, but let alone a lot of copper tied up in all those charging cables.

Susie Dent: Well, yeah, exactly.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: How much copper do we all have in our spare drawers at home?

Susie Dent: And what happens to those when we throw them away?

Nigel Steward: I think this is one of the things we need to get much better at Susie, I think it's a great question. It's embracing more of the circular economy in what we do. And e-waste. So electronic waste. And this includes things like those chargers are very, very rich in copper, and also all of the other elements that Anna and I spoke about earlier. And the extraction of those is going to be really important for us going forward, that can be another really good added source. So when you think about it, it's very, very rich in copper e-waste, and it comes back fairly regularly. Our phones, our chargers, they don't last as long as say the electrical cable or the plumbing in our homes. So those sorts of things that the plumbing and the electrical infrastructure that stays in place, and that doesn't get recycled. But everything in our phones, our consumer products, this is what we should be looking at more and more is recycling that e-waste and bringing all of those valuable raw materials back.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So it's a hugely complex systemic coordination that's required right social, political and governmental coordination. So, Nigel, if we're going to be implementing all of these seemingly quite radical technological changes as to how we're accessing copper mining it, producing it, and processing it. What might some of the unintended knock-on effects be the unintended consequences of this radical shift?

Nigel Steward: Well, I think we have to produce things with a with a much-improved ESG footprint and a zero carbon footprint going forward. And I think all of that is achievable. I think one of the things that sort of concerns me though, is the competition for land, particularly when we talk about renewable energy. And this is why I really hope that nuclear fusion works. And there is a lot of great work being done with international projects in the US and in France now with ITER. And many startups in that field are working on fusion. I think there's more than 30 now. So it’s a very exciting time and hopefully something comes to that. And I think the importance of that for me is that when you look at how much area of land, a fusion project takes up compared to the amount of land that's consumed by wind and solar and given the just the sheer rollout of wind and solar that we will have to execute as a society. And then you realise that takes up land. But population is growing. So we're going to need more food and arable land and pastoral land that takes up land. And then we've also taken commitments Montreal at COP15, to preserve biodiversity of our oceans and also land. And so you can see this sort of clash coming. And then climate change, as well as is eroding some useful land for us as well as the world heats up. So I think these are the unintended consequences. We think, you know, wind and solar are going to solve our challenges, but they do come with an unintended consequence. And this is why our great hope should be fusion, and we should encourage fusion.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, so what we're talking about here is actually different from the nuclear power stations that are operational today. Those ones that work now are based on nuclear fission, which is a process by which you break very big molecules like uranium apart. And that process releases energy. Fusion is about fusing very small molecules together to release energy. And the reason that people are so excited about fusion is that it's the process by which our sun generates its energy. It involves smashing very, very small molecules together at very, very high temperatures and pressures. And the products when you do that is new fused molecules and various other subatomic particles, but also a huge amount of released energy. And this released energy is so huge that nuclear fusion, I think, is often thought of as the kind of Holy Grail of our global engineers. The reason though, that we don't have any commercially viable fusion reactors yet, is simply because we have to recreate the conditions of the sun on earth of those high temperatures and pressures, which in itself is a huge technological challenge. But as Nigel says there are loads of amazing folks working on this. And personally, I'm very hopeful that we will see fusion making huge steps forward in the next few years. [musical interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So looking to the future, then, what's next for our beloved dictionary, Nigel, what technology are you most excited about that you think gives you the most hope for a future full of dictionaries?

Nigel Steward: I think probably it's the way in which they’re produced and producing everything that's sort of needed in the electronic world but also the physical world with a much, much lower environmental footprint and a much-improved social footprint, and definitely with a zero CO2 footprint going forward as well in the context of climate change. So any technology that supports us in those goals is of great interest and excitement to me.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And Susie, reflecting on this journey that we've been on looking at where the dictionary comes from, how it's actually made. How do you see the dictionary continuing to evolve both linguistically and now perhaps physically as well?

Susie Dent: Well, I don't see that there's going to be any turning back towards the paper version. The Oxford English Dictionary announced actually several years ago that they thought any future edition would be exclusively online. So I think we'll almost certainly be consulting things on our computers still, just as we have spell checkers for a very long time. And English won't stop evolving. I mean, it has to evolve in order to survive. So we will always need to be chasing the sun and we will always need to be documenting our language, not to preserve it, but to chart it and to explain it and to help us use it.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I love that. [music plays]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Thanks for listening to Things You Can't Live Without, which was brought to you by Rio Tinto. I've been Dr Anna Ploszajski. And my guests have been Susie Dent and Nigel Steward. Thank you.

Nigel Steward: Thanks very much, Anna. Good to meet you as well, Susie.

Susie Dent: Likewise, I have learned so much.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: You can listen to more episodes of Things You Can't Live Without wherever you get your podcasts and don't forget to follow rate and review us to make sure that you don't miss an episode.

–Ends–

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Hello and welcome to Things You Can't Live Without the podcast where I, material scientist, Dr Anna Ploszajski, am joined by a special guest to discuss the one thing they can't live without, and a host of experts to run us through the true impact of our obsessions. I think for me, probably the item that I can't live without the most at the moment is my spillproof coffee cup because I have to walk my border collie, Spud, first thing in the morning rain or shine, mostly rain. And every morning when I'm getting out of bed. I'm grateful to the modern world of manufacturing for making my morning coffee on the go possible. And I have to say, I certainly wish that I picked a different example now because I'm pretty sure that my guest this episode is going to put in my daily routine to shame. With me today to talk about the one thing that he can't live without is five time Paralympic athlete, Rudy Garcia-Tolson. Rudy won his first Paralympic gold medal aged just 15. And he's been breaking records ever since, including being the first double above knee amputee to complete a full Ironman Triathlon. He's also a proud ambassador for the Challenged Athletes Foundation, whose goal is to support physically challenged athletes to pursue active and healthy lifestyles. Hello, Rudy, and welcome to Things You Can't Live Without.

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: Good day. Excited to be here. Good to see you.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: You too. Now, please tell us really, what is the item that you can't live without?

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: Well, my item is slightly different than yours in which I use them a little bit more throughout my day and my life. My item that I cannot live without are my prosthetic legs.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And can you describe them for our listeners? What do they look like? How do they work?

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: Sure. Well, you know, I've grown up with my prosthetic legs since I was about 5 years old. And when I was a little kid, and still today, little kids refer to my legs like how I used to, they were my my robot legs, you know, that's kind of what they look like, but the medical term and the professional term are my prosthetic legs or my walking legs, because one of the many perks of being a double amputee is that you can have multiple different pairs. So it has a foot, it has a prosthetic knee, and it has a socket, that is up top. And so I have 3 components in my legs, which are connected by adapters, and they weigh about 9 pounds. And they are pretty high-tech because my knees specifically are bionic, which means there's computers inside, there's a battery inside, and I have to charge them at nighttime, similar to charging your cell phone and your computer. So there's a lot of charging going on at night to get me ready for the next day. But my prosthetic legs, my walking legs, are something that I put on every single morning, especially when it's time to go take the dog out for a walk, though the legs go on and they usually stay on for all the way until past dinner.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Amazing. And it sounds like there's quite a lot of very high-tech engineering that goes into these prosthetics.

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: Yes, there is, there is a they've come a long way. The prosthetic industry over the last 20 years have seen a substantial upgrade from where we were and, you know, thinking about the whole history of prosthetic legs, I would say 50 years ago prosthetic legs were primarily made out of wood. So you can imagine they were heavy. They were not comfortable and not very customisable and probably very easy to break. And now they, a lot of the components, are made out of carbon fibre, titanium, high-grade plastics, and now they are smart. So over the last 20 years, there's been a lot of advancements in the quality of the prosthetics. And with prosthetics, you're not only given somebody who has a disability with limb loss, the opportunity to walk again, and live a active healthy lifestyle. You're giving them an opportunity to live a life without limitations. And what that means is because I'm missing both of my legs above the knee, when I get up in the morning, I need to put my sleeves on, my socks, and then I put my prosthetic legs on and because I have that, that capability of putting my legs on, I'm able to go to work, I'm able to drive my car, I'm able to go and essentially sustain myself and not need somebody to help me live my life.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay, well, I think it's fair to say that your prostheses are just incredible feats of engineering and definitely wouldn't be possible without some pretty sophisticated materials. Later on in this episode, we'll be hearing about the origin of those materials from Marie-Pierre Paquin, Chief Advisor of Discovery at Rio Tinto. [musical interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: How many prostheses have you had throughout your life? Do you think?

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: Well, I guess, I guess I could start by asking you, how many pairs of shoes do you think you've had throughout your lifetime?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Oh, good question. 50?

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: Okay.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: 70.

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: I would say I'm probably about in the same ballpark. It's a hard, hard number to remember, especially from my first pairs of legs when I was about 5 years old. Now, when we're talking about the feet, or the knees, they can be reused. And so just because I'm growing doesn't need, it doesn't mean, I need new feet or new knees. But what I do need are the sockets, which is these top parts here. So the sockets are the parts of the, of the prosthetic, that a user will need to get a new one of roughly every 1 to 2 years as the person is growing. So when I was a little kid, I had to get a new socket, about every year to year and a half because my leg was growing. You know, I remember we would be I would be in 1st grade at school. And I would get back from recess. And I would notice a screw or a piece of my leg missing. So we would always have to send a search party out to the recess playground to find a part of Rudy's leg and, and, and it just became a normal routine and during my early years in school, but thankfully, throughout later in my life, I got upgraded prosthetics, and now they, they hardly ever break, and they're a lot more stronger. So I don't have to worry about sending search parties out to retrace my steps and find the pieces of my legs so.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Well, that's very good, because I know that you're prone to running marathons. So it's good that people don't have to run after you.

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: A lot of different sports. Yes, marathons. Ironmans. And thankfully, when I swim, I don't use any legs, so I'm able to take them off, but everything else I do, I need my legs.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And now you're working to help other kids in that situation or similar situations to be able to have that feeling too, right?

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: I am. I work for the Challenged Athletes Foundation and our mission is to provide sporting opportunities for individuals with permanent physical disabilities around the world. You know, a lot of times, insurance companies will provide a person with a disability a new walking leg or a new everyday wheelchair to live life to go to school to go to work. But a lot of times that, that racing prosthetics, the sporting legs and sporting wheelchairs, they consider that a luxury. And we all know that sports is not a luxury, sports is a right for everybody. And, and so that's why we step in and we fill in those gaps because the prosthetic legs for sports, the racing wheelchairs for sports are very expensive. And we help fill those gaps to get kids and adults what they need to get out and live an active, healthy lifestyle.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So it sounds as if you've seen prosthetics change a lot, even over your lifetime, as you described them developing since you were 5 years old. But I'm wondering, do you know much about the longer history of prosthetics, you know, how old do you think the first archaeological evidence for a prosthesis is?

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: You know, I'm not too, too knowledgeable about the history, you know, of prosthetics. You know, I do know back in the day, when there were pirates, we all know when a pirate was missing his leg. He had a peg leg, which is typically just a piece of wood that went down and it made a loud thumping noise when he was walking and, you know, that's kind of our vision of a pirate. A pirate has an eyepatch.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: That's how you know, it's a pirate.

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: He has a parrot and he has a wooden leg. And that's probably about as far back as I know of my history about prosthetic legs.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, no, I mean, I think you're not actually that far wrong. I did some digging. And the earliest archaeological evidence that we have for any sort of prosthesis is apparently a 3000 year old ancient Egyptian mummy, who was found with a prosthetic toe that was made from wood, unsurprisingly, and leather as well. And yeah, later on, I think actually, as you say, for the vast majority of history, wood was kind of the go to material it's, it's kind of amazing. It's got the very strong and very lightweight combination of materials properties that is quite rare in materials and so if you want to put the whole weight of your body onto a wooden leg, it's, will mostly stand up. Okay, but as perhaps people have found over history that would, eventually will, will not perhaps be as good for the job. And we've talked about the kind of high technology involved in these prostheses that must come at a cost, right? What, what are the most expensive aspects of this?

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: That is one of I guess you could say one of the downsides of the ever evolving prosthetic industry. And when new components come out, when new knees come out, that are smarter, that the battery life lasts longer, maybe a new foot with a different type of carbon fibre angle, that gives you more energy return, the costs are going up, and because my knees are computerised, one knee costs upwards of $30,000. And you know, that's not including the feet, that's not including the sockets, that's not including my, my socks, the suspension system. And you know, in a lot of instances, this knee that I have is not the most expensive, they now have newer versions, different versions that give you even more energy return to assist you in a lot different way. And those will cost even upwards of you know, 50 to 100,000 dollars. So we start to see the prosthetic industry integrates in our body, and what we call bionics. It's, it's going to even skyrocket. So that that is one of the challenges and that is because of the materials that titanium the carbon fibre, the computers inside of them. [musical interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Let's talk about titanium a little bit more. And to help us understand the role of titanium in the modern world. We're joined by Marie-Pierre Paquin, Chief Advisor of Discovery at Rio Tinto. Welcome, Marie-Pierre.

Marie-Pierre Paquin: Hi, Anna. Hi, Rudy.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: First of all, tell us more about Chief Advisor of Discovery. That's an incredibly cool job title. What does that actually involve?

Marie-Pierre Paquin: Isn't it, eh? It's the coolest job title. My task is mostly to look at new technology, innovation, and everywhere that can be found. So in university, in start-up, and big companies, and to bring that innovation inside of Rio to solve some of our most difficult challenge or to grab also interesting opportunities. So a lot of it revolves around the energy transition and everything carbon but also to achieve those big targets. We need metals and we need materials, and how can we produce those material and those metal in a sustainable way to achieve the energy transition. So there's also opportunity in there.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And you're responsible for finding those opportunities. That's very cool. Can you take us back to the beginning, how long have we known about titanium for?

Marie-Pierre Paquin: So we've known about titanium I guess for a very long time, it's been used in different application across history. From the beginning, it was already known to be a material that resists at very high temperature. And initially it was thought of to use as a inside of the light bulb because of the high temperature resistance of titanium, but it's a very difficult material to form and to produce. So utilisation of titanium across industry has been growing but it's not been like it. You have the copper ages you have the iron ages, you don't have the titanium ages.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Where might our listeners have met titanium in their daily lives, what sort of thing do we use it for?

Marie-Pierre Paquin: The biggest use of titanium, the upside is, to is using paint, it's a pigment. So let's say you move into this new flat this new apartment this new house and the previous owner had the great taste of painting all of it in bright red, and it's not quite to your taste, and you're trying to paint it white. So you must buy the the paint that has the highest titanium dioxide content. So you will get away with only two coats of paint. So if you're two or three coats of paint, that means maybe the level of titanium dioxide in the paint that you bought it is below. You will find it also in sunscreen, toothpaste, Oreo cookies.

Marie-Pierre Paquin: Oh wow.

Marie-Pierre Paquin: It's an additive in the plastics to get the colour or the opacity to plastic also. So there's a lot of application of titanium dioxide in our everyday life.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Why don't we make everything out of titanium?

Marie-Pierre Paquin: The cost. As Rudy alluded to, it's, it's a very expensive metal. And the reason it's very expensive, it's the way to produce it. It's challenging. It's not an easy metal to produce. So to manufacture like very precise pieces like those that will go into a prosthetic. You need a lot of machining.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And is titanium itself a scarce resource? Like is there enough in the world that were the costs to come down, we would be able to use it in loads more applications.

Marie-Pierre Paquin: In fact, titanium is the 9th element in abundance in the Earth's crust. So there's quite a bit of it, just to give a reference is about 100 times more titanium in the crust, then there is copper.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Oh, wow.

Marie-Pierre Paquin: Yeah, so there's throughout, there's a lot of titanium. In the earth crust, there's a lot more titanium dioxide out there to be, to be recovered.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: If for some reason, for some reason, these processes were deemed, you know, not green enough or too expensive, or we just can't make titanium anymore. What impact would that have on you, Rudy? Like how would modifying your prosthetics so that they didn't contain titanium effect you?

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: You know, earlier in our conversation, we mentioned that prosthetics used to be made out of wood. And although having a wooden leg would probably allow you to walk down the street, walk around in your house and give you that mobility that wouldn't work best for activities and sports. Now, when it comes to the prosthetics nowadays, as we, as we talked about, you have the carbon fibre which is a very lightweight and strong material, but you also have the, the insides of the knee that the frame of the knee which are titanium, and now the attachments which are titanium as well, how does the knee attach to the foot? How does the knee attach to the socket? And these attachments, adapters are very important for, for me with prosthetics because I need to make sure if I'm doing, if I'm running, or if I'm jumping off a big rock or a ledge my leg is not going to crack and split. So I think without, without titanium in my legs, I don't even want to know what type of activities I likely would not be able to do because of the forces that come with having prosthetics.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Right. So we we never want to go back to the wooden legs, is what you're saying.

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: Exactly.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: But it's interesting that you know, titanium, although it is very abundant, it does come with some challenges. And Marie-Pierre I wonder if you could outline for us, what are the key challenges that you're finding at the moment in terms of ensuring that we do have a sustainable future with titanium?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Titanium all the way.

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: Exactly.

Marie-Pierre Paquin: There's many challenges around titanium but in around the mining and metal extracting industry in general, and a lot of them are common, but some of them are specific to the titanium. One of the specific challenge to titanium is that there's only a fraction of it that we can recycle. So everything that is like a prosthetic for example, end of life, you could recycle the titanium out of it. But for all the paint on our walls, we don't yet have like the technology to scrape the paint and recycle that titanium dioxide that's in there. So you would say above 90%, 95% of the titanium that is extracted from the earth will not be recycled. So if I was to say like, what's the big challenge for the titanium but the mining industry in general, is how can we propose projects that are acceptable for the community that owns those project that the community feel that this is bringing value, and this is a positive thing that comes their way and don't look at it like a negative project. For that we have to design project in a different way that they were designed 50 years ago and make sure that we take into consideration that concern and the total impact over the full cycle of the operation, either the mine or the refining facility. All this will integrate into the community, how will it be closed? Because it's from day one, we know it's going to close at some point. So always is going to be closed at the end of life. How can we make sure we do that in a responsible and sustainable manner?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Sure. And it's sustainable from a human perspective, a societal perspective, but also an environmental perspective, right? Is there a decarbonisation aspect to the equation as well?

Marie-Pierre Paquin: Absolutely. That's a big one. Every step of the value chain of producing titanium or titanium dioxide, there's an impact on the energy consumption and the greenhouse gas emission. So if we think from the beginning, so you have exploration, then you have the mining. So in mining, what happened then you have the diesel in the mobile equipment, so you have those big haul truck to carry the rock, they are burning diesel, so how should we think about those, how can we decarbonise those truck? One other aspect which is really critical and can make a big difference is how we improve the recovery? So if you were to disturb a piece of land to extract a valuable metal, how can you extract all of it not leave anything in the waste or in the tailings, then you need to go to smelting. But in the process of doing that you are emitting CO2. And it's an integrated part of the process. So if you want to remove those process emission, you really need to think about how you're going to change the whole industry, how you're going to change the whole process.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So we know that in a sustainable future, all of the things that we're producing, and buying and making and getting rid of all of those processes are going to have to be less carbon intensive, we're going to have to massively reduce the fossil fuels that we're kicking out in the atmosphere, etc. In this highly complex system that you've described for us, what are the opportunities for decarbonising? What's the stuff that you're working on that you think is gonna make a big impact to reduce those carbon emissions?

Marie-Pierre Paquin: One example I could give you of, we have a great team working on it at the moment, the smelting of ilmenite, that we're using carbon, so how can we replace carbon, it's not just a matter of putting energy into the process, we need the chemical power of removing how to generate from the iron oxide. So how can we do it in a different manner. So we're currently investigating the possibility of using the CO gas, which is a byproduct of the current smelting process to remove one more oxygen. So the CO has the potential of becoming CO2. So could we use that as a reductant. And the way we look at it is we are going step by step. So when you want to make sure it works, we will most likely do a proof of concept in the lab, some basic experiment to make sure the reaction happen that the the energy balance work, then we'll do bench tests, probably simulation and calculation before we go full steam with the full investment because those process are very expensive. So it is a really a systemic approach that needs to be taken to make sure that we're doing the right thing.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Rudy, listening to our conversation. A lot of this is new to me, and I'm sure there's lots of aspects of this that you've probably not even contemplated or heard of, is the sustainability of your prostheses, something that has ever crossed your mind?

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: You know, I guess you can say, I've been quite naive on how my legs have been made, and what it takes to get just a little adapter made and the processes that it goes through. So it's quite interesting to hear, where we get it from, how it's made, and how can we make sure that we're, you know, being smart about how it's made, and to reuse it. And, you know, one thing about prosthetics is that, you know, although the components, the sockets are custom made for one individual, the adapters and the feet and knees can be recycled and reused to other individuals. And I think that's an important part of our industry, the prosthetic industry is to make sure that, you know, when someone no longer has a use for the foots, or the knee or the adapters, that we're able to find somebody else to use that because they have a long life, and they're very strong still. [musical interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So as we've heard in our conversation, you know, prostheses have come a very, very long way from the wooden legs of pirates, certainly on to sort of Rudy's Paralympian adventures. And it sounds as if these technologies are not slowing down in their development anytime soon. Marie-Pierre, what can we expect from titanium in the future?

Marie-Pierre Paquin: I think there's great thing to come, while I'd like to mention is additive manufacturing. But if we are able to make the additive manufacturing more useful and widely used for this type of part, like the 3D printing, for example, that would allow titanium to be used in a lot more application. And by using more titanium and different type of application for mobility, for example, you would decrease the weight of the truck or the car or the plane. And by reducing the weight, you also have an impact on greenhouse gas emission, everything becomes more efficient. So I think there's a lot of application that will become more affordable, we'll be able to use more titanium, but we have to be able to do it in a sustainable way. So all of the work and the challenge I mentioned to you there's a lot of very smart people working and looking at it and I'm sure they're going to solve it but it's going to be challenge and, but I'm very hopeful and very enthusiastic about the future of titanium.

Marie-Pierre Paquin: And Rudy what's next for you?

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: Well, I will continue on my mission of making sure that when individuals are new to being an amputee, that they understand what will be next, how we can support them along their journey and really get them back into the game of life and continue surfing and skateboarding, swimming and doing what I do. So with my prosthetics.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Awesome, thank you for being with us, both of you. Thank you.

Marie-Pierre Paquin: Thank you.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: This has been Things You Can't Live Without with me Dr Anna Ploszajski. Follow Things You Can't Live Without on your favourite podcasting platform and join us next time for more material stories on where our stuff comes from.

–Ends–

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Hello and welcome to Things You Can't Live Without the podcast where I material scientist Dr Anna Ploszajski am joined by special guests to discuss the one thing they can't live without. It's essentially a nerdy version of Show and Tell as each episode we'll dissect these objects to find out the amazing mix of elements, compounds, chemicals and processes that they're made from, and uncover the true impact of extracting processing and making them but also talk to experts about how they're making sure we won't have to live without our favourite things as we transition to a more sustainable future. My guest today is one of the UK's most beloved overnight DJs on air every weekday night on BBC Radio. He's also a regular face on our TV screens. A fanatical cyclist with two world record attempts to his name, and the proud owner of more lycra than normal clothes. It's OJ Borg. So in this episode, we're going to be dissecting OJ's beloved e-bike. Not literally, you'll be relieved to hear but intellectually, to find out what's inside and where those materials come from. To help us in this quest. I'll later be enlisting bicycle historian and author Tony Hadland, and technical development expert at Rio Tinto, Jared Osborne, but first, OJ.

OJ Borg: Hello.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Tell us why you can't live without your cargo e-bike?

OJ Borg: For two reasons, one, I pretty much do everything on it now. Like I can't stand driving the car. Because it's so much quicker, it's so much easier to take the bike, I don't have to worry about parking it, you can normally nip down bike lanes, if you're lucky enough to have them in the city you live in, I get around quickly. And also the kids refuse to walk anywhere now. I've ruined my kids ability to walk anywhere, so I can't live without it because my kids would literally never leave home. If we want to go somewhere. It's like can we take the cargo bike? And the answer is always yes. Because it's way easier. Most of my daughter's friends they're like blagging me to try and pick them up to take them to school in the morning if I'm on the school run so it's been great. Unfortunately my kids are now getting rather large so it's now difficult to cram them into the bike. So if you can think of a bigger one that'd be great but that's why I bought the bike.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Amazing and did you say it's an electric bike?

OJ Borg: It is a pedal assist bike because when I, being a cyclist, when I first looked at buying one I tried out a friend's and I and he said to me you want to buy one that's got battery and I said no, no, course not I don't want to buy a bike that's got a battery, what sort of cyclist you think I am? And then I tried it and it was hard work. And the thing is though I wanted to share the bike with my wife and the problem is you know however big your kids are the most dangerous part when you're at the lights is starting off. It really is. That's when you're wobbly, the most wobbliest, that's when it's not the best. So the fact you've got pedal assist just means you get ahead of the traffic and you are steady because the faster you go the steadier you are, plus having a battery means you will ride it in the wind, in the rain. I will ride it to work you know I will ride home at 3 o'clock in the morning past badgers and foxes and, and drunk people and it's something that I think having a battery on it just makes you use it more like I think, I think e-bikes, battery powered bikes, are the future of sustainable transport.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And do the badgers and foxes and drunk people ever try and jump in? Do you ever, you know, think about being a taxi service?

OJ Borg: Do you know, I have to, well yeah, do you know it's, it's shouted at me a lot and the worst thing that ever happens is where I work I have to cycle past Manchester United the Theatre of Dreams, Old Trafford, and what will happen is if I've got it wrong, and I'm cycling past, basically football kicking out, it will just be shouts "hi, mate, give us a lift" and it's like no, I will not get you in my bike.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Wow, that's very impressive. And that's really painted me a picture of quite how obsessed you are with cycling. Tell me about your record attempts.

OJ Borg: So the hour record is a very famous record attempt quite simply how far can you go in an hour and I have worked around cycling for ages and you do the hour record attempt on a velodrome so the banked, pine banks, you cycle round it, and when they changed the rules and everyone started having a go at it again, which would be about a decade ago now. So about 8 minutes into this hour record attempt and I have to say it was the first time I've ever ridden on a velodrome. It was the first time I'd ever ridden on one of the bikes where you laying out front like Chris Boardman in the Superman position. So there was a lot of new things going on, I realised I'd left my pants on and the rule of lycra is don't wear your pants underneath it. Now obviously you can't stop and take your pants off in the middle of a record attempt. So I kept going, but my seat then fell down. And I gave myself such bad cramps that at the end of the hour record attempt because I was trying to beat a record attempt by a guy called Oscar Egg. I gave myself cramp that was so bad that my mates literally had to put me in the back of his, back of his car, like it was an ambulance. And then I had to crawl up the stairs, not using my legs. Then my second attempt was basically the same where I fell off. So just to say two record attempts, still haven't broken the record, but you know, I'm hopeful.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, Tony, tell us more about the history of the bike. Where does it fit into the story of us?

Tony Hadland: Right, well, there are lots of false stories about the origin of the bike, fake news. goes back a long way. If you've ever been in Italy, you've probably been or someone's tried to sell you a t-shirt showing that Leonardo da Vinci invented the bicycle, which is actually a modern sort of 1950s fake story. But the real ancestor of the bicycle was invented more than 200 years ago. 1817 to be specific in Germany, and it was known in Britain as a hobby horse that was basically like a balance bike but for adults, and it enjoyed a brief period of popularity, people did ridiculous things like going across from Pau in southern France to Madrid on one of these, you could go much faster, but it didn't have pedals. This was one of the things about it that about 15 years later, the French revived the idea, but with pedals fixed to the front wheel. Now this was so successful that the cycle industry was born out of it, but the ride was uncomfortable. And so these fringe bikes became known as bone shakers. The next step was to make the bike go further and faster for each turn of the pedals. So the front wheel was made much bigger of keep the weight of that great big wheel down, wire spokes were invented. And that's how the high bicycle or pennyfarthing was born. But it was difficult to get on and off high bicycle, so consequently, chain drive was adopted. So for each turn of the pedals, the wheels rotated 2 or 3 times, the bike would therefore have smaller, equal size wheels with a much lower seat. This was a safety bicycle, which appeared in the 1880s and is the ancestor of most bikes we ride today. The first patent for an electric bike was taken out more than 150 years ago in France soon after the cycle industry started, but it didn't go into production. Because this was only 10 years after the first rechargeable battery had been invented. The technology just wasn't good enough, it wasn't there. And over the following century, many e-bike designs were tried, including in Germany, France, Netherlands and the USA, but none caught on in a big and lasting way. In the UK, the major problem selling electric bikes was that our legislation treated them as mopeds. So you had to have a driver's licence, pay road tax and be insured. However, in 1982, the law was changed to allow e-bikes to be ridden by anyone over 14 years of age, without the need for a licence road tax or insurance. But until 2020, take-up was very slow, and even now, we lag a long way behind countries like the Netherlands, and we are way behind China, where 50 million e-bikes were sold last year against a mere 155,000 in the UK.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Wow. So there's a lot more, a lot further to go then in the UK in terms of taking up an e-bike.

OJ Borg: It's weird that they were, weird that they were, treated like scooters like, like mopeds for ages.

Tony Hadland: Yeah. And companies like Raleigh campaigned with the government, against the government to try to get the law changed. And it took a long, long time. But eventually we did get there.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, fascinating. It's amazing to think about what the sort of future there might have been. So if we're on a campaign, then to encourage our listeners to consider an e-bike. OJ can you paint us a picture of how it feels when you're, when you're out there on the roads?

OJ Borg: When you're riding an e-bike it's like the wind is at your back. You know, we all have that, we all have that knowledge when you ride a bike and the wind's behind you. And it's just for a moment you think, oh my god, cycling so easy, you know, the wind's at your back, almost when you're cycling at the speed of the wind as well, the sound of the wind drops, because everything's going at the same speed. It's quite wonderful. And that's what an e-bike is like, it's not people think it's like a moped it's not, it is literally like you're the strongest person around. It's like your Chris Froome cycling a cargo bike about so the beauty of it is, and this is why I always say, that it's the future of what, you know, transport will be is because it's just easy. And I must admit, on days when the weather is bad, and the wind is howling, and I really don't want to be living in Manchester. It's let's, you know, it's not the Riviera, let's put it like that, that those days are the days where you can just jump on it. And you've got some battery power. That is great. The only problem is sometimes I've forgotten to charge it and then I have to pedal it back with two kids in it into the wind. And I might be screaming and using words which are not suitable for a family audience.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And do you spend, I'm wondering, I feel like there might still be a little bit of a snobbishness around the use of e-bikes, particularly in the elite cycling community. Do you feel that there might be sort of certain camps setting up you know, the pro and the ante?

OJ Borg: I think there was, I honestly think there was for a long time of people who were against e-bikes but I think that over the past few years has massively changed. I think yeah, if you went, if you went back 5 years people were would not have done it. I think it's changed completely when it comes to commuting. I think even now e-bikes are, in you know, if you're of a certain age and you can't keep up or you're not a very good cyclist and you've got a partner who is good. You know, the fact that you can use an e-bike which is going to get you up to 26 kilometres an hour or whatever. I think that's the rule, isn't it? 26 kilometres an hour and keep you going on a 50 kilometre ride. I think why not? You know, unless you're the pro peloton and you're cheating, but that's not been proved yet.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: That'd already be slightly harder to get away with.

OJ Borg: Well, listen, Tony will tell you about that. It's a thing at the moment.

Tony Hadland: Yeah, yeah, there that was that case a few years ago where the female Belgian mountain biker was caught out because she came off the bike and the bike went up in the air and the wheels were still being driven around when it was in midair. There was a motor stashed behind the seat. Yeah, there was a company in Belgium that used to make these motors that hide in the seat tube and act on the crank. Some, there are still companies that do this sort of thing, quite honestly, openly. But this this particular lady got drummed out of the brownies for that offence.

Tony Hadland: So OJ, what do you think is in an e-bike? What are the crucial components in that battery?

OJ Borg: So, so in my e-bike, there's dropped crisps. There's an old, there's an old headband, which has been ground into the floor, there's going be a motor, which I believe on my bike is a Bosch one. And there will be a battery, which I have to take off and charge. And they asked me when I bought it whether I wanted the second battery. And I said no, and I sort of now wish I'd bought the second battery. [musical interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: At this point, I'd like to bring in Jared Osborne, who's going to take us through the materials that make up the e-bike. Welcome, Jared.

Jared Osborne: Thanks, Anna, lovely to join you.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So tell us first what is it that you actually do?

Jared Osborne: So, Anna, I think I've got the coolest job in Rio Tinto, my role as General Manager Technical Development, I have all subject matter experts in my team here in Melbourne that are doing all the de-risking of our future operations. So the new ore bodies that we're discovering, designing the extraction to get the critical minerals out of those, those ore bodies and, and into bikes like OJ's e-bike.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Ah okay, and what elements in OJ's e-bike are you actually responsible for sourcing?

Jared Osborne: If we break down the main components of the bike, so the frame itself, it's probably made from aluminium. That's a metal that's lightweight and durable. That cargo box that's either for the kids, the pets, the supplies, or that, that stray person from Old Trafford that's made of expanded polypropylene and that's a lightweight but impact resistant. And the wheels they're probably made from aluminium with some stainless steel spokes. The bike's pretty sturdy looks like they're about two and a half inch wide rubber tyres, all really important to keeping you on the straight and narrow, so you don't come off, like you did in those record attempts on the two wheel bike. The tyres, we can't avoid the fact that probably made for some rubber compounds, either natural or synthetic. And then at the guts of it or the battery, it's probably a lithium ion battery. In fact, it is a lithium ion battery, your battery itself that packs some punch. It's got lots of energy 500 Watt hours, so it can expend that energy really, really quickly for you so you can take off quickly at the lights.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So, lithium, then is perfectly placed at the heart of the battery. Why is lithium particularly suitable for batteries, Jared?

Jared Osborne: It's because it's, it's so reactive, I suppose is why it actually forms the heart of this battery and is so ideal for it. Lithium, the metal itself, that was discovered 200 plus years ago, it was initially not used for any of these sorts of processes. It was useful lubricating greases. Today, it's one of the mainstays of rechargeable batteries. So what's really interesting is where is the lithium and how can we extract it, because it comes in many different forms. The ores that it comes from there's two general sources of it. One is either in mineral form, and the other is within brines or very, very salty water. And the minerals, they can be hard rock or they can be clay. Now ores they're typically really low grade, there might be one or 2% of lithium oxide within them. What that means is to get the lithium out, we have to apply a fair bit of energy and chemistry to extract the lithium from it to make the lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide that goes into the batteries. There's also other ores which are more clay like so these are sediments where lithium's adsorbed into the layers of the clays. And again, they require a fair bit of energy to get the lithium out of those clays. Emerging from the pack is the brine based deposits. So the salty water.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah. So I heard Jared that. I don't know if this is true. Maybe you can debunk this for me. I heard that there isn't enough lithium that we know about on Earth right now, for us to convert every internal combustion engine car into an electric car, let alone electric bikes as well. Is that true?

Jared Osborne: So if we look at lithium supply and demand reserves, there's known reserves around the world. There's probably 80 to 100 million tonnes of identified lithium globally. That's probably about 400 different deposits. The various types of described them so hardrock, sedimentary clays, brines, and the like. That's more than enough, for us to convert everything that we need. What we need to do is, is actually start those mines and get them to keep up with the demand.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So if we're almost certainly going to need more lithium in the future, we're going to need to get that from somewhere. And, Jared, I'm really interested in, can you paint us a picture in? Like, what would this look like what a big lithium mine look like?

Jared Osborne: So, Anna, if we move perhaps to the new style of operations, the brine type operations, a big direct lithium operation, that would currently be something around 25,000 tonnes per annum, lithium carbonate equivalent. So if we're thinking about somewhere north of 2 million tonnes per annum increase in lithium carbonate required, sort of by 2030, 2040, we have to put a lot of these mines in or expand production in the existing ones.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: How much of a challenge does that actually represent to you guys?

Jared Osborne: It's a pretty big challenge, because when nature put some of these deposits out there, it didn't put them right next to the coast, it didn't put them right next to a power supply. But there is one potential advantage in some of the parts of Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, which is solar power, and we are seeing large investments in solar power in those areas, they're very, very good for solar power. So that is one of the trump cards that could potentially help this industry and working in conjunction with government and communities to get those renewables in those places will help enormously.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I'm very pleased to hear that we won't have to imagine a future in which we don't have any lithium, it sounds as if we've got enough, it sounds as if we know what we're doing to extract it. We're starting to decarbonise that process so that we can make it more sustainable. But I want us to imagine a terrible future for a moment, in which for some reason, there is no more lithium, right? Everybody wants an e-bike, everybody wants an electric car, there's some new technology that takes all of the lithium that we would have put in our electric bikes into something else. OJ, would you ever go back to a non-e-bike?

OJ Borg: Well, if I had to, of course I would. But the problem is, I think you get used to the luxury of being propelled along. And you know, and it really does. And I mean, I go back to my earlier point, which is the beauty of an e-bike, whether it be cargo bike or any bike is if you are not fit, if you are maybe a little bit older, and you want to keep up or just simply you just want it to be easy to get from A to B like I remember that the earliest e-bike I ever saw was I was on my road bike in town and I was trying to cycle home and a guy in front of me kept beating me off the lights and I didn't know what an e-bike was at the time and he was smoking a cigarette as he cycled along I think he was wearing I think he was dressed as a decorator, obviously decorating, and I couldn't work out why he was so fit and I was absolutely you know, like, you could see the veins on my head as I tried to keep up with him between the lights. It just makes getting around easy. And it always will and I think going back, which like if you've got a nice sofa and you go back to sitting on a park bench. Yes, of course, you can still sit on the park bench, but you're gonna get a splinter in your bum. It all goes back to lycra.

OJ Borg: It all goes back to bums.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Well, clearly, this is not a future that you want to partake in, OJ. You are not ever hopefully ever gonna have to live without your e-bike. But if we're all gonna get e-bikes, which is what we're pushing for in this podcast apparently, that's gonna have consequences for the planet, right. Tony, can you tell us, what are the trends in e-bikes at the moment? How much are they going to take off in the next few years?

Tony Hadland: Well, it's quite an interesting thing that. The market is growing quite slowly. In the 1980s after the UK legislation was liberalised several companies set up, entered the market. None of them was a big success. And then in the 1990s Raleigh was the first major UK maker to launch an e-bike. But it was too expensive for a market where nobody knew what to expect about e-bikes. E-bikes were something which were looked at as kind of weird and marginal. In fact, I went to the bike show in 1983 at Harrogate, just after the liberalisation and the early products there were sort of tucked away in one corner. They were, they had sort of car batteries more or less, great big lead acid batteries to drive them. And they, there was a 20 inch wheel shopper and a 20 inch wheel trik people kind of looked at that out of the corner their eye and went on to something more exciting. I think the general feeling was that they were, they had a market for people with disabilities or quite frankly, and that stayed for a long time, in contrast to Raleigh's experience it should be said there was a company called Powabyke which started up as a maker of relatively inexpensive e-bikes and they went on to outlast all their competitors. They've been around for 20 years or so. They're the longest established e-bike brand in Europe now. So it showed that you could run a successful business selling affordable or relatively affordable e-bikes. So if we fast forward to 2020, COVID-19 is something which has had a big impact. To quote from a report to the Bicycle Association it turbocharged the e-bike trend. E-bikes have been the only major growth segment anyway in recent years. And that was from a very low base anyway. But in the first year of the pandemic, there was a 92% year on year rise in the number of e-bikes sold, and a 5th of all spending went on e-bikes. In fact, that was what was described as a feeding frenzy with people trading up to get their hands on a bike, and at the same time pushing the prices up. Because any bike, we've got all this time, the only thing we're allowed to do is to go out and have a bit of exercise. Let's get an e-bike. And today, the Bicycle Association, which is the UK cycle trade body sees e-bikes as, and I quote, an unstoppable force with huge growth potential.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I think one thing that's going through my mind is when we think about, I don't know, sustainability, and kind of being sort of more responsible with our stuff in the future. I feel like we should always be aiming for increased simplicity, increased recyclability. And I wonder whether there's an unintended consequence of the uptake of e-bikes that actually is, potentially, although we think of them as being quite green technology, potentially going to have a negative impact on sustainability. And the climate. Jared, what do you think in terms of the unintended consequences for the environment of lithium?

Jared Osborne: So there's, there's a range of potential and unforeseen or unintended consequences, and one of them that we're thinking about the complexity of it, let's just rewind to how we're actually going to cope with making enough lithium in the first place for it and creating the energy to actually put into those those batteries. We're going to need a combination of renewable energy available for extraction, that's going to rely on battery storage, because we're going to need that to have efficient production, because we can't just run our processing plants when the sun shines, or when the, when the wind is blowing. And to do that, we're gonna need more copper, we're gonna need the electrification of it, we're going to need lots of critical minerals for solar production. And the rate of growth needs to happen such that we don't hit a constraint along the way, if we do, we won't be able to keep up with green lithium production along the way. I think there's some good consequences that could come from this as well, though, there's going to be jobs to create that infrastructure and the raw materials, less cars, perhaps in the future infrastructure as an asset. So we're going to build these infrastructure for the mines, perhaps they're there for communities post mining, as well for them to use. And that electrical infrastructure that could be some good unforeseen consequences in there as well.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, Tony, what's your take on the unforeseen consequences of increased e-bike use?

Tony Hadland: It's a difficult one really, isn't it? Many people have come adrift re(garding) the prophecies and all these sorts of topics. But I think one of the one of the things that we need to bear in mind is that, batteries normally need replacing fairly regularly. And one of the things that could cause a little bit of a hiccup to the takeoff of e-bikes is if the word gets around that, you know, I've spent 1500 hundred quid, 2000 pounds on this bike, and three years in I've had to spend 300 quid on a new battery. And even worse, perhaps the lack of standardisation in batteries, that I'm quite a believer in getting more to the sort of synergy with the makers of power tool batteries. And indeed, the, the setup I've got on my electric bike uses Bosch power tool, 36 volt batteries, which are advertised as being droppable from several metres onto a concrete floor and surviving quite happily, because people drop them when they want and work on building sites and that sort of thing. They, they're designed to run cool. You can buy those at any branch of a well known builders merchant knocking around the place, there's a huge market, they're interchangeable, and perhaps more of that, because a lot of e-bikes you look at, you see the batteries have been nicely styled into a particular casing or there's different looks very swish, you know. Are you going to be able to get a replacement for that battery? What's the level of support? Is your bike going to be put aside as a result of, well, just the fact that you can't be bothered to, to buy another battery? Then it's like the flat tyre syndrome that we see so often with bikes. When people have the enthusiasm, they buy a bike, they ride it in the summer, they get a puncture in the autumn, it goes to the back of the carriage and 5 years later, they find it when they move out, you know, you don't want that sort of thing happening. But I think that there could be an element of that.

OJ Borg: I think there could be. I mean, I counted that slightly as an e-bike evangelist in the sense that if you make the bike so core to your life, that you know you're saving money because yeah 3, 3 years in you don't want to be buying a 300 quid battery. But you buy any car 3 years in, I guarantee you're gonna be spending 300 quid on something and possibly more. So I do think the costs are way low, but only if you can build it into your life and the infrastructure is there to ride the bike safely. The problem a lot of times is when it gets to winter and this is coming about to e-bikes is the fact that it gets cold you know it gets cold and it gets wet. So if you've got a bike that's going to get you to a to b and this bike is so engrained into your life that you know you're going to get there quicker then you know, then I would say the flat the, flat tyre syndrome isn't going to happen. [musical interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So, OJ, so take us home then. What's next for you and your bike any record attempts on the cards?

OJ Borg: Well, I don't know. I think we're going to try and get up to 20,000 kilometres it's just weird that this bike which I bought as a form of transport to get the kids about and do the big shop on has become my primary, my primary form of transport. The one thing I've been trying to do for the past 3 years is take the kids camping on it, where basically they ride their bikes, I pile all the camping kit into it and we go and have a lovely trip away. The only problem is, we would need to also recharge it when we get there so I need to find a campsite that's got a plug in the ground. So that's what's next for me and my cargo bike.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Or some solar panels? Would those fit?

OJ Borg: Or some solar panels can you imagine I could carry it. I could maybe put, maybe if I carry a trailer with me with solar panels on it. I could just cycle forever and never stop.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: You coud, you could. It's an exciting future for sure. Fantastic. Well, thank you all so much for being here for sharing your expertise and your adventures with the e-bike. OJ Borg, Jared Osborne and Tony Hadland. This has been Things You Can't Live Without with me Dr Anna Ploszajski. Follow Things You Can't Live Without on your favourite podcasting platform. And remember, always wear a helmet.

–Ends–

Dr Anna Ploszajski: From the moment we're born, we accumulate stuff. Some of it comes into our lives briefly some of it we hold on to for years because we want it or need it or just absolutely love it. But of course, all of this stuff has an impact on our planet. On Things You Can't Live Without, I, material scientist, Dr Anna Ploszajski ask a guest each episode to tell us the one thing they can't live without. And we interrogate a host of experts to find out the true impact of our obsessions. Joining me today is an award winning Foley artist who has performed sound effects for over 200 live action and animated films and TV series, including Black Panther, Disney's Encanto and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, and her name is Shelly Roden. Welcome, Shelley.

Shelley Roden: Hi, Anna. I'm so happy to be here talking with you all.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I'm so excited too. So tell us, what is the one thing that you can't live without?

Shelley Roden: As a Foley artist, I cannot live without other people's trash.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Right, okay. So other people's trash. Now, this is not an item that I expect many listeners will be able to directly relate to, but we'll be digging a little bit deeper into that in just a second. Today, we're also joined by Saskia Duyvesteyn, Chief Adviser for R&D in Copper at Rio Tinto, who will be taking us through the science and engineering of the stuff that we often don't like to think about, which is waste. So welcome, Saskia.

Saskia Duyvesteyn: Anna, it's so great to be here today to get to talk about one of my favourite topics on how can we actually reuse waste?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yes, I'm so excited to get to that. But first, Shelley, tell us more. Why can't you live without other people's trash?

Shelley Roden: My daily life is spent walking in sync with imaginary characters, and creating the sounds of the objects they're handling on the screen. So I need to collect all these objects. And the way we do that it was we go to thrift stores, we keep an eye out for things left on the street. We go to salvage yards and collect anything from everyday objects, such as tea cups and saucers to odd objects that are thrown away like old beat up car doors, or car hoods, and anything that can create a sound that will convey that what you're watching on the screen is real. And I can share some of my favourites with you. But we'll get to that.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So what does a typical day look like for you?

Shelley Roden: I work on a stage, a Foley stage, that is similar to working in a music studio. So I'm the performer, I'm the musician, working on one side of soundproof glass. And there is a engineer on the other side, sitting in a mixing console, recording and mixing from all the microphones on our Foley stage. And myself and my partner work as Foley artists performing live in sync to what you see on the screen. We have a gigantic movie theatre sized screen that we can see all the detail, all the texture, all the action, so that we can perform it like mimes, or dancers, or musicians. We are all the above and I need items that, like I said, range from old ironing boards, old rusty ironing boards, to pine cones. I mean, if you can imagine in your everyday life, we have that on the stage. It's a yard sale, gone crazy on our stage.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: That's incredible. I'd never heard of this before we started talking. So we're talking about like footsteps and clinking glasses, you know, all the kind of sound effects basically that are nonverbal in the movie, is that it?

Shelley Roden: Exactly.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So why can't they just use the sounds that they're recording, you know, that they're picking up in the scene with the actors themselves?

Shelley Roden: That's a really good question. They do use the sounds that they record on site. They have quite a few microphones positioned. However, they're primarily aimed at the actors and they have to record the actors dialogue because that is the most important thing. Foley is confused with sound effects because they overlap quite a bit. But if you imagine sound effects recorded in the field, like jet engines, or gunshots. We would not do that on this very contained stage. We specialise more on movements of character and bringing animated characters to life. They don't have any sounds. Animated characters only have voices. They don't have surfaces they walk on. The things that they're handling in their hands aren't real. So we are making them sound real so the audience can connect with them.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Can you play us some of your favourite sounds?

Shelley Roden: Oh, favourite sounds. Gee, well, I happen to have a bunch of items set up around me. And one of my favourite setups is what I used for Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman, who I very fortunately had the pleasure of walking. And the sound that I'm going to demonstrate is when he is coming down off of this spaceship. We had to create the sound of spaceship stairs. So I'm going to do for you and then you can guess what I might be using.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay, we'll guess the object or guess the material.

Shelley Roden: Here we go. [sounds]

Shelley Roden: What do you think I have underneath my feet?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Oh, my gosh. Saskia, any guesses?

Saskia Duyvesteyn: Of course, I had to think something metal because that's where my head immediately goes. So like some pots or pans or something like that?

Shelley Roden: Let's see, you're getting warmer, but it's larger. It has to be larger. So what are you hearing? [sounds]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: There's a metallic clang. And then there's a sort of thuddy sound. A bit of an echo.

Shelley Roden: Yes, exactly. So I'm using 3 different metals to create the sound.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Oh, wow.

Shelley Roden: So, on our Foley stage, we have a steel plate built into the floor. It's about 3 inches thick. And then on top of that, I have placed a diamond plate. It's made of carbon steel, I believe. However, I elevated the diamond plate using gaffers tape rolls at either corner, so that it is lifted off the steel plate. However, you can hear the thudding of the steel plate if I'm pressing down into the diamond plate. And then to make it sound like it's attached to a spaceship, I happen to have a very resonant car hood behind me. And it's connected to the steel plate, so that everything interacts with each other in a beautiful way and creates this thing that does not exist.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: That's incredible.

Shelley Roden: Sorry, the spaceship does not exist.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Oh, what? Spoilers, Saskia, you're our metals expert. Would you ever have guessed? That, that's what we were listening to?

Saskia Duyvesteyn: No, I wouldn't have guessed. Of course, I'm happy to hear that it was made of all sorts of metals and the combination of them. And that's something I think I've learned in my career, that it's often not about one metal, but how you combine things. And whether you're adding something as what you might think is an impurity actually is something that then changes the properties of what the metal does. So I think it's actually quite unique, that I'd never thought about it from a sound perspective. Like I always think about it from a materials perspective. And so quite interesting that once again, when you combine something, you often get something greater than the sum of the parts.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, I love that. Okay, I would love to do one more round of this game. I'm wondering if this time, you can show us what you're playing, the objects, and we have to guess what the sound is supposed to represent.

Shelley Roden: Oh, this is fun. Okay, so this is obvious. This...

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay, it's a glove.

Shelley Roden: And then there's this.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: A broom?

Shelley Roden: It's a wicker decorative broom.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay.

Shelley Roden: And then the third object is...

Saskia Duyvesteyn: Oh, like a kind of metal grate, metal grate.

Saskia Duyvesteyn: You could hear the, the branches moving? Sounded almost like a bouncing or a jumping. But I'll be honest, I don't have a clue. And I'm sure when you tell me. I'm gonna say it's so obvious that I'll feel silly that I didn't recognise what it was.

Shelley Roden: Yes, exactly.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay. Okay.

Saskia Duyvesteyn: So, ready?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yep. [sounds]

Saskia Duyvesteyn: Any guesses?

Shelley Roden: No, not at all. This shows you how wide of a spectrum Foley is without the visual, you can imagine anything.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah.

Shelley Roden: So that was the sound of Baby Groot's footsteps. Groot is a character in Guardians of the Galaxy. And in Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, he is trying to help his friends who are in a cage and he is on the outside, walking on a metal grate.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Right. Okay, so this is a character made of wood.

Shelley Roden: Yes. And if I were to use wood, just solid wood, it would not sound cute. He's adorable. I want him to sound like how people feel about him. So if I were to use wood blocks, it would just be like, ca-clank, it wouldn't be cute. So the broom was flexible enough to allow me to roll into it and make it sound alive like a real foot. [musical interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I'm interested to think a bit more about those materials that you're using because you could buy all of your stuff fresh, right? You could have a new car bonnet. You could have a new gardening glove. What was your thinking behind the decision of wanting to use trash and kind of salvage your materials?

Shelley Roden: Well, for me as a Foley artist, it's, its budget and it's also... I am very much interested in maintaining the beauty of our world as it is. So the more we reuse materials, the more time we might have to preserve this beauty. So for me, I would prefer to go to a thrift store and find knitting needles for 10 cents, rather than going to Amazon or Target and getting a brand new pair. And also, I need to listen to these things. I can't listen if I'm shopping online.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Right, okay.

Shelley Roden: And then some things pop up in a sort of surprising way as useful. For example, I have some pop up foldable sunshades. And I was working on The Incredibles 2 and I had to come up with the sound of a parachute for Mrs Incredible. We could think of it as, oh, well, she has a parachute, maybe I'll gather a parachute and try it and pop it.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah.

Shelley Roden: But really what I needed was not necessarily the fabric sound of the parachute, which is hard to control and very flimsy. But I needed the pop that moment that pops in the air, and she becomes airborne. So I have it next to me. I can show you.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Oh my gosh, yes please.

Shelley Roden: What it looks like. Yeah.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Ah, okay, so I hadn't, and when you're describing that, I thought it was like a concertina one but it's actually like a kind of, it's a sheet of fabric and then around the outside as a kind of stiff metal ring, basically.

Shelley Roden: Yes, exactly. Its wired, suspended in wire, but I'll just demonstrate, just to show you what it sounds like. So here we go. Does that come through? It does.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: It's a parachute.

Shelley Roden: Okay.

Saskia Duyvesteyn: I could completely picture Mrs Incredible jumping out of the plane.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Brilliant. And at the heart of it is your handling and knowledge of all these different materials. It feels a bit funny for us to describe them as waste actually, because what you've done is completely repurpose them into, you know, these sort of otherworldly objects in some cases. I would love to now to turn to Saskia, to tell us a bit more about, you know, where this stuff is coming from? Because, Shelley, what you're doing is giving this stuff new life and, you know, adding to the story of those objects. So Saskia, can you tell us a bit about what waste means to you as somebody who works in the production of metals at the start of their life? Where does waste come into your work?

Saskia Duyvesteyn: So it's, its an interesting one that I've been thinking a lot about, as I, my background as a, what you would call a traditional metallurgical engineer. Most people say, excuse me, what is that? A metallurgical engineer? And so what I do is I process metals, that's my background. How do you actually take something from a rock and make it into something useful? And so waste is actually a key part of that. And why that is, is if you think about where metals come from, ore, people may not realise that, ore, rocks, don't actually have a whole lot of metal in them. If you think about like a copper ore, maybe it has, if you're lucky, it'll have 1% copper in it.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Wow.

Saskia Duyvesteyn: So what that means is that it has almost 99% waste, right? So once you're starting with that, you're inherently, from the get go, need to think about the waste, because you're actually going to end up with more waste than metal. And so it becomes part of the process from the moment you think about it, even the moment you mine it because again, where we sit now, right? When you look at historic mining, right, and things were literally at the surface, right, you could find a native, what we call, native copper, pure copper just sitting at the surface, you could just pick it up. But that's not how it is anymore. Now you actually then need to dig to get to the ore. So you actually first need to move waste, to then get to the ore that then has waste to get to that valuable piece that you're looking at. So if we start to think about the energy that we've put in to actually get that little bit of copper, what else is in that waste that we might be able to recover? Because once you've spent that energy, then let's make sure, I like to say, have, can we squeeze every last little bit of value out of that rock before it becomes waste? And we're really need to dispose of it, right. And so that's really a shift that's happened over the last few years where before, you probably might have just looked at it from the primary metal and now recognising that there's actually a whole bunch of by-products or I actually prefer the word co-product.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So what are the sort of materials that you're getting from a process like let's say copper mining and copper processing? What are those co-products that you get alongside the copper?

Saskia Duyvesteyn: In copper ore, we have things like molybdenum, we have gold, we have silver,. Those are all things that we were already recovering right as valuable. But you can get tellurium. Tellurium is used in solar cells. Well, the only way to get to tellurium, 90% of the tellurium, comes from copper mining, not from a tellurium mine. And there's a number, a number, of other elements, when you look at that, that then in some cases may not be the highest concentration. But if you're already processing them, if you think about from that incremental, that little bit of extra energy that it would take to recover it, you're not having to create an entire new mine. You're not having to create additional waste.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And is it because it makes good financial sense? Or is it that it makes good sort of technical sense or just because, you know, you're trying to reduce the waste that you're creating?

Saskia Duyvesteyn: So, I can facetiously say, yes, all of the above a little bit.

Saskia Duyvesteyn: So we have all sorts of other critical minerals typically in, in, in copper mining. You have the rare earths. You actually have things like the galliums, and the germaniums, and the cobalt, and the nickels, and the indiums, and all sorts of elements that many people have never even heard of. We, in essence, have a bit of a kitchen sink, that's all available in in copper ores. It's actually not very large amount, but yet, you can't have your electric car. You can't have your cell phone. You can't have all of those other types of objects without some of those critical minerals. And you'd look at your other ores as well. You look at aluminium ores and you will find similarly things like scandium, which is key for making new alloys with the aluminium, you look at gallium and germanium, which are critical for the computer chips for cars and phones. And so again, no one would create an aluminium mine for those. But once you've processed the material to try to recover that, is just something that just makes good sense. It makes sense from a community's perspective, right? It makes sense from a net zero perspective of saying, hey, how do we actually sustainably mine and partner with areas where our mines are in making sure that we're getting that value from. It's not just one thing. It's all of that, and combined, that I think has really shifted that view of let's make sure that we are really thinking about not as a waste. But as what we like to say full value mining.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Right? So there's this sort of shifting attitude, then, maybe the we are, you know, wanting to make all practices more sustainable, you know, everyone's trying to reduce waste, reduce energy.

Saskia Duyvesteyn: Where it gets interesting more is when you start to think about recycling and reuse. Because now you have to think about, you've now recovered the metal from a certain spot. And now you've sent it all over the world, right, or all over the country. And it's now got different applications. And now if you want to reuse that, you have to now bring, and it takes energy, to bring all those materials back to a spot, to then reprocess them, which then has an additional energy footprint. So it's an interesting perspective, when you start to think about from a circular economy piece. If you were going to maybe build something for being able to recycle it, you might put it together differently, right? Because it would be easier to separate. The interesting thing is recycling our materials is actually quite challenging from a technology standpoint, because it isn't just put it back in the same process when we made it the first time. Because we've altered it right, we've taken a copper and made it into brass. You can't then just return it back to copper. You have to do additional processing to bring it back. And so we don't always know what those processes look like. And these are some really tough challenges that I actually see that the, the, mining industry is at this amazing renaissance, where there's an ability to think differently, right? To say, yes, that's how we process things from primary, right, from an ore. But if we're now going to think about I like to call those geological ore bodies, what about what we call as an urban ore body, right? The salvage yards, the other, you know, what does that look like? That still represents a resource for us. And so how can we actually think differently about processing those kinds of materials? And so there's a real piece, and that creativity that Shelley talked about, to see something and be able to think differently about it. How you might take it apart. How you might reprocess it, is part of that piece that it really takes to be able to turn it into a useful product again, requires that creative thinking and that different way of looking at things.

Shelley Roden: You've given me a different perspective, Saskia. You've given me a different perspective, if I go for a hike on the Old Man of Coniston, I know it's a copper mine. And I can look at it like, oh, how sad, but now you've given me a different perspective, which is tellerium is necessary to create solar cells. So that copper mine is integral to us advancing this technology of the way that we live.

Saskia Duyvesteyn: And I think that's exactly one of the most interesting pieces in this, in this, renaissance that I think, you know, the mining industry is going through is, is, this education of what does it really take to mine? Whether you're mining for primary, whether you're remining waste, whether you're remining recycling materials, right? All of that is part of that process to be able to create the products. And so just even having people have an understanding that it didn't just magically show up on the desk, right? How did it get there? And what goes into it? And also, some of this is about consumer choice, right? Sometimes consumers, they would like the greener product, but do they want to pay the extra price for it? It's often a trade off, I mean, much of mining is a trade off about, are you trying to manage costs, or are you trying to manage, you know, footprint? It's all an interplay of that bigger circular economy to recognise as you said, Shelley, that you can't always have one without the other. And so having some of that awareness of those choices is always an interesting perspective for people to realise.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I love that. So do you think that's the future then, is recognising the value and even the small trace amounts of these precious materials?

Saskia Duyvesteyn: Absolutely. And that's exactly what we do. And that's been our approach, right? Is, you know, for example, from a US government, other governments as well, have put a list together of critical minerals. And they've said, we've said from our country's perspective, right, we don't have enough of that material, we need to import it. Therefore, it's really critical for our country's economy, and different for each country, obviously. But for every country's economy, those are really critical from a from a strategic, from an energy perspective. And so we want to work on that list of materials. Well, that's one way to look at it. But we've said, but let's align that list with what do we actually have available? And what might be the easiest ones to go for first, so that we can start to build that and show an example of how to do it. While in the past, we might have said, okay, let's go for all of them. And in the end, you get none of them. And I think that's really been one of the shifts is that piece of really thinking about it in smaller steps, as opposed to trying to solve it all in one, one big jump.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And, Shelley, what's next for you? What wonderful new worlds are you going to be transporting us to next?

Shelley Roden: How do I tie this in with what Saskia said. Just trying to wrap my brain around this world that I know nothing about. And I do have a question, if you don't mind?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Please go for it.

Shelley Roden: Because looking at a large mining company feels so foreign to me, as an individual person. What can we do as individuals other than being aware of what we spend our money on? What can we do in our daily lives to help? What do we have control of?

Saskia Duyvesteyn: So, I think that's a really good question, Shelley. And actually, no one's ever asked me that. So, I'm this is, this is, a really good thoughtful one for me. I think that in some ways, it boils down to what you just even said, is an open mindedness of and an awareness and an education piece, right? Where that just even understanding where something came from, and making a bit of that effort to sort of say, well, gosh, I might want this product. But where does that actually have to come from for me to get it? Because I actually have a belief that for, for, especially kids that are just starting out and thinking about what do they want to do for a career, probably never thought about going into mining. And yet it's this amazingly complex system that has an aspect of people to it. It has an aspect of technology. It has an aspect of computers, and digital. It has aspects of chemistry of really being able to have an impact on the world and the footprint, and it's not an easy problem to solve. And so for me, what I would love is, as you can see, I've, I've been a long enthusiastic person in the mining industry. Since I was 10, I wanted to be a metallurgical engineer. And so the passion of understanding what a complex world that is and what it all takes to get it just even if everybody understood that just a little bit better, I think would start to contribute to the choices of not just mining but manufacturing that circular economy is just really understanding where stuff comes from.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: That was a phenomenal answer. Thank you, Saskia. So we've gone from vibranium to copper mining and back round again to the circular economy. I think from my perspective, I can definitely guarantee that I won't be looking at my trash in quite the same way again. It might be a much more musical household than it was this morning, we'll find out. But a huge thank you to my guests this episode. Foley artist Shelley Roden and metallurgical engineer Saskia Duyvesteyn. Thank you both so much.

Shelley Roden: It was such a pleasure sharing it with you, Annd, and you, Saskia, and listening to your stories. Thank you.

Saskia Duyvesteyn: It's great to get to meet you. [musical interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: You can listen to more episodes of Things You Can't Live Without wherever you get your podcasts and don't forget to follow, rate and review us to make sure that you don't miss an episode.

–Ends–

Mark Davies: Welcome to Things You Can't Live Without, the science podcast where we turn the spotlight on those items from our daily lives that we rely on the most. Each episode, I, material scientist Dr Anna Ploszajski, talk to well known figures to find out what single item they can't live without. Together, we'll interrogate a host of experts on the science behind what's really required to make these items and what needs to be done to make sure we can continue to sustainably fill the future with e-bikes, dictionaries, prosthetic legs, and all the other things we're going to hear in this series. And the legend that is sitting with me today is Welsh Singer/Songwriter, Author, MBE, and Broadcaster, Cerys Matthews. Welcome Cerys.

Cerys Matthews: Hey, good to be here.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Thank you for being with us. So tell us what is the one item that you can't live without?

Cerys Matthews: Climbing equipment.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Climbing equipment, okay, so what does that involve? Give us the brief rundown of your climbing equipment.

Cerys Matthews: Well, I guess the first thing would be rope and carabiner and harness, some rubber shoes. But it's like hiking equipment as well. You know, like stretchy hiking trousers, and a good bag.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: There must be a room in your house somewhere that is just full of carabiner clips, ropes and everything in between. I love it. Today, we're going to be focusing on that carabiner clip as our particular item that you can't live without, and to take us through the past, present and future of aluminium and the carabiner clip, we're joined by climber, librarian and climbing curator Nigel Buckley and Rio Tinto's Chief Technical Officer Mark Davies. Welcome to you both.

Nigel Buckley: Hello. Thank you.

Mark Davies: Hi, thanks for having me.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Lovely to have you with us. But before that, Cerys, tell us a little bit more about your climbing equipment. Where did your love of climbing first begin?

Cerys Matthews: I guess, you know, I'm largely desk bound, I build radio shows these days, pulling music, sourcing it, referencing it, putting it into an order. It's great, you can escape into your head and into these compositions across the world, you know, brilliant sounds, but you don't move. It's all in your head. And I got into climbing by a complete accident, really. I wanted to do some hiking. So for my 50th I went to do the Everest trek, the base camp one. And I thought, I'm a bit scared of heights.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay.

Cerys Matthews: And I said, you know, I'm gonna just start, I literally live next door to an indoor rock climbing centre. And I thought I'll just go there, get my head round, ropes and, I mean, tying knots is the only exam I've ever failed in my life. I got sent to do like a sailing course when I was a kid and it was awful. So, I thought, let's, let's, just face the fears and start climbing. And I went and I just simply got hooked.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So you went to base camp on Everest?

Cerys Matthews: Yeah.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Wow. What was that like?

Cerys Matthews: It's the best thing I've ever done in my life, easily.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And how long did the full track take you?

Cerys Matthews: We took it slow because of the boys. So, I think, we were out out for about 11 days, total, including stays in Kathmandu, which is absolutely brilliant as well. The slower you go, the better you just zigzag up and down. I was the only one that got altitude sickness.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Oh wow.

Cerys Matthews: I was, I was the one most keen to do it. And I was the only one that got altitude sickness. So it's quite funny.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I'm sold. I'm going to finish the episode and then I'm sold then I'm going to Everest. [music interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I'm sure these sorts of treks don't come without risk. You know, a part of your climbing must be at least getting over the fear of it, you know, good faith in the equipment that you have. And our question on this podcast is, what can't you live without? This might be a piece of equipment that saves your life on these treacherous tracks. But, of course, climbers haven't always had such high-tech equipment. So it's time for us now to turn to our history of climbing guru Nigel Buckley. Nigel, welcome.

Nigel Buckley: Hi, thanks for having me. I certainly can't live without my climbing equipment.

Cerys Matthews: Yay.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: How long have we been climbing for?

Nigel Buckley: So, the idea, the appreciation for altitude on the summit took a long time to take hold. From the 14th century, I have records of people going up mountains for religious reasons, meteorological, scientific, survival for food, but climbing as a pursuit, as a sport, in its own right, really sort of first attempt on a mountain for summit was 1492 on Mont Aiguille in France. That was led by Antoine de Ville and then in the 18th century a scientist in Geneva sort of went around the Mont Blanc area. I don't know what he was doing, maybe, it was word of mouth, but in my imagination, he was pinning up posters offering a reward for the first person to summit Mont Blanc, which was done in 1786. And Saussure himself later did it. I think it was the following year, he had 18 guides, food, wine...

Cerys Matthews What was a green curtain for?

Cerys Matthews: Foie gras.

Nigel Buckley: He had, mattresses. He took a green curtain them. You know, they toasted on the top.

Nigel Buckley: I think, you know, to go around his bed, I imagine, so you know, getting changed and stuff. Then Alpinism really takes hold in the mid 19th century. The Alpine Club was the first mountaineering club in the world. That was founded in 1857.

Cerys Matthews: Can I ask a question at this point, Nigel?

Nigel Buckley: Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Cerys Matthews: So very much western based, the Alpine Club. Was it British, right? English?

Nigel Buckley: Yes, yes. It started in London.

Cerys Matthews: Any sort of evidence in history of mountaineers in perhaps Asia or other countries doing it for fun?

Nigel Buckley: You know, people go up valleys. There was a an expedition a few years ago to find the Yeti and it's in Bhutan. People were doing environmental DNA testing down huge valleys in the Gangka Ponsam area, which is the highest unclimbed mountain in the world. And they found evidence of human DNA. But, of course, a lot of things match human DNA quite, quite a lot, like bananas are like a 50% match...

Cerys Matthews: Really?

Nigel Buckley: ...for human DNA. Yeah. But you know, the idea that you've gone down a valley that no one's ever been down, probably, it's not true.

Cerys Matthews: I'm also thinking about people sort of fleeing persecution as well being pushed to the extremities.

Nigel Buckley: Usually, mountains are political or geographic borders. So the summit is often in the way. What people were interested in, altitude wise, is passes the coals.

Nigel Buckley: How'd you get from one place to the other. But climbing is a sport. That's really, it's mid 19th century, the railways, the Napoleonic wars are over, the railways are there.

Cerys Matthews: Yeah.

Cerys Matthews: People with a lot of money.

Nigel Buckley: Well, so people have a lot of money. And on like national expeditions, we're looking for the poles. So we're looking for the Northwest Passage, you're well to do, upper middle class person could get out to the Alps, relatively easily. You could be a Mont Blanc in 24 hours. So that's when it really takes off. And then gear started coming along, because in the early days, they were going out with a long walking axe, some nail boots. Whymper in 1865 on the Matterhorn, he used the grappling hooks, a free pinned hook on a rope, he'd throw up and pull himself up things that you couldn't climb, but when the piton came along, it was really, really adopted by German climbers more than it was by British climbers or French climbers. And pitons you can hammer into rock to climb things that you couldn't previously climb safely.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: What's a piton for those of us who are not climbers?

Nigel Buckley: A piton came in different shapes. But basically, it was a sub arrow of metal. And they would be really thin sort of, sort of, knife blade. And he'd also have like two inch wedges of different sizes in between,. You'd hammer and hammer them into cracks, which is a sort of precursor to the bolt, which came along later.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And these are all different pieces of equipment that you hammer into the rock face to prevent you from falling very far. Is that right?

Nigel Buckley: Yeah, you would fall down to the last one you put it in if it holds.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay, well, I mean, that doesn't give me much faith in the equipment, but I'm sure it worked in reality.

Nigel Buckley: Pitons, at first, were iron and they were soft. When the steel piton came along, you could hammer it in. And, you know, they were rigid. At first people with the pitons, they'd have a ring. And then, and then, eventually the carabiner starts to be used. And, I think, the carabiner really started maybe more than 100 years ago for soldiers carrying rifles and things like that.

Cerys Matthews: Describe the carabiner.

Nigel Buckley: Describe the old type of carabiner, or the new? Shall I start with the old?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Start with the old. Take us through it.

Cerys Matthews: Yeah.

Nigel Buckley: Oval and quite weak. And then they started using a D shaped carabiner. And with different clips, so the first type was a sort of, snap gate and then screw gate started coming in and there were twist gates, and these are all steel, and then aluminium came along it made it much lighter. So imagine carrying, you know, 40 pitons made of steel and all the carabiners to go with them to clip in. It's just a lot of weight.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So it sounds to me like the story of climbing equipment. We've had advances in, in, safety and in the different ways that these pieces of equipment work, as we've had sort of advances in new materials and the popularity of it rising and, I guess, more money flooding into the scene, as well. I really want us to dig down now into the materials specifically. You know, we heard about Ötzi the Iceman. All of his materials were wood mostly, you know, all of his climbing equipment was, was, wood and natural materials and then we've gone on from there to hemp ropes and then, you know, in recent centuries, polymers and plastics, nylon, being a particularly good one for climbing, very lightweight, very strong. We're focusing in this podcast on aluminium. And you mentioned aluminium as being a real step forward in climbing equipment, mostly thanks to the fact that it's very lightweight compared to the iron or steel alternatives. Cerys, any idea where aluminium comes from today?

Cerys Matthews: No.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Any guesses? Any guesses?

Cerys Matthews: Africa, somewhere in Africa, a country.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Somewhere in Africa? Well, we will put this question to our expert and joining me in the studio today, Mark Davies, Chief Technical Officer of Rio Tinto. Can you answer this question for us? Where does aluminium in our climbing equipment come from?

Mark Davies: So, Cerys, did a pretty good job. Actually, Africa is one of the places that the raw ore for making aluminium comes from. Aluminium ore is called bauxite, and it's little round marbles, little orange marbles. And it's formed by weathering in tropical regions. So rain washes away the other minerals and you're left with these little balls that contain about 25% aluminium.

Mark Davies: And so most of the world's aluminium is bauxite, is mined in either West Africa, northern Australia or Brazil.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay, nice.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay, so well done, Cerys. Smashed it. And how does aluminium compare to some of the other metals that we've been talking about on this podcast, particularly steel and iron?

Mark Davies: So the real advantage of aluminium is that it is very light for how strong it is. And it's also very corrosion resistant. And probably the biggest example is actually, aviation and space. You know, since World War II, every plane that you would have been in, every rocket ship, would have been made of aluminium because of this combination of strength, but lightweight.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Right, aluminium itself, in the story of metals, we're talking here about climbing equipment, it's relatively young, isn't it? We haven't known about it for that long.

Mark Davies: It's very young as an actual metal actually, probably similar timing to the climbing story. So the aluminium salts were used back in history. The Romans used aluminium salts to preserve wood, but actually making it into a metal is really like an 1880s type invention.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: 1880s. Okay, so we started making, what were their first?

Mark Davies: Yeah, look, the first recorded examples of aluminium were probably in Napoleonic times. It was utensils, really, it was very initially, utensils. When aluminium really took off, it was probably in around World War II. And in the aftermath, the sort of Cold War, a lot of new aluminium processing facilities were built.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Got you. So that was really the point when it started taking off. And then it was aeroplanes and later spacecraft. And what else do we use it for today?

Mark Davies: So today, your laptop, your, your cans, but actually, it's growing a lot in cars. So because it's a lot lighter weight than the alternative metals, and, if, if you replace 1 kilo of a heavier metal with aluminium, over the life of the car, you probably save 20 kilos of CO2. And so over the last 10 years, they've gone from like 170 kilos of aluminium to about 230 kilos of aluminium. So there's a quite a big step up in use in, in, the automotive sector. Still used in aeroplanes and buildings. So most of your window frames and doors, there'll be aluminium, once again, light and strong.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, I've got a bit of materials hypothesis that I want to run by you all and this has to do with temperature, and particularly how cold we can use these different metals. So, Cerys, firstly, I want to ask you, when you were up Everest, or maybe some of your other climbs, what was the coldest sort of temperatures that you were walking in?

Cerys Matthews: Oh, gosh, not that cold. I often think about cold climbing, you know, there's some classic stories of the past, where you read about these climbers stuck on the bottom of the hemp rope in minus temperatures. And I just can't imagine handling frozen rope with frozen hands and the exposure in the wind and stuff. Because I've not been lower than probably, I don't know, freezing point or something. No, I've been a very fair weather climber. Overall, though, during winter time when it gets freezing. This is, this is, even inside the indoor gyms, those handles can get quite cold. And then I'm thinking what, what a poor, what a fair weather the person that I am complaining about indoor climbing handles.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Even freezing temperatures is very cold. So I don't really consider you a fair weather climber. But I take the point that you know, certainly not subzero temperatures, but this point around zero degrees Celsius. That kind of freezing point is a really interesting temperature for materials. Because in the early equipment that would have been made out of iron and steel, iron and steel is actually not very good at temperatures around freezing and below. It becomes extremely brittle. There's a concept in materials called the brittle to ductile transition temperature, which is when you cool steel down around zero degrees or so. Below that point it becomes very, very brittle and actually this was one of the key problems as to why the Titanic disaster was so disastrous, was that the hull of the Titanic was submerged in water that we as we know, it was very, very cold. There were icebergs frozen seawater around. And when it hit the iceberg, it was below its brittle to ductile transition temperature. So it basically caused it to shatter a bit like glass. Rather than denting if it was any warmer, it would have sort of dented and potentially not been quite so disastrous.

Cerys Matthews: And zero degrees is not that cold, is it?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: It's not that cold. And I'm sure some of the early climbers with their iron and steel components would have been below that temperature. So that's another added element of danger.

Nigel Buckley: There's quite a lot of stories of people being on the north face of the Eiger. So on Eiger, you could be with, two ice axes two technical short ice axes, and crampons with front points. And there are stories of people getting stuck because both of their axes are broken on the ice, and the crampons and then they're left just hanging around on a, on a, ledge waiting for rescue. Even, you know, in the in the 70s people waiting for helicopters to come and get them.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Oh my gosh, wow.

Nigel Buckley: They can't progress because everything's broken.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: That sounds terrifying. Well, I mean, the good news about aluminium is that it doesn't have this brittle to ductile transition. So that's one key reason as to why not only because it's more lightweight and easy to carry, but also that it doesn't have this weakness that when it gets cold, it becomes brittle and more likely to break.

Mark Davies: Which is just as well when you're sitting on the aeroplane and it says minus 65 outside.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Right. Good point.

Cerys Matthews: Good point.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So back to you, Mark, you told us about these little orange balls of aluminium that we find inside, inside, rocks in the, in the, ground, what's the process of taking those orange balls and turning it into an aeroplane?

Mark Davies: Well, it's quite a long process, there's quite a number of steps. But it actually starts off by, we mine those small balls. Now, it's typically, you know, quite shallow, you'd normally remove a small amount of topsoil, and you store that, so that you can reclaim the site afterwards. And then it's 2 or 3 metres of these small rocks that you scrape up with diggers and put it into trucks and then ships to move it to the next stage. And then the next stage of the process is actually where we dissolve those rocks in hot caustic soda at pressure. And so the idea there is that the bauxite is made up of a mixture of aluminium oxide, and a bunch of other stuff. And you want to separate the aluminium oxide out. So you dissolve it in this hot caustic soda. You filter off the mud, the red mud, and then you precipitate the aluminium oxide out. And then you bake the aluminium oxide to drive the moisture off and you're left with a powder that looks a little bit like flour or castor sugar...

Mark Davies: ...when that's aluminium oxide, and that's sort of one process that's called refining, alumina refining. And you take that alumina and then you move it to a smelter, and the smelter is typically somewhere where you have lots of cheap electricity because aluminium in many ways is frozen electricity. You know, the process to produce it requires very, very significant amounts of electricity. So you then dissolve that alumina in a cryolite, which is another mineral and pass an electric current through it. And then it sits within a big steel carbon lined cell. And the aluminium settles at the bottom and then you drain that and cast it into ingots. And then those ingots will go away, they'll be alloyed, they'll be rolled and rolled into sheet, which will then be folded lots of, lots of, lots of, little folds and turned into an aeroplane.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And turned into an aeroplane. Amazing. So there's sort of chemical process at the start to refine the aluminium oxide and then an electrochemical process that gets us the metal itself. And then you can process that afterwards.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay.

Mark Davies: The biggest environmental footprint with aluminium is its carbon footprint, because you lose so much electricity. Unless you're losing green electricity or hydropower or renewables, you have a very large carbon footprint. So the average carbon footprint around the world is about 12 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of aluminium. Now, if you're making it with coal fired power, that's about 18 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of aluminium. If you're making it with pure renewables. So we have we have a massive hydropower system in Canada, where we make the most of our aluminium. So even with zero carbon electricity, because you use a carbon anode in the electrochemical process, you still get about 2 and a bit tonnes of CO2 per tonne of aluminium.

Mark Davies: Okay, so the chemistry of the process, it has, it gives off CO2. Is it ever possible to make completely carbon neutral aluminium?

Mark Davies: Yes, we're, we're working, well, we've, well, I hope so.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Amazing.

Mark Davies: That's actually one of our key R&D efforts. This ELYSIS technology, in collaboration actually working with the Government of Quebec and Alcoa and the Government of Canada and Apple. And what happens in that is that we replaced that carbon anode with an inert anode. And so we put the electricity through you get aluminium and you get oxygen coming off instead of now...

Cerys Matthews: Nice.

Mark Davies: ...this has been the holy grail for the aluminium industry.

Cerys Matthews: It sounds like a secret thing. Are you allowed to tell us?

Mark Davies: I, I, even I.... they, actually, even my team won't tell me what that inert anode made of. It is, it is, very secret. So like, even though the team that works for me, won't tell me what it's made of.

Cerys Matthews: Diamonds.

Mark Davies: Yeah.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: We're gonna say some materials. And we're going to read your facial expressions and see if we can get.

Mark Davies: I don't know if your MacBook has it. But we actually sold the aluminium from that first process to Apple. Yeah, because Apple actually put some money in to help develop this technology. So some MacBooks have this aluminium.

Cerys Matthews: Is it safe for climbing on?

Mark Davies: Yes, yeah, absolutely. So when we sell the raw aluminium, it's sort of like 99.99% pure. To make it into things like planes and carabiners, you alloy it. So you add a little bit of copper or zinc or manganese, then you heat treat it to get the sort of exact properties that you want. And so, actually, you know, one of the reasons that we need to make new aluminium is because when you recycle, some of these alloys build up and you get properties that you may not want.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So what's the negative then, why isn't an all aluminium zero carbon?

Mark Davies: Because we're actually literally only in the middle of inventing this technology as we speak.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay, so it's a pilot project.

Mark Davies: It's a pilot. The other thing that we have to do is that, you know, we have to really build out the world's renewable energy.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So it's a scaling issue, it's also a coordinating issue to make sure that the electricity it is being powered by is coming from sustainable sources as well.

Mark Davies: The amazing thing is if we're going to really move to a zero carbon economy, that we need to transition to renewable energy and renewable energy uses a lot of metals, like I think it's over 6 billion tonnes of metals will be needed between now and, and, and, most of that is going to be aluminium, steel, copper.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Is there a cost aspect to this?

Mark Davies: There will be, yes. Yeah, so primarily, because you do need to rebuild your smelter.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah.

Mark Davies: And a smelter today is several billion dollars. And so they have to have a price incentive that says, you know, we're prepared to pay more for versus regular aluminium.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Right, because I would always love to believe that people are wanting to decarbonise out of the goodness of their heart and, you know, trying to do the right thing. But there must have to be a financial incentive for it to...

Mark Davies: There absolutely is. Now, obviously, the wonderful thing about aluminium is, it's sort of infinitely recyclable. And actually, I think the statistic is that 75% of the aluminium that's ever been made, is still in circulation, because we just keep recycling it.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Wow.

Mark Davies: Now, as I said, you typically you can't use that recycled for everything. But we are actually doing research on how you can make alloys that are more tolerant of contaminant. [music interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So, Cerys, I would like to transport you to an imagined future in which we can't find any more bauxite in which there is no more aluminium in which there are no more carabiner clips. What would life without your beloved climbing equipment look like?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I love that. Maybe without it, you'd have to learn how to do all those knots properly, because you'd end up tying things with rope instead of carabiners.

Cerys Matthews: That, that's the point. Once you introduce the carabiner into your life, you don't just use it for climbing. You use it to carry your house keys. You use it to hang your car keys. You use it to hang your hat from your rucksack. I mean, you can't live without carabiners, once you've been introduced to this snap and loop bit of metal. What would I do? I'd probably cry. I know. The thing is the beauty with a carabiner is it's not, it's such a simple design. It's such a small item. But it's such an enabler. And it's also the promise of an adventure all in one little loop of metal. And so just to hold it, makes you feel happy.

Cerys Matthews: And I wouldn't, I wouldn't think Nigel would be in a hurry to climb with me. Santa's bought me a book of knots. I am trying, from this. I know it's important, very. It's, it's, it's fatal not to learn. Literally. I've got, I've got, a question like so if you can't use aluminium, is there another metal that is light and usable for this kind of scenario?

Nigel Buckley: Yeah, we'd carry steel, wouldn't we?

Cerys Matthews: Just steel. Back to the heavy.

Nigel Buckley: Yeah, we just get fitter.

Cerys Matthews: You can carry them.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Maybe, titanium? Titanium is pretty lightweight. It's quite expensive.

Mark Davies: It's, that's even harder to make.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: It's even harder to make. Okay.

Nigel Buckley: I think, you know, climbing is all about making things work with what you've got. I think it's in Czech Republic, where they just tie knots and use those as as protection in cracks, sort of tying knots in some nylon sling and slotting them in. Yeah, it's all about working with what we have.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So then that's not such a scary future after all, but I think we still don't want to live without aluminium.

Nigel Buckley: No, I'll keep it.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Overall, I think we'd like to keep it. So Mark, what's the one thing that needs to happen. What for you would be the key breakthrough that you want to see?

Mark Davies: I look, I'm going to cheat and have give you two things. Yeah. So I think we need to move to zero carbon electricity to start with, because without that, none of our processing is going to be decarbonised. And then, secondly, develop and scale up ELYSIS technology, which is this inert anode. Yeah, those are the two critical steps. There's a lot we need to do in the mining and the refining as well. But those are the ones that will really make a huge difference to the carbon footprint.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And how optimistic are you that we'll get there?

Mark Davies: I'm certainly very optimistic on ELYSIS. And I'm optimistic on renewable energy. And in lots of parts of the world. I just think the challenge is can we go fast enough? And, I think, that requires a real partnership between governments and industry and society to roll out those low carbon renewable energies faster.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Nigel, you've seen the full story of climbing equipment from the start. Is there any where that you're excited to see it go next?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I'm always interested in lighter gear, I think all climbers are. But yeah, if I could buy recycled aluminium climbing equipment. Yeah, certainly. I'm really excited about lots of new people coming into climbing. I think the Olympics and, you know, there are more women climbing in climbing gyms and there are men, which I think it'd be great for, if we want to call it sport or sport or pursuit or whatever it is that we do.

Cerys Matthews: Can I also add it's a great sport to start when you're over 50 as well, because you can continue climbing, especially when you're wearing a harness and a rope until you pop off this mortal coil. And if you like crosswords, it's a great sport.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: You've inspired me. Cerys, what terrifying rock face awaits you next?

Cerys Matthews: Well, I'm currently talking to you with a titanium arm. You mentioned titanium as I broke my arm recently. I'm not climbing. So walking into a library. Go figure.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Oh, well, there's everyone's warning, avoid libraries.

Cerys Matthews: Yeah. So I'm learning in the pursuit of one armed climbing as we speak.

Nigel Buckley: Nice.

Cerys Matthews: Which is interesting. And when, when, it's better, I think I'd like to balance a lot of indoor climbing with, with, more outdoor climbing, you know, because I'm more enthusiastic than expert. I'm still very much at the beginning of my climbing kind of life, I hope. And so Majorca has got some nice routes. I've never climbed funnily enough in Wales, but have climbed in the Alps. And in England, so maybe, maybe Wales is calling too at some point.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Many adventures await you. So we've covered scraping orange balls in remote Australia and dangling in somewhat peril in the Alps. But personally, I'm really excited to hear about the prospect of zero carbon aluminium and personally quite nervously excited about some future mountain adventures for me and hopefully for us all as well. Thank you all so much for sharing your expertise and passions, Cerys Matthews, Nigel Buckley and Mark Davies.

Nigel Buckley: Thank you for having me.

Cerys Matthews: Thanks for having me.

Mark Davies: Thank you for having me.

Cerys Matthews: Lovely to meet you all. [music interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: You can listen to more episodes of Things You Can't Live Without wherever you get your podcasts and don't forget to follow rate and review us to make sure that you don't miss an episode.

–Ends–

Dr Anna Ploszajski: There are some things we simply can't live without for our livelihoods, for our wellbeing, or just getting from A to B. But every item that we bring into our lives, however precious or necessary, is going to have an impact on our planet. I'm material scientist Dr. Anna Ploszajski, and on this podcast, I talk to special guests about the one thing they can't live without. And we take a deep dive with experts to find out the true impact of our obsessions. Joining me today is a Daytime Emmy Award-winning science communicator, podcaster, TV presenter, writer, and food buff. Her comedic science podcast, Ologies, was crowned one of Time Magazine's Top 50 Podcasts. She's a regular face on screen, delighting audiences with science and cooking in equal measure, and she's basically an all-round cool nerd, and believe me, I do not use that term lightly.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: It's Alie Ward!

Alie Ward: Hello! Thank you for having me, I'm so excited!

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Welcome, Alie. It's so lovely to have you here. So, so far on this podcast, I've had guests bring to me electric bikes, prosthetic legs, and the good old-fashioned dictionary to the table as items that they can't live without. But what about you, Alie? What's the thing that you can't live without?

Alie Ward: Well, you know, I guess going backwards a step from a basic homeostasis, I can't live without water, which most of us, from what I understand, cannot. For me, a lot of my water drinking is based on having to incentivise it. And so, I cannot live without this particular mug that I carry around. And I get very emotionally attached to mugs. And this has been my mug for the last couple of years. And I don't drink enough water if I don't have it, which could kill me.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay. So, it is literally a lifeline.

Alie Ward: It's a lifeline.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: You would perish without it.

Alie Ward: I find every other cup inferior. And so, every time I go to drink water in my house, it's a compromise, unless it's in this cup, which the more I talk about it, the more embarrassing it gets. It gets weirder and weirder.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So your insulated reusable cup is the item that you can't live without, Alie. But to take us through how it came about. Both in the historical sense and the material sense. This episode we're joined by chemist and broadcaster Andrea Sella and Marie-Pierre Paquin, Chief Advisor of Discovery from Rio Tinto. Welcome to you both.

Marie-Pierre Paquin: Hi Anna.

Andrea Sella: Hi Anna.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So we're going to turn to you two shortly but for the benefit of our listeners, who don’t have the privilege of visuals on your beautiful cup. Alie, can you describe this thing of beauty to us.

Alie Ward: So, it is a metal cup with a ceramic glaze, I think, around it, but the core is stainless steel and the magic of it is that it's insulated. I drink my water very cold. And, when I really fell in love with this cup was when I had a quick business trip and my car was parked for 36 hours in LA, where it tends to be very hot, and I came back and I still had ice in it with no top and we had a bonding moment at that time. But I hated this cup originally. This was my least favourite cup I owned for a while.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Why? How come? How did you first come about it?

Alie Ward: Well, it was a gift. It was a promotional gift on a production I had worked on. They gave one to everyone and it had our names engraved in it, which was very nice. And the logo of the company, it was one of those like swag things that you always feel kind of guilty getting because a lot of times you don't need them. Water bottles tend to be pretty rampant. Tote bags, those kinds of things, pens. But it had my name on it, like laser engraved into it, but they had put my full name, which is Alison, which, no one calls me Alison. Like if my parents call me Alison, I'm concerned. Maybe the dentist and the DMV that's on. So, it had the name Alison written in it. And so, every time I saw it, I, I felt like I was getting reprimanded. And so, it was in the back of the cupboard and it's not an item you can donate because who wants a mug with someone else's name on it? And I felt bad about it because it's a resource, it's an item. And so, I carved Ali out of the Alison. I was able to take an Exacto knife and carve Ali W, plastered it with some vinyl stickers, and then I was like: okay, now there's a spark. Now there's some, I guess, some chemistry if you will.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So how long have you actually had it for?

Alie Ward: I want to say eight years, eight years.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Oh my God. Okay. That's way longer than I thought you were going to say.

Alie Ward: Right. I mean, I'm, I'm, uh, I guess I'm cup monogamous for the long term, but I think I've only been using it for about three to four years.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: There was a cupboard period of which we don't talk about anymore.

Alie Ward: I think we bonded during COVID. I think options were limited.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Makes sense. Andrea, I'd love to bring you in here. We've talked about mugs keeping things hot, mugs keeping things cold. Can you talk to us about the vacuum flask? Because this is a variation on that. So, give us a bit of the flavour of the history of the vacuum flask. How did it first come about?

Andrea Sella: I mean, the vacuum flask is an amazing thing and I have loads of them today. I suppose you'd call it double glazing instead of having a kind of container, which has single wall. So, you have this double walled thing, which has a vacuum, which has an empty space. The thing is, then you have to understand how it is, that warmth can be transferred from one place to another. So, the first thing is, and this is a law of thermodynamics that was identified, heat energy always flows from hot things to cold. And so, if you think about an ordinary mug, you make a cup of hot coffee or tea and if you hold it after a moment, it's scalding hot, right? And the reason is that essentially, you know, this whole thing is made of assemblies of atoms, one jostles the next one and so when it's hot it moves more, so it causes the next one to jostle and that causes the next one to jostle, right? And here I'm quite interested by Alie's story about her ice in the cup because she said something about not having a lid on the top and that the ice was still maintained and that's quite interesting because if you have something cold Typically, if you cool things down, they contract, and typically, if you warm them up, they expand. And that gives you a way of transferring energy around. Because imagine you have some air in contact with the hot drink, well, it'll be warmed up by the contact. And then, because it's now expanded, it then moves upwards. And one of the things that you want to factor in is, you know, if you're drinking coffee or tea, what temperature do you drink it at? And the interesting thing is that, actually, we drink that in that sort of 50 to 60 degrees Celsius range. And so, these highly insulated cups, if you put the lid on them, you make the tea, you put the hot drink in there, and then you've got a problem is that the stuff is too hot for too long. And so actually people often will take the lid, will take the lid off initially, and then they put the lid back on.

Alie Ward: Ha! Yes!

Andrea Sella: And at that point, the cooling rate drops off. It levels out. And now you can hold it there for a long time.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Alie, has that answered all the questions you ever wanted to know?

Alie Ward: Yes. These are things I think about all the time. These are mysteries of my daily life. I wake up and I confront boggling questions about the very thing I need to survive.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Well, from solving life's great mysteries to, um, to zooming in and, and thinking about the, the physicality of this object, let's get back to the bug and the materials that it's made from. But to take us through the steps that go into sourcing, producing, making that steel for your flask, all those atoms that had to be assembled to create that object. We are now gonna turn to Marie-Pierre Paquin from Rio Tinto, to take us through that. So welcome Marie-Pierre.

Marie-Pierre Paquin: Hi Anna. Hi everyone. Very happy to be here.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So, steel is an alloy of iron, mostly, but with a very small amount of carbon in it. And to make it stainless, the special type of steel that we have in our mug, we have to add chromium and nickel to the mix as well. So, there's four elements from the periodic table there, iron, carbon, chromium, and nickel. That sounds like quite a lot of ingredients to have to bring together, to source from different places, and melt together to make this material. So, can you take us through where these ingredients in Alie's mug might have come from?

Marie-Pierre Paquin: All of it comes initially from iron ore. And then there's two major processes to convert this iron ore into iron. So, that's the first step, getting to the iron part. So, this is a very, uh, energy-intensive process. So, in the case of the mug, you would probably roll a slab to produce a steel sheet, which will then be formed into a pipe. And then the pipe would be used as the basis for the, to the interior and the exterior of the mug. You would kind of form them using the pressure of water. So, you would, put the pipe in some kind of a mould and inject water at very high pressure inside of it. So, it would take the shape of the mould and you would do that with different moulds for the inside and the outside of your mug, which will be, like, assembled later on together with the welding and then getting the vacuum and painting it a nice colour and then being able to, to use it.

Alie Ward: And I, this is such a recipe, I cannot imagine being near a molten metal furnace and being like, let's add a little nickel. What happens if we put 0.15? You know, percent carbon? Who came up with this?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: All of knowledge from steel comes from the knowledge of blacksmiths, you know, centuries of blacksmiths who worked with this stuff with their hands and chemists and material scientists are then built on that knowledge to, to industrialise it and to make all sorts of other things.

Marie-Pierre Paquin: Well, the, the long story, so steel has been around for quite a while. Uh, but it was mostly made like, uh, with a small batch, very expensive, not scalable process until the 19th century where Bessemer invented this new process where it greatly reduced the cost of steelmaking at that point. And that was like the ancestor of the current blast furnace. So that was the, I would say infancy, of the industrialisation of steel making. So, they got to those recipe that fits the purpose of steel. Steel is a very versatile, uh, metal or alloy, I should say.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So, Alie, did you have any idea how much prior knowledge and how much artistry had gone into the stainless steel of your mug?

Alie Ward: I knew it was magic. I mean, I knew that there was so much magic and molecules. And I think that's what I love about science communication, too, is like, some people don't think that they're science people or science minded, but just think of the thing you love the most. And there's so much background and context and science and tinkering and so many hands and minds went into having that thing in your life. I do have a question though, and this is something that I've seen in the news recently that some cups, vacuum sealed stainless steel mugs, will have a lead plug in them and people are very worried about that. How are they sealing that vacuum? Is there a plug in there like a bicycle tire? What's going on?

Andrea Sella: When you make them out of glass, you know, you have a glass blower and what they will do is they will hook up, they will build it with a glass tube and then they'll heat it up with a torch. The whole thing's under vacuum, heat it up, melt it.ut how it's done with the, with the steel ones, I assume that there is some kind of plug, but remember it's on, it'll be on the outside. It won't be inside. Inside the mug. Right? So, one thing that has happened, you know, over the last 20 years is that as, as lead has become progressively less fashionable. Because of, you know, lead in gasoline, petrol, whatever. And so, the amount of lead in most solders is very, very low. So, they're, they're, you know, very high in tin. And then they have a little bit of something else. I wouldn't worry unduly.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: We can all sleep easy then.

Alie Ward: Yeah, I still, I still accept my mug with open arms and mouth.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So, we've heard a lot then about the kind of complexities of the processes that go into making these materials and these objects that we love so much. Alie, I'm now going to transport you to a horrifying future world in which vacuum cups no longer exist. What would that be like for you?

Alie Ward: Thirsty. It would be dehydrated. Because my problem is I like my water really cold. And in a regular glass cup, it gets too warm too fast. If I see ice melting and floating in a cup, I'm, uh, so yeah, I would be so thirsty. I would have to pack up from Southern California and move to an area with only glacial water. And I would just have to lap from a glacier. It's the only way I can survive. So, we better keep it together. People better not melt this world too fast.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: On that very thing. I think I see the impact of steel being both positive and negative. So, of course, steel has allowed us to build our modern world. Okay, like roads, railways, structures like bridges and skyscrapers, cars, ships, all of these things need steel. But the negative impact of steel is the climate side, right? The steel industry contributes 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions and that carbon dioxide can go on to become a greenhouse gas to warm the planet and eventually melt those glaciers. So, I want to turn back to you now, Marie-Pierre, to take us through: what do we need to do so that we will have future generations that can enjoy vacuum flasks as much as we have?

Marie-Pierre Paquin: So, there's a lot of things we can do to seal, but fundamentally We've been using more or less a similar process over the last century to produce steel and one of the reason we've been doing that is because it's super efficient. So, the step is you take natural gas. You separate the carbon and the hydrogen and you use a CO gas and the hydrogen that is generated from that splitting of the molecule to do the reduction inside a solid, a reactor with solid iron ore.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay. So, just to compare that to the traditional processes that we've talked about, traditional blast furnaces react iron ore with solid carbon called coke, which produces molten iron and lots and lots of carbon dioxide gas, right? That's the chemical reaction. You're saying that if we use natural gas instead of solid coke as our source of carbon, the hydrogen in the natural gas can extract iron from the solid iron ore, and that process won't produce so much carbon dioxide. But the thing about natural gas is that it's a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. So, is there anything that we can do about that?

Marie-Pierre Paquin: If we're going one step further, I'm sure you can, you can guess where I'm going, but instead of using a mixture of CO and hydrogen, why don't we use only hydrogen to do the reduction?o, that is one way that is currently being studied very heavily and being scaled up at a different scale to prove that it's possible to be industrialised. There's some challenge with that approach. One of the challenges, the fact that the reaction between hydrogen and the iron oxide is endothermic. So that means that it needs heat to happen, on the contrary when you were using the carbon to do the reduction where it would generate heat. So, you have to find a way to put the heat in the reactor, which is not coming from the reaction. So, you would need some other way to preheat the gas or to preheat the material before doing the reaction.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Right – but you could imagine a future where you get that heat from a sustainable resource, right? It wouldn't have to come from a more carbon heavy heat source.

Marie-Pierre Paquin: Absolutely. Absolutely. There's many ways we could generate that heat. So, using renewable electricity, for example, would be one way to get that heat into the process.

Dr Anna Ploszajski What about just putting it all in a vacuum flask? That would mean that you could keep it, keep it hot.

Marie-Pierre Paquin: That's an idea. So Alie, one question, how much would you be willing to pay? Let's say you lose the mug, you lose it, you need to replace it. How much more would you be willing to pay for one that is made out of green steel versus one which is made out of regular steel?

Alie Ward: Oh, that's a great question. I was just going to ask if they can recycle steel or not. I think the typical market value of the tumbler that I have is $22, is what the retail price is. I would pay, myself, knowing how much I use it, I would say like 100 - 150, knowing how much I use it and knowing that it was going to have that kind of longevity. I think a big part of that also depends on are you going to lose it and do you need to put an AirTag on it or insure it.

Marie-Pierre Paquin: Okay, so I have two good news for you, Alie. So steel is one of the most recyclable product that we have. So, a lot of steel is recycled. So, that's one way to very like reduce the emission. The recycling, recycled steel is, is, is very like much less carbon intensive than like primary steel. So, if you have to recycle, like that's a very good move because it will really impact the, uh, the greenhouse gas emission. The second good news I have for you is that you probably wouldn't have to pay a $100 for your green steel mug. The interesting thing is for a mug like yours, it's a few grams of steel that is used into the production of your mug. So, let's say we, we increase the cost of producing green steel compared to regular steel by, let's put a big number, $500 per tonne. So even if we were to increase the cost of steel by $500, that would mean a very minimal impact on your mug in terms of increased costs.

Alie Ward: On the topic of recycling, let's say that I, my mug and I had a breakup. Let's say that, I got a mug that I no longer could stand to look at, can you just drop it off at the recycling centre? Could you put it in your recycling bin? Where does that go?

Andrea Sella: So, I mean, one of the interesting things is that there is, uh, there's a whole underbelly to our society that we're often, I think, unaware of. And that is scrap merchants. Builders come around with old bathtubs, old boilers. All kinds of stuff. And in the UK, certainly in recent years, if you leave a bathtub out in your front garden or something, it'll suddenly vanish overnight and somebody comes by because this stuff has value and, you know, of course they can get it for free. So, you know, actually there is, there are plentiful opportunities and what really we need to do is to make sure that it becomes. easy for people to do this, right? That, that in a sense, our, uh, recycling networks kind of become better at that.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Marie-Pierre, finally, if there's one thing that you think will change steel and how it's used and how it's going to appear in our lives in the future, what will be the thing that you're waiting to see that will get you really excited?

Marie-Pierre Paquin: I think what will get me really excited is when we find a low temperature reduction process that gives us iron, good quality iron, without the use of carbon, that can deflect with renewable power at a very low capital cost. So, that's a lot to ask for, but when I get that, I'll be super happy.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: We can dream big. Andrea, has our discussion made you look a bit differently at your beloved vacuum flasks?

Andrea Sella: You know, it's interesting. I mean, I have, I have quite a strong emotional attachment to glass vacuum flasks. I mean, I, I, I just find your flask, they're, they're things of beauty. I use them every day. I love them. Um, I've never had quite the same emotional attachment to the, the, the steel ones.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Alie, how about you? What's next for you and your trusty flask?

Alie Ward: You know, I'm definitely tracking my water these days because I'm really trying, in collaboration with my mug, to get an adequate amount of water because I think it's really funny how much people are sold moisturisers and, uh, and other things when really, oh, we're just really thirsty, so. I'm trying to make sure that my water to tea ratio, my chai tea, is nice and healthy.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Thank you all so much for your contributions to our discussions today. We've gone from beloved mugs to hopefully a future full of green steel so that generations to come can enjoy the delight that comes from a vacuum flask full of ice. This has been Things You Can't Live Without with me, Dr. Anna Ploszajski. You can listen to more episodes of Things You Can't Live Without wherever you get your podcasts and don't forget to follow, rate, and review us to make sure that you don't miss an episode.

–Ends–

Dr Anna Ploszajski: We're back with another episode of Things You Can't Live Without, the science podcast where I, material scientist Dr Anna Ploszajski, ask my guests to reveal the single item that they can't live without. We're interested in how this stuff came into existence. From mining to processing to making it. And we'll be accompanied on this journey by a host of experts who are going to be helping us with all the behind-the-scenes science that goes into creating the everyday. They'll also help us to gaze into the future to answer the question, if we can't live without this stuff, then what are we prepared to change in order to live with it sustainably? Today, I'm honoured to have with me Buddha Lo. For the cooking enthusiasts amongst us, Buddha needs no introduction. Born in Australia, he began working in the kitchen of his dad's restaurant when he was just 12 years old. He's worked in Michelin star restaurants across the globe and founded some of his own. In 2022, he became a contestant in the American TV series Top Chef, which he went on to win, not once, but twice, the first person ever to do so. Buddha, welcome to Things You Can't Live Without.

Buddha Lo: Hi Anna. Thank you so much for having me.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I'm so excited to talk to you. And I imagine you're somebody who knows their way around a kitchen. You've got a kitchen gadget or two, I'm certain. But tell us, of all of those, what's the one item you can't live without?

Bhudda Lo: Anna, the one item I can't live without is salt. You'll find that in every single kitchen all around the world. And just like my kitchen, I cannot live without it.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Such a basic ingredient. Everyone has it in their kitchen. Why is it so ubiquitous around the world?

Bhudda Lo: Salt is a flavour enhancer. It's so important that it just brings out natural flavours and just makes things just taste so much better. But not only that, it's also something that we need to survive on. We literally cannot live without salt.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yes, you can't, we can't, we all need it in our lives. It's an interesting material, this one, because all of the materials we've featured on this podcast so far have been finite resources in some way, but salt is a bit different, because thanks to our oceans, we could be fairly safe in the knowledge, at least in the short to medium term, that we're never going to run out of salt. But having said that, the practice of extracting and processing salt, of course, takes some form of energy, so it doesn't get to escape our scrutiny when it comes to sustainability and pushing for net zero. And as we're going to find out, salt is integral, not just to the kitchen, but also is a fundamental ingredient in many industrial processes behind-the-scenes that are making materials, making stuff for our world as well. To tell us more about all of that and more is Rio Tinto's Chief Advisor of Process Development, Amy Lamb. Hi, Amy. Nice to meet you.

Amy Lamb: Hi, Anna.

Bhudda Lo: Hi, Amy.

Amy Lamb: Thank you for having me.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Welcome, Amy. I'm so excited to talk to you about how we get from sea to salt. But first, Bhudda, I'd love to hear, I guess, a bit of your personal journey with this special ingredient.

Bhudda Lo: Well, like you said, it's something that people need in their diets, but it's so important. I mean, I literally have my career hanging on this one, one particular item. If I under season it, I'm going to be told that, that's not correct. If I over season it, it's not going to be correct. So, so it is so important. I cannot create food without it.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So, what are all the ways that you use salt in the kitchen?

Bhudda Lo: We use it literally for every single thing that we cook. The golden rule for us in the kitchen is actually I learned that when I was, when I was an apprentice in a hotel, I under seasoned something or I didn't put salt in particular stocks or broths or water. So yeah, he would say salt everything, including your water. That is something that has been ingrained in me into making sure that, everything is seasoned. So, you're going to find salt in every part of the kitchen.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I love that. I'm going to start doing this as well. Just putting little pots of salt all over. Although my kitchen is much smaller than yours, I'm sure.

Bhudda Lo: Yeah. I live in New York City, so it's pretty small.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Oh yeah, fair enough. I meant your work kitchen.

Bhudda Lo: Oh, my work kitchen. Oh, even work kitchens in New York City is pretty small, so, yeah. [music interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I was given a gift recently, which was, a friend of mine had come back from holiday and she gave me a gift of salt, funnily enough. And, it was four little pots of it. One of them was black with activated carbon in it. One of them was pink with something else in it and all these different types. Is that a real thing? You know, how different are different types of salt?

Bhudda Lo: As a chef and cooking, or every single day, I don't actually use other different types of salts. I don't find that the impact of it is going to change it to a different level. I guess what would probably change things is actually more salts from different natural ingredients. Maybe something that has been salted. Soy sauce, maybe anchovies or cheese. I find like the salinity that you get from, you know, these sort of processes is actually far greater than, than the different, types of salts that are out there. But yeah, that's in, in kitchens, we'd never go, hey, pass us the volcanic salt, you know, it's not going to change your life, you know.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: You mentioned sweet dishes earlier. I've got an incredibly sweet tooth and I love salty, salty and sweet together.

Bhudda Lo: Yeah.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And I actually, my sort of main, I guess, encounter with salt is actually as a sea swimmer. I spent a lot of time doing long distance open water swimming in the sea, which is a very salty environment. And so I went down this sort of research rabbit hole a little while ago about like, have you heard of Battenberg cake?

Bhudda Lo: It's the cake with the, squares…

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, that's right.

Bhudda Lo: …inside of it?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Pink, yeah, pink and yellow squares with marzipan around the outside. I found this research that showed that there's a receptor, it regulates how it communicates with the outside world. And what it does is it transports sugars into cells, but only when sodium is present. And this was found on the sweet taste buds on mice. So, basically, what this finding was saying was that these sweet taste buds would only kind of trigger a feeling or a flavour of sweetness to the mouse in the presence of sodium, which is salt.

Bhudda Lo: Yeah. And I believe that, uh, I, I think I was learning that it opens the taste buds as soon as the salt touches your tongue. It opens your taste buds and it allows more flavour to come in and I don't think life is worth living unless you're tasting the maximum flavour so.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I want that on a t-shirt. I love that. Amy, I'd love to turn to you and ask you, do you have any, either kind of salty mishaps or do you feel particularly strongly about any unconventional uses of salt, like in tea or coffee or even unsalted butter? Where do you stand on this?

Amy Lamb: I actually will admit I've never tried salt in my coffee, so I'll have to give that a go sometime. See, see how that changes the flavour of my cappuccino in the morning. But I did have a salty mishap once. I brined a turkey for Thanksgiving one year. So, after brining the turkey, you had the juices, and of course you make gravy with the juices from the turkey. Not realising the salt content, I didn't taste it beforehand, and I ended up with very salty gravy, so I ended up using instant gravy for my Thanksgiving feast, which I was not, I was not happy about, but, I did, lesson is very much learned, when brining meat, the juices are very salty, so be careful how you use them.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: That's a very good lesson to learn. I'm sure you won't make that mistake again, and I'm glad you were able to salvage it with, you know, some instant in the cupboard. [music interlude]

So Bhudda, you've beautifully explained, you know, the significance of salt to the art and the craft of cooking. And I looked up, you know, where the word salt comes from, it's actually from the Latin word, sal. And funnily enough, the word salary, you know, like paycheck, comes from the same word for salt. It relates to the fact that the Roman soldiers were given monetary wages in order that they could go and buy salt. So, it was seen as like such a, an important and integral ingredient for them that they had, you know, their wage packet to cover it. It's amazing when you start looking into it, that salt is not only important for our health and for, you know, the enjoyment of food. But it's also a surprisingly integral part to making loads of industrial processes happen and loads of materials that we, that we use, things like glass, like most glass that we have, the sorts of glass that you would have in a restaurant to, to drink from, for example, that's a type of glass called soda lime glass, and the soda part of that is sodium from sodium chloride. Similarly, with like plastics like PVC, polyvinyl chloride, the chloride part of that comes from sodium chloride. And the biggest use. Probably the one that people will think of the most is in de-icing and making sure the roads are safe in the wintertime. So, we have, we have a huge amount to be grateful for with salt, not just for deliciousness, but also for, for, you know, loads of the materials in our material world. Going back to the de-icing usage, salt changes the freezing temperature of water, but it also changes the boiling temperature, right? And that, that's a common use in the kitchen, isn't it? How do you use it to kind of modify boiling temperature?

Bhudda Lo: Yeah, so that's very interesting as you're saying it. As you're saying it, I was like, the heating and the cooling of adding salt to water, it's really weird because it does, and I'm hoping that you could probably explain it a little bit more, but yeah, the temperature of water is 100 degrees boiling, but when it goes, when it has salt in it, it does increase to about, I believe, about 107, maybe 110. You know, you want to keep that process. If you're cooking a vegetable, the salt is also going into the vegetable and that will season the inside of it. And that's the best way to do it because you do want salt to penetrate vegetables and make sure that it's seasoned all the way through. Once you then put it into ice water, it doesn't make sense, to just put it in bland water.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Ah, so, so what are you using that ice water for, for, for cooling things down quickly, did you say?

Bhudda Lo: Yeah, so, main, mainly vegetables, but we would, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever that we're cooking, yeah, we would, we would, use that salted water for it.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Ah, okay. Interesting. I'm going to start doing that. So, you asked a bit about the kind of chemistry of it. Now as you and listeners will know, as we've already said, a salt dissolves in water. To understand why salt alters the boiling point of water, we first need to understand what water is. So water is H2O, right hydrogen and oxygen. The shape of the water molecule is a V shape. And really importantly, this shape means that one side of a water molecule is slightly positively charged where the hydrogens are. And the other side is more negatively charged where the oxygen is, when water is just water with nothing else added to it, there are attractive forces between the positive sides and the negative sides of water molecules. You can maybe imagine them a little bit they're like tiny magnets swimming around. What's happening chemically when you add salt to the party, is that salt’s chemical name is sodium chloride, sodium and chlorine. When salt dissolves in water, it becomes charged sodium and chlorine ions which are floating around between the water molecules which as I've said themselves have a slightly positive and negative sides to them. So, what ends up happening is that the charged sodium and chlorine ions are attracted to the charged sides of the water molecules. These attractions are much stronger than the forces between the water molecules themselves. Boiling water happens when water molecules are given enough heat energy to break the attractive forces between them and they can go flying off to make a gas. But when there's salt in the water, the water molecules are effectively held back by the charges between them and the salt ions in the liquid. This means that the water molecules need more heat energy in order to break away which is why the boiling point of water rises when salt is added. So salt is integral to making loads of our everyday materials. I mentioned rubber and glass textiles, paper, and it's also really important to food into our bodies. It's now time to bring in Amy Lamb to tell us more about where it comes from. You know, this is such a precious material. Where does salt come from, Amy?

Amy Lamb: Basically, salt comes from two different sources, either from rocks as in the form of rock salt, or from the sea as, from sea salt. Sea salt is basically the evaporation of water, from sea water. to crystallise the salt and then pretty much it's dug up and washed and then sold on as product from our salt operations. Rock salts on the other hand comes from underground. So, these have been formed over millions and millions of years. It’s basically, again, it's the same evaporation process of seawater. But it's done over a long period of time, and you get large deposits of salts underground. And so. You end up, mining the, the salt, from underground. They generally do need a purification step at some stage.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And what sort of scale are we talking here? How big are these processes?

Amy Lamb: Uh, depends on the operation. Uh, if, if you look at Rio Tinto's, Damper Salt operation, we use the sea, that sea salt. So, we pump seawater, into evaporation ponds and we have the capacity to produce about 10 million tonnes of salt a year.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: That sounds like quite a lot.

Amy Lamb: It is quite a lot. And, and to give, put it in perspective, that is equivalent to evaporating 19,500 hectares of water each year.

Bhudda Lo: Amy, when you say evaporation ponds, how's it, how's it getting evaporated? What sort of process do you use for that?

Amy Lamb: That's another one. It's probably one of the first renewable processes used because it uses the sun's heat and wind to evaporate the water. Now, as you can imagine, it takes a long time for that. And the reason you need so much space is because you can't, you don't want to have very deep ponds. So, you want to have, they're, they're actually quite shallow.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay, so you, so you need a lot of space and need a lot of sun and warmth. I imagine you don't do this where I live in London. Where is it done?

Amy Lamb: No, you do need a little bit of space and Australia has plenty. So, our Dampier Salt operation is in, is along the coast of Western Australia. Another interesting thing about the Dampier Salt operation is that it's actually been identified as a key biodiversity area for, by Bird Life Australia, because we have migratory birds that come and feast on the invertebrates that are in these ponds, it's actually quite an ecological phenomenon for these sites. So even though we're, we have 27,000 football fields worth of salt ponds, they are part of the ecosystem.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So once you've scraped it off the bottom of your evaporation pools, what happens next? How does it then get processed?

Amy Lamb: So, we, we basically assess the quality of the salt and depending on the quality will determine which customer it's best suited for.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I always think of salt when we're talking about a kind of industrial usage. Salt is very pesky when it comes to interacting with other materials, especially steel and iron. You know, salt is a, it's a real accelerant to the rusting process, to corrosion. So, is that something that when you're, when you're using salt on industrial scales with industrial equipment that you have to take into account?

Amy Lamb: Absolutely, as, as anyone who's had to drive over iced roads, you do actually witness that corrosiveness as well on your cars. So, yes, in processing, processing, with salt, you do need to adjust the processing methodologies for that corrosive behaviour. So corrosive resistant materials such as stainless steel, obviously regular maintenance and the coating of equipment parts is key to that. Also, corrosiveness also increases the energy consumption in a plant. So, you end up using more energy in your heat exchangers and evaporators if you do have corrosion going on.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Oh, okay.

Amy Lamb: So, absolutely, it's preventing corrosion in the first instance is, is quite key to the efficiency of processing salt.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Bhudda, did you have any other, any questions about the kind of industrial processing of salt? Did you have any idea that your salt was coming from these sorts of places?

Bhudda Lo: Well, I think that salt, especially with well, you know, we're talking about sea salt and rock salt and, just how, like, how the sea actually really flavour enhances the world, really. I mean, I'm thinking about seaweeds and kombus and stuff like that. That's like, you know, I'm not sure if it would be in the same sort of topic, but MSG, it is a sodium, but it is a complete different sort of flavour enhancer out there. And that typically that would come from seaweed, kombu. So we're looking at two of our biggest flavour enhancers coming from the sea. So, it's very interesting just listening to the process of how things were done, how salt's collected. I'm from Australia. So, it's a massive island surrounded by the sea and it's a lot of land. So, it makes a lot of sense. And it just makes me think about how at one stage, you know, with 10 million tonnes of salt, I mean, you could possibly be one of the most richest people on the, on the earth at one stage, right?

Amy Lamb: Absolutely. I think, to put it into perspective, you know, the salt production in 2022 was 290 million tonnes. And, so, the 10 million tonnes that Rio Tinto produced is only a drop in the bucket, really.

Bhudda Lo: Would those salts that they use for the roads still be able to be consumed or would you say that's not edible?

Amy Lamb: No, that's a lower quality. Yeah, that's a lower quality salt and hasn't gone through the same purification processes that table salt has gone through.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, super interesting. Buddha I'm going to now transport you into a terrible world I'm afraid. It's a theoretical world. You're not going anywhere, but I would like for you to imagine that industrial scale salt processing is no longer viable. You still live in your apartment in New York City. What lengths are you going to go to, to source your own?

Bhudda Lo: We're going to have to be able to not just be able to just use it for salting water and anymore, it would, you would have to use that. And, and it'll be just like using truffle or caviar, you know, it's something that's very, there's not a great amount of it. So, but you pay a lot of, you're going to have to pay a lot more for it. So, using that salt was going to taste I wouldn't say better, but when you do get that bit of salt, you're going to be like, wow, this changed my life. So, I'm glad I don't live in a world where salt isn't that scarce.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Amy, when we think about costs, salt is not an especially expensive ingredient to me, I imagine it's, you know, relatively plentiful. Are there any other unseen costs to the people or the places where it's made that do impact, you know, on its kind of sustainability?

Amy Lamb: I guess it's pretty similar to other industrial processes as far as the impacts to people in the environment. So, whether it's the, your carbon footprint or the, how much land you need or how much water you use. You know, those are really impacts to the people and the, the cost to society as a whole, we really need to stay mindful of the impact that we do have, when we're developing these projects.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And when it comes to the energy usage, is it possible to make salt 100 per cent carbon neutral or 100 per cent sustainable?

Amy Lamb: Well, if you're using renewable energy, I would say, yes. So, using the wind, wind or solar or hydropower, is a great way to, to get towards that net zero goal.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: It's so interesting because as soon as we start looking at these everyday objects, you suddenly see, I guess you might call it a carbon footprint, or, you know, you kind of suddenly see the impact that you wouldn't have thought of before. Buddha, have you ever looked at a grain of salt and thought, you know, what, what's been the impact of, of this existing?

Bhudda Lo: That's a really big question because it goes, it just blows my mind to think how old salt is and how we've used it and how it's just absolutely changed the world. Before fridges preserving food, you know, that was the main resource to preserve food and I believe like there's been wars over salts, but there's also been wars that have been lost because of salt because if you don't have salt provisions to your boat if you're traveling and whatnot if you're doing long distance traveling like that was the way that you lived. You would have to salt the stuff that you take on board. So, it has longer the shelf life.

Amy Lamb: One thing I find fascinating is how long we've, salt has been around. You know, 6,000 years ago was, there's archaeologists have found evidence that salt manufacturing happened that far back. And just one interesting fact is that salts, sea salts, that's that is a renewable resource, because as long as we have oceans, we will have salts. And the other interesting thing, what I heard the forecast for salt demand is going to go up to about 500 million tonnes of salt by 2050.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So, to wrap up, looking to the future, I guess, you know, we've talked about potentially new sustainable processes, new places to find salt, new ways of making sure that it's sustainable and ecological. Amy, are there any particular advancements that you are excited for, that you're looking forward to? I'm thinking of, for example, of sodium ion batteries, compared to lithium ion batteries, which we also covered on this podcast. The, the argument being, you know, you can, you can have a battery system that operates on sodium that is, as you say, essentially, an infinite resource.

Amy Lamb: Yeah, absolutely. You know, and there's, there's lots of advantages to those batteries as well. And one is safety, they, they're not going to start. There's no fire risk, and there's no toxic chemicals involved in those batteries. They're also easily recyclable, and they have a long-life cycle. Unfortunately, the disadvantages are the costs for those and, and, also they have a lower energy density. So, the batteries need to be larger as it were. And there is some difficulty to building it at scale at the moment. So, it's still, there's still a lot of work happening, and I think it's going to improve.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, okay, so we won't have we won't have to either have salty dinner or a new battery for our laptop, we might still be able to have both for now.

Amy Lamb: Yes.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Buddha, how about for you what cooking adventures await you next?

Bhudda Lo: So many. I mean, I just completed Top Chef World All Stars and so winning that has opened up a lot of doors for me, but I think that also spreading the word and making sure that everyone knows about what they eat, what they put into their body, and making sure that, that knowledge, that history, all those sort of things tie into people's backgrounds where, you know, just being able salt something and really understand why we do it. Like the Koreans do with kimchi, they salt preserve the cabbages and they use that and they have it in their fridges for forever. It's something that everyone could learn how to do and realise how easy it is to actually do. And I think people, by people learning that sort of thing, people will be a lot more aware of where their food comes from, be a lot more thoughtful on how they consume it and what they do with it, and look for a better future with, with, food. So, I'm, I'm hoping to not only just cook, but also spread the word about the knowledge that I've learned throughout my time.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Well, thank you both so much for sharing your expertise and passion, Buddha Lo and Amy Lamb.

Bhudda Lo: Thank you for having us.

Amy Lamb: Thank you very much.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Well, I'm off to relive my sea swimming days by eating a kilo of seaweed and an entire Battenberg cake by myself. You've been listening to Things You Can't Live Without, a podcast brought to you by Rio Tinto. You can listen to more episodes of Things You Can't Live Without wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to follow, rate and review us to make sure that you don't miss an episode.

–Ends–

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Welcome to Things You Can't Live Without, the science podcast where I, material scientist Dr Anna Ploszajski, ask my very special guest to reveal the single item they just can't live without. Throughout this series so far, we've heard of electric bicycles, dictionaries, prosthetic legs, climbing equipment, and insulated vacuum flasks, all being things we can't live without.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: You might think that this list is a rather random collection of stuff. But what each of these items has in common is that their constituent materials are substances that have been mined, processed and made into this myriad of objects. On this podcast, we find out from a host of experts who lift the lid on all the science and engineering that these processes entail.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: They also give us a technology forecast to help us understand what needs to happen for us to make this stuff greener. Today, I'm honoured to have with me a chemical biologist and explorer, who travels to the most extreme jungles and ecosystems of our planet, searching for the tiniest creatures, from heat loving microbes to Amazonian stingless bees in order to create big changes in the world. Dr Rosa Vasquez Espinoza, welcome to Things You Can't Live Without.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Thanks so much, Anna. It's lovely to be here.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: It's really great to have you. And Rosa, I imagine when you're spending your time researching in the Amazon, there are lots of essentials that you have to take with you. But if I could press you for just one, is there one item, above all others, that you just can't live without?

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Yeah, that's a fantastic question, because there's just way too many items, but I would say my number one, as a scientist and explorer, is my field microscope. I have plenty, but this is kind of my favourite, because it has this camera that allows me to be able to record and also show whoever is around me on my team or the communities kind of what I'm magnifying.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: That's so exciting. As a scientist, I love microscopes and I'm very excited to talk to you about this more. And today we're joined by another exploration expert who operates in a completely different world to you. It's Rio Tinto's Managing Director of Studies, Alison Morley. Welcome, Alison.

Alison Morley: Thanks, Anna. Thanks, Rosa. I'm really excited to be here.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Pleasure. Very, very excited to talk to you. But firstly, Rosa, can you tell us the story of how you first fell in love with the Amazon?

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: So, I grew up in Peru and I have family that comes both from the high Andes mountains as well as the luscious forest of the Amazon.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: And so growing up, I attended school in the capital city, just like any big city London like, but every summer I would be basically going to visit my relatives, cousins, uncles and aunts, whether that meant learning how to literally cultivate potatoes in the Andes, or spending time crossing the Amazon River in tiny wooden traditional boats, playing with monkeys, literally on our heads, getting fruits right from the rainforest.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: And my grandmother is a traditional healer. She never had the chance to attend school, but she lived with us in the city, and so she built her own kind of natural pharmacy, where I spent every single time I was not in school, I spent it with her, with this Andean and Amazonian combination of plants, and so it's been, the Amazon has just been rooted in me since, since I'm a child.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Wow, that sounds like an idyllic childhood, and a very adventurous one as well.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Yeah, I never really appreciated, I think, enough the fact that it's so unique to do that. And not until I moved to the US and other places to pursue science, that's so incredible to have that closeness to such unknown biodiversity in many cases.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: And that's kind of really what drove me to do the work I do now.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So can you tell us a bit more about that? What sort of research projects do you work on?

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: So I'm a chemical biologist, and basically it means I look at the tiniest life forms that most often go ignored, specifically in the Amazon. And so that means from looking at microbes that maybe living in boiling rivers that we have in the jungle, or tiny insects that nobody that does not live in the jungle would know about.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: And I look at the chemistry, the molecules they may be producing, as well as their genetics, how their DNA makeup may have an influence on how they live within a whole ecosystem, but as well as how they contribute to it, perhaps even giving us tools to help medicine, bioremediation, and even help with conservation in the jungle itself.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Wow. Okay. So, from the very small to the very large then, but kind of focusing on how changes in the very small insects or the chemistry that's going on down at the tiny scales gives rise to big ecosystem changes.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Yeah. Yeah. In a way, in all my work because of that, scientific training, but Indigenous upbringing, is really rooted hand in hand with Indigenous knowledge.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: And so, I'm Indigenous descent myself, and so all the work that we do is not just purely going to academic journals, but on top of that, we also really bring in close collaborations with Indigenous leaders, so then we can translate these studies, or even design them in a way that they have direct conservation impact in a positive way in the lands where we are doing our work.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: That's so interesting. Do you have any favourite examples of projects that kind of, I guess, exemplify this relationship between people, place and your research?

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Yeah, it's with the Peruvian Boiling River, which is that insane boiling river that reaches temperatures over 90 Celsius. And yet you have a variety of microorganisms that are just thriving there.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: And, basically, studying this microdiversity could help understand how life came to be in the rainforest, how we could perhaps use them as a model to understand how climate change is impacting the rainforest, and perhaps even finding tools to help combat that.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: That's incredible. So, Rosa, can you tell us a bit about how these sorts of exploratory expeditions work?

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Once you get there, I would say that the next greatest challenge, it's the actual navigation of the river. You have this constant intense vapour that can make you dizzy. There was this one specific moment where we got to one part of the river where the water was maybe 80 Celsius. So not your hottest, but still pretty damn intense.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: They had told me that on the other side of one specific section of the river was an area that was quite pristine because nobody virtually went to that space because you needed to climb over a certain wall to be able to get to the other side. Of course, as a scientist, that sounds exciting because that means they have the least amount of contamination.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: They could really give me the cleanest view as to how this life looks like. They call it the spider man wall, because once you start climbing it, there is a section where you physically need to get your arm all the way to the other side in one single movement at the same time as your leg because that's the next space where you can actually hold yourself safe from to be able to cross it.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Not only are you having this intense river below you with all this vapour coming out of it, but the rock itself, there were critters like spiders and other things. So, not only had I to be extremely careful with my grip and my movement, but I had to ignore everything else that was kind of going in and around, you know?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Rosa, you're the most badass person I've ever met. This is amazing. [music interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Going back to your microscope then, how does the use of this piece of kit help you to understand these different ecosystems better?

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: There are certain kind of microbes that many of them grow together in a community. They may look just like kind of this dark green algae to the naked eye, but when you put them under a microscope and magnify them, even if it's just, you know, 200 times what you would normally see things at, the microscope really was fascinating at being able to tell us within a second if the sample we were looking at was something we were actually interested in collecting and simplifying a lot of the steps after that.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Can either of you guess how old the technology of microscopes is?

Alison Morley: All I can think of is Galileo, but I think he was telescopes, wasn't he? Not microscopes.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: That's true. I guess it's a similar sort of technology, though, but yeah. Any guesses, Rosa?

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Yeah, no, I was, I should know this answer, and I feel really bad, I don't know it off the top of my head.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: No, no, this isn't an attempt to shame you. I didn't know, but I did some research. There was a big development of technology in microscopes and telescopes around the sort of 1600s when, when, you're talking about, but way, way, way before that, there are ancient Chinese texts from 4,000 years ago. describe water-based microscopes.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So, how light is bent by different shapes of water. If you ever got water on your phone screen, actually, you'll know what this looks like. It kind of magnifies all the little pixels on your phone screen. The ancient Chinese were making tiny, tiny microscopes like that.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: That's fascinating.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, I know. Amazing. And the ancient Greeks and Romans were also really into glass and they did make glass lenses. So, it's possible that the ancient Greeks and Romans also had forms of microscopes thousands of years ago. Then there's a bit of a leap in the history of microscopes to around the year 1600, which is when I guess the study of alchemy and science, as we know it today, was starting to kind of form a bit more formally.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So, these early microscopes around the year 1600, they could magnify about, 20 to 30 times. But in the 1660s, a Dutchman called Antoine van Leeuwenhoek made microscopes that could magnify up to 200 times. So, this was a massive step forward. And with his microscope, he observed animal and plant tissue, human sperm cells, blood cells, minerals, fossils, and loads of other things that had never been seen before on this microscopic scale.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And by the 20th century, we were able to enjoy not only zooming in using light, but zooming in using electrons and electron microscopes have much, much higher resolution, thousands of times more than we can see with a light microscope. Today's digital microscopes like yours, Rosa, combine ordinary microscope lenses with digital light sensors, which enable us to magnify and record the images on a digital screen.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: The discoveries made by all these different types of microscopes, you know, are endless. Understanding what the building blocks of plant and animal matter are and non-living matter as well, in the atoms, they all owe their discoveries to microscopes. And by understanding the very, very small, we then come to understand a bit about the very, very large.

Alison Morley: That's very cool.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Yeah, that's a fantastic timeline. [music interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So from an Amazonian explorer to now a geological one, I'd love to turn to you, Alison, and hear a bit more about your work in exploration and discovery. Because for you, explorations look like something a bit different from Rosa’s. So, what does, what does exploration look like for you?

Alison Morley: Look, there's, there's some differences, but there's an awful lot of similarities.

Alison Morley: I found myself nodding along a lot with Rosa as she was speaking, so, you know, ultimately, I've spent 25 years in the mining sector, many of that doing exploration, and you're looking for concentrations of minerals that are economic. That's what you're ultimately looking for. The key thing that you're really looking for is differences in the rock.

Alison Morley: There's usually some reason why a certain mineral or a certain element will concentrate in a certain place. And that might be because there's a fault there, or a structure, and that encourages a lot of fluid flow. To go through a particular part of ground, it might mean that there’s a particular bit of ground that's really chemically different from another bit of ground.

Alison Morley: So, as a geologist, what you're really looking for is, one, those, those concentration of minerals that makes them rich enough to be mined, but then the way that you find them is by noticing differences in the Earth's crusts that other people haven't noticed before.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And how do you use your knowledge of geological structures, I guess, combine it with new data to make these discoveries?

Alison Morley: Oh yeah, and. you know, I think geology has changed a lot over the last couple of hundred years when it sort of started as a, as a, science. But maybe 30, 40 years ago, people were really using visual clues. So, they might have been looking for a particular mineral on the surface. There's plenty of examples of big mines that were discovered because people noticed a blue or green staining on the surface and then realised that, that, was a copper. carbonate or a copper oxide, and they could follow that down to where the ore body is. And that was kind of like the old style of, of, discovering ore bodies. What we've found in the last, say, 20, 30 years, is we've got a whole bunch more technologies that we can now add to that. So, your geologists that are out in the field are still really looking for those visual clues.

Alison Morley: But at the same time, they've got a lot of technology now that helps them look at these differences within the Earth's crust. So, you're looking for different physical properties like electromag or magnetism or density or gravity. And we use a whole bunch of different tools for that. And the thing that had me nodding along with Rosa's conversation is that the nearest sort of analogy to Rosa's infield microscope for a geologist is probably the hand lens, which has only, you know, is very, very small.

Alison Morley: And whilst it might only get you to 10 or 30 times, depending on the hand lens. What it does is really give you a sense of what minerals that you're looking at. At the same time, we do have geologists who sit in a lab and they will look down lab microscopes at rocks. And I've got to say, the view down a lab microscope of a, of a, rock is something really amazing.

Alison Morley: So, what you have to do with a rock, you can't just whack it in under the microscope. So, what we do is that we make a thin section of the rock. So, it's 30 microns thick. So, you can, you can, hold it up to the light and see through it. And when you put that under a particular type of microscope, you can see straight through the rock.

Alison Morley: It means that you can identify what the rock types, what the minerals are within that rock by colour, shape, cleavage, it's always a great word to use with undergraduates, which is how the rock, um, breaks apart. And I've got to say, when you look down a microscope at a thin section, it's a magical experience. They are the most beautiful things. The colours are amazing.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And what's the reason that you shave them so thin. Is it so that you have that benefit of being able to look through and kind of discern the different rocks more easily?

Alison Morley: That's exactly right. So, it allows the light to pass through it in a way that is, you know, standard across all, any different sections that you might have.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: You're a bit like a forensic scientist, but of the earth. I love that.

Alison Morley: Yeah, that's exactly right.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I really love the idea both of you actually kind of trudging around with various tools hanging off your belt, but actually quite similar approaches.

Alison Morley: Well, I think you hit the nail on the head when you were talking about the difference in scales before, Anna.

Alison Morley: There's, there's, you know, really fractal patterns in geology. So, what you see down a microscope can often be what you see in your hand and then what you see in the wall of a mine and then what you see from an aerial photo looking above. You can still see these same patterns and it's just magical.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Can you explain a bit more what you mean about the fractal patterns?

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So, you know, a shape of a rock might be such under a microscope and then you actually see kind of bigger versions of that as well?

Alison Morley: Yeah, yeah, you can do that. So, when you look at a rock sample in your hand, you can go, oh, okay, there's a sort of what we call an lineation or a fabric within the rock that shows you which way it's been squished and you end up with these really beautiful patterns.

Alison Morley: But a geologist can look at them and go, well, this is the way that the rocks were squished. You can then apply that at the macro scale when you're sort of in a, a mine, you might be able to say, well, I know that that fault from looking down my microscope moved in this direction. However, I don't know where this ore body's gone, but if I can tell that little bit of data about what I saw in the fault, maybe I can realise that the rest of the ore body is a 100 or 200 or 50 kilometres down that way.

Alison Morley: And you can really use all the clues that you, you find at all scales to give you a sense of where you need to look next.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: I love the analogy that you did, Alison, of like looking at something at, with your tools at this micro level and then kind of seeing the pattern emerge at a larger, larger level.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: The question I would have, it's an exploration experience you've had that's just kind of like left you awestruck of like how beautiful earth crust or mineral, whatever it is that you were like looking at or the location itself that just kind of like hit you as to like, whoa.

Alison Morley: Wow. I think the more profound experience for me, so going to one of our exploration sites, driving through a very, very small community there, realising that there was no employment opportunities within that small community, that the young people were leaving town. You could see the town was really kind of dying in front of your eyes. And then 15 kilometres out of town, we'd found a project that looked very, very prospective for Manganese at the time. And just kind of realising that if I had the ability to make that project work, the opportunities I could bring to the young people of that town.

Alison Morley: So, for me, there's that element of, how do you make a good society? And I know that there's a lot of arguments against mining in that question, but there's a lot of arguments for mining within that question as well. So, for me, it was, how do I make sure that people in these far flung places have the same opportunity for work, employment, and to better themselves, as anybody else does?

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Thanks for sharing. Yeah, no, that's, that's something the, the human aspect of exploration is something that we also kind of really have not really just focused on. I think traditionally science tends to occur outside of culture, but when you go to places in my case, like the Amazon or the Andes, nature is intertwined with culture and it's unavoidable.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: And, so, I think that's how we approach our own explorations, which is science is intertwined with the people and the culture around. There's not two ways about it and just finding a way to celebrate all of that. [music interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Now, Dr Rosa, I'm going to transport you to a terrible alternate universe. In which, when you were climbing on your spider man wall, you dropped your field microscope in the boiling river.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Oh no.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: You're now without it in the Amazon. What would you do? What would life be like without your microscope?

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: So, just as a disclaimer, I haven't dropped any item in the Boiling River, but some of our colleagues accidentally did.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: And entire, very expensive, fancy cameras have completely melted with a lot of intriguing and unique material. So, it happens. So, you know, knock on wood. I think. You know, we, it's also about going back to the basics. I think it is amazing to have all this technology nowadays. Of course, it allows us to do things faster, more accurate, look at things we were not able to see before.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: But I think in a way, nature exploration is also very inherent to human nature. There has been cases where we were not able to bring equipment for X, Y, and Z or something happened and we just didn't have it with us. And, I think, it kind of reminds that there, there is this, you know, perhaps detail of observation, perhaps there's another factor I could be like looking at, perhaps is it the reflection?

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Is there a different like type of intricate colour that I could be taking attention to or connecting it more to where in the rocks I'm finding these? I'm all for equipment, but also all for adapting, which is 100% unavoidable when you are in the field.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I love that. So, you would adapt as you always do.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: We have to, we've already had to, so, you know.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: No, for sure. But making anything has an inevitable impact on our planet. So, I now want to think a little bit about where the stuff comes from, you know. Alison, you're involved in sourcing the raw materials for Rosa's microscope, but I'm interested in where your work sits in the bigger picture, in the full story of mining.

Alison Morley: So, the, the exploration team are pretty much at the beginning of the story. So, what you might end up with is a bunch of people in an office who have an idea. So, they will generally then put that idea to an exploration manager who holds the, the budget. And then there's also the element of, can you pick up that ground?

Alison Morley: So, there's a system in most countries where the ground is held by the government and you have to apply in order to be able to pick up that ground and go and explore it. And then once you've realised that there's a target there, then you usually you get a whole bunch of people to go out to the ground.

Alison Morley: You might put some drill holes in, you might take some surface or some soil samples. And you know, the idea is of course that you, you hit the big ore body right down the guts of it on the first hole. Very rarely happens that way. Usually takes a lot more holes and a lot more belief and a lot more convincing.

Alison Morley: So that's kind of exploration in a nutshell. 

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And is there a sustainability element to this? Are you trying to do your exploration work in a more sustainable way or a lower impact way?

Alison Morley: Exploration itself is fairly light touch. It's not until you move further down the chain where the sustainability really has big impacts.

Alison Morley: But having said that, I would say that most of the geos I know are absolutely drawn to geology because they love the environment and they are intrinsically sustainability obsessed people. So, where it can be done, it is being done. That's good to hear.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Rosa, I know that you work with policy makers on this sustainability issue as well. What's your experience in doing so? And what is your hope? What are you trying to achieve by interacting with policy makers?

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Yeah, we partner with environmental lawyers as well as stakeholders and multiple levels in the local areas. And, so, these really came about in the last few years, after seeing the impact that our science and storytelling was having and listen closely to what the communities were needing as to what the next step was, okay, we navigated conversations to the different part of ministries to understand.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Where is it that we start to change that the communities see within their timeline within, you know, in short-term periods. So, it involves a lot of conversation and bringing in the right messages and then finding the people that are keen to support and that also, like Alison said, live and breathe in sustainability and understand that they're, through their work, they can have quite direct impact.

Alison Morley: I think there's an element there that, you know, anything, any decision like that that's made with that real scientific, factual backing, that's the thing that gets me really excited, is being able to convince people with real data. So, using your, your, skill set to change the world is awesome.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, absolutely.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Yeah, I mean, it comes back to communication again, right?

Alison Morley: Yeah, and I’d just make a comment as a geologist. I heard somebody the other day say something, something was as dumb as a rock. And I was sort of like, it just means you don't know how to read a rock. You know, we spend our whole careers learning how to read the rocks.

Alison Morley: So, rocks, the rocks speak, you just got to know how to listen, listen to the rocks.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Listen to the rocks.

Alison Morley: Yep. [music interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Looking to the future. Alison, what's next for you? What are you most excited about at the moment?

Alison Morley: Yeah, I mean, we do, do, a lot of partnerships with startups and what we're seeing now is this data explosion where you can actually get, you know, readings from satellites that are constant, you know, and so the amount of data that's coming at us is really a tsunami of data.

Alison Morley: So, rather than just looking at the data, we need to understand how we pull the data apart. So, I think there's a real piece there around data, AI, within geoscience. And it's just, it's just, fascinating. Geology is essentially pattern recognition, advanced pattern recognition. Now, at the moment, people do that better than anything, but I think that will probably remain the same.

Alison Morley: But if you can cut out some of the grunt work of that pattern recognition with AI, just imagine how powerful that could be.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: What isn't AI helping us with?

Alison Morley: So true.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And how about for you, Rosa, what explorations await you next?

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: In terms of the Amazon, we are creating the first map of stingless bees in partnership with the Ashaninka people. And so we are providing them with equipment and the training so that they can conduct science and basically really be able to generate the first visualisation as to where these bees are, not just with the hope that it can inspire natural corridors and be able to protect it, be able to guide reforestation, but also futuristically with the hope that by studying their honey, we've noticed not only are we able to look at the medicinal properties of that honey, which traditionally is being known already by the communities, but also potentially looking at pollution.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: So, we've been able to see that there is traces of pesticides or pharmaceutical pollutants. that can be still detected in the honey. And, so, we're, we're looking to submit that this year. I'm really excited for that.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Well, we've been on an exploration of our own this episode from ancient Chinese water microscopes and boiling rivers to working with communities to ensure sustainable mining and ecosystems long into the future.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Rosa Vásquez Espinoza and Alison Morley, thank you both so much for sharing your expertise and passion for exploration.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Thanks so much Anna, it's been fantastic and so lovely to meet you Alison as well.

Alison Morley: I've had a great time, thanks for having me.

Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza: Bye, bye.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: You can listen to more episodes of Things You Can't Live Without wherever you get your podcasts, and don't forget to follow, rate and review us to make sure that you don't miss an episode. 

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Hello, and welcome to Things You Can't Live Without, the podcast in which I, materials scientist Dr Anna Ploszajski, ask a special guest, what's the one thing they can't live without? Then we interrogate experts on this stuff, how it's made, who made it, and where its constituent components come from. This is because we all know that our stuff has an impact on the planet.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So we want to find out what needs to change in order for us to keep living with these objects in a sustainable future. Joining me today is a spacecraft engineer with over 17 years' experience working on planetary exploration missions throughout our solar system, including the Cassini mission spacecraft around Saturn, which frankly puts my parallel parking to shame.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: She's worked on the full life cycle of space missions from concept and design through to build, launch, operation, and end of life. I'm certain her thing that she can't live without will be out of this world, and I can't wait to find out more. Welcome to the podcast, Dr Leah Alconcel.

Dr Leah Alconcel: Thank you very much.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So Leah, tell us, what is the one thing that you can't live without?

Dr Leah Alconcel: It's lasers.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: It's lasers! A suitably scientific object for someone such as yourself. But as always, we need an expert to take us through the processes, people and raw materials that make up our favourite things. And that expert today is Rio Tinto's Chief Scientist Nigel Steward.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Welcome back to the podcast, Nigel.

Nigel Steward: Hi Anna, good to see you again and nice to see you too, Leah.

Dr Leah Alconcel: Nice to see you, Nigel. Nice to meet you.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So first, Leah, tell us about your lasers and why you can't live without them.

Dr Leah Alconcel: So, lasers have been part of my scientific journey since I was a postgraduate student. I used them then – they were very big lasers – as a base component of the experiments that I was doing.

Dr Leah Alconcel: So, I used a custom-built Nd:YAG laser, which is a neodymium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet laser, and also a titanium-sapphire laser, which was provided by a company. But it was the custom-built one that I really loved because you could actually take that apart. You could actually take the rod from the laser out of that.

Dr Leah Alconcel: It was water-cooled and I only had to do that a couple of times when I was a postgraduate student, but when I did get to do it, it was very exciting. And then once I started working in space, I discovered that they were pretty much everywhere in spacecraft and experiments. Obviously, they're a big part of computer equipment, CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, and other components of computer equipment, as well as being on spacecraft.

Dr Leah Alconcel: So large and small lasers have been part of my life since I started being a scientist.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: What are the main uses for lasers?

Dr Leah Alconcel: For the sort of experiments I was doing during my PhD, they were used to break apart molecules. We would create a beam of negatively charged ions and fire the laser at the beam.

Dr Leah Alconcel: The laser would intersect with the molecules and break them apart. That helped us understand how different molecules interacted with light in the atmosphere. Two examples I would give are from the Cassini mission.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Tell us more...

Dr Leah Alconcel: In 2017, the Cassini spacecraft came to an end in Saturn's atmosphere. It burned up because it was running out of fuel, and that was considered the safest way to dispose of it because Cassini was nuclear-powered. It was necessary to dispose of the radioactive material by burning it up in the atmosphere.

Dr Leah Alconcel: On the JUICE mission – Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer – which is currently on its way to Jupiter, the magnetometer uses lasers. One of its sensors is called a coupled dark state magnetometer, and please don't ask me exactly how it works because it's the one sensor I don't fully understand.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: It's good to know that even scientists like you need to have a bit of faith sometimes in the instruments you're working with.

Dr Leah Alconcel: Yes. But that magnetometer also uses lasers. They're really small diode lasers.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I just wanted to ask you about the JUICE mission.

Dr Leah Alconcel: You mentioned that it was launched last year and it's currently whizzing around the inner solar system picking up speed.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Are you going to slingshot it off the inner solar system and point it at Jupiter?

Dr Leah Alconcel: Yes, exactly. I think it has a couple of swing-bys of Earth and Venus before it starts its journey out to Jupiter.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: How does it feel to have your work out there in space?

Dr Leah Alconcel: Pretty good, I have to say. When you see the culmination of that many years of work. The first meeting I attended was in 2010 and launch was in 2023.

Dr Leah Alconcel: It's definitely not a game for the impatient, but if you're patient enough, it's very satisfying when you see the end result.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: How did you first get into space? What attracted you to it?

Dr Leah Alconcel: I think I have to blame doing a postdoc at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Dr Leah Alconcel: JPL is in Pasadena, California, and it's one of NASA's research centres. While I was there, I was still being a physical chemist, using lasers to make measurements of chemical reactions. But Earth science was only about ten percent of what JPL does.

Dr Leah Alconcel: The other ninety percent is space. I got to know a lot of people who worked on missions, including the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. I saw them doing test drives and had the chance to visit mission control. That was what really got me interested.

[Music interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So on this podcast, we're really interested in where stuff comes from and how things are made, but also how things work. And I wonder, Leah, if you could do us the honours of taking us through how lasers work.

Dr Leah Alconcel: I guess the simplest way to think about it is when you switch on a light, you get a bunch of rays of light and they come out in all different directions.

Dr Leah Alconcel: There's no control over where they go. You get a lovely bright light that you can read by and that helps you see at night. Whereas when you switch on a laser, what you get is a really focused beam of light. All the little light rays are going in the same direction.

Dr Leah Alconcel: And you can make a tremendously powerful beam in that way. You can make a beam so powerful it can cut through solid materials. So that's kind of the difference, I think, between what we think of as a normal source of light and a laser source of light.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay. And the colour of light that you get out of a laser is related to the specific material that's at the core of the laser, right?

Dr Leah Alconcel: Yes.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And you mentioned one of those materials earlier. What was the one that you were working on?

Dr Leah Alconcel: So the main laser that I used was an Nd:YAG. That's neodymium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet. It was a very lovely sort of coral pink, the little laser rod.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Oh, very nice. I wouldn't have guessed that.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And we'll come on to some of those elements that you just mentioned because that's the theme of our episode. There's one family of elements that are critical to lasers that I want us to particularly focus our conversation on today. And that is the family called the rare earth elements. These sit in the kind of murky corner of the periodic table that you'd be forgiven if you'd never heard of them because we don't tend to come across them in everyday life.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: There's 17 rare earth elements in total, including elements like scandium, yttrium, lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, samarium, terbium and dysprosium amongst others. A bit of a tongue twister as well. And lots of these are used in these kinds of applications in lasers.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Can either of you tell me why they're particularly useful in these applications? Nigel?

Nigel Steward: Well, they allow us to control the frequency and the type of light that's generated by the laser. So that's their function. They modify the type of host material to achieve the frequency and the power of the laser.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Because what we want to get out of it is a specific colour of light. So we can play around with what the atoms and electrons are doing inside the materials so that, as they generate that light, it's the right colour for the use that we want.

Nigel Steward: Exactly.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: The name suggests something that they're relatively hard to come by.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And of course we're really interested on this podcast in where stuff comes from. So Nigel, I'd love to turn to you now to tell us more about rare earth elements. Firstly, are they actually rare?

Nigel Steward: Well, I think the rarity aspect comes from the fact that when we talked about the neodymium yttrium aluminium garnet laser earlier on, aluminium we're very familiar with.

Nigel Steward: But we're not very familiar with these other elements, even though they're actually very prolific in our lives. We hear about aluminium, copper, iron and titanium, but less so about the rare earths. So it's rare in that sense. They're all around us, but we don't see them. They were discovered in the late 1700s.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay, so actually quite a long time ago, relatively speaking.

Nigel Steward: Quite a long time ago, yes. And some of them aren't that rare. For example, cerium is about as prolific as copper.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Oh wow.

Nigel Steward: But I think what's really made them rare is that despite being discovered a long time ago, they've been very difficult to extract chemically.

Nigel Steward: So it really wasn't until the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the creation of ion exchange technologies, that we were actually able to separate all of those rare earths out into their individual elements.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Ah, okay.

Nigel Steward: So the rarity maybe came from the fact that they were difficult to separate out and extract. But since the 1950s and 1960s, we've been able to extract them very successfully using ion exchange technology.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Okay. So these are liquid processes and we're talking about ions, not irons, right? It's a bit of confusing terminology.

Nigel Steward: It's an element with a few electrons missing, yes.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And how do those processes work, and how do they compare to other processes of extraction?

Nigel Steward: Well, what happens is you digest a rock and you extract all of the rare earths into solution.

Nigel Steward: Then what an ion exchange resin does is capture a particular ion of a particular size. All of these individual elements have slightly different sizes and characteristics, so you can pick them out one by one. The only ion you want goes into that ion exchange resin. Then you take the resin and flush it to bring that element back out into solution. That's the way we extract them.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And they form when you effectively dissolve the rock. What sort of chemicals are you dissolving it into?

Nigel Steward: Things like sulfuric acid and hydrochloric acid.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Leah, when you were developing your lasers or working on them, did you ever think about where the materials came from?

Dr Leah Alconcel: Not really, no. I think I have to say that when I was a student, I took that stuff for granted. You bought what you needed in order to run an experiment and, as long as it was available, that was enough.

Dr Leah Alconcel: I did have a sense of how valuable the core elements were. For example, the rods that were used in the YAG laser were very expensive and fragile. So handling them was non-trivial.

Dr Leah Alconcel: I remember the first time I ever had to take apart the laser head and actually remove the rod. I was sweating bullets because I really didn't want to break it.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Don't drop it. Don't drop it.

Dr Leah Alconcel: So I did have a sense of the value—not necessarily of the process by which the elements were extracted—but of how difficult it was to create this crystal matrix to capture them.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Nigel, in terms of the economics of extraction, are rare earth elements especially valuable?

Nigel Steward: Yes, they command a very high price. Some of them in particular are very rare.

Nigel Steward: We find rare earths in two principal mineral sources. What we tend to find is that cerium is quite prolific. You can extract a lot of cerium, but you need to extract a lot of cerium to get some of the other elements, things like dysprosium.

Nigel Steward: So in the end, because we need to meet dysprosium or neodymium demand, we end up overproducing the amount of cerium. There's usually a cerium and lanthanum surplus to get all of these important rare earths that we need in lasers and for many other uses as well.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And where does that excess go?

Nigel Steward: It tends to go into stockpiles and, because the supply is high, the price of cerium is very low. Cerium is relatively inexpensive, whereas elements like dysprosium are very expensive to buy.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Leah, did you have any other questions for Nigel about rare earth elements, where they come from, or how we're extracting them?

Dr Leah Alconcel: I'd be interested to know the two mineral ores you get the rare earths from. What does it look like when you take it out of the ground?

Nigel Steward: Well, they're just rocks.

Dr Leah Alconcel: They're just rocks?

Nigel Steward: There's nothing special about their appearance. What's special is that they contain rare earths.

Dr Leah Alconcel: Wow. Okay. So how do you find where they are?

Nigel Steward: That's a really interesting question. You have to drill a lot of holes. We roughly know where things are found and use a lot of indicators—what we call exploration vectors—to try and identify resources.

Nigel Steward: It's not easy, but that's the world of exploration geology. One of the things we've used in the past is radioactive tracing because these rare earths are often associated with uranium and thorium.

Nigel Steward: You can scan the surface and identify radioactive hotspots using very sensitive pieces of equipment. That gives you a lead indicator as to where you can find some of these rarer ore deposits, like monazites and bastnäsites.

Dr Leah Alconcel: I'm having visions now of a slightly more serious version of The Detectorists, going around looking for these radioactive signals to find the ores.

Dr Leah Alconcel: The Detectorists was about a couple of amateur metal detectorists who go around looking for treasure, but end up finding an awful lot of other stuff and making some very funny jokes.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: And are those detectors by any chance based on laser technology, to take us back to our topic?

Nigel Steward: Well, sometimes we use LiDAR.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: There you go. Another use for lasers.

[Music interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Now, Leah, on this podcast, we do try to give people hope for the future, particularly a sustainable future, but we're under no illusion that this transition to a more sustainable future is going to be plain sailing the whole way.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: There may well be a version of the future in which we've either used up all our rare earth minerals, or it becomes too expensive or energy-intensive to mine and process them, in which case you may be without your beloved lasers. In that imagined future, how will you cope as a scientist?

Dr Leah Alconcel: I don't know.

Dr Leah Alconcel: Probably quite badly. We're really very dependent on them. And it's also one of the hopes for the future for space communications. As we put more and more satellites into Earth orbit, and as we start to look at potentially establishing remote habitation on other planets—or even if it's not humans, having robotic exploration outposts in other parts of the solar system—laser communication is considered to be one of the ways of the future.

Dr Leah Alconcel: The volume of data that you can communicate is much higher using lasers than it is using conventional radio systems. And if you don't have the obstruction of an atmosphere, optical communication between spacecraft can travel a really long way through near vacuum with very little interference.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: But if we don't have that, then we won't be able to talk to all of the different spacecraft that are out there, and potentially even to people living elsewhere in the solar system. And of course, through fibre optics, our internet is light-based these days.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So would you effectively be able to get Wi-Fi on Saturn from Earth if there were lasers? Would that work?

Dr Leah Alconcel: Yes. I mean, that's kind of what it would be, yes.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: I love that. I love the idea that you could watch all your TikTok videos on Saturn if you were chilling out there.

Nigel Steward: It's interesting listening to you describing space and all those technologies that were developed for space and have actually been brought to Earth and that we use every day today.

Nigel Steward: I'm thinking about laser scanners at the supermarket checkout. You think about all the optical cables serving the internet, and they all have lasers communicating down those cables. Many of the things you've talked about regarding the analysis of lasers are also things we use when analysing core samples during the search for new minerals.

Nigel Steward: We use laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, for example, and it greatly speeds up our rate of discovery. So there are many technologies that have been brought from space and the development of space technology to Earth that we use every day and take for granted.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: That's really interesting that you mentioned the work of Rio Tinto in discovery and determining what materials are there and how to process them. Lasers clearly are much more ubiquitous than most of us realise.

Nigel Steward: Exactly. In mining, I mentioned the exploration side of things, but we deployed autonomous haul trucks in some of our mines about 12 years ago. Of course, they use LiDAR systems. That's how the truck navigates and knows what's around it.

Nigel Steward: In our everyday work, because lasers are so accurate, we use them to position things within our processes very precisely. We also track things throughout our operations. Spare parts, for example, have barcodes or QR codes.

Nigel Steward: We scan them, track them and feed that information into our systems. Then we have to communicate with people around the world. We're a global company and we rely on optical fibre networks powered by lasers. So lasers are a very important part of our business and of our day-to-day lives.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Life as we know it wouldn't be the same without lasers. We may not realise it, but so much of our data and technology relies on them. We can't really imagine a future that would be recognisable without these rare earth elements. They really are key to that future.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: If we want to live in a sustainable future where these materials are still available, and where we're extracting and processing them sustainably, Nigel, can you paint a picture for us? What's the current state of play regarding the impact on the planet and the people involved in mining these rare earth elements?

Nigel Steward: I think the main challenge is that they are found in relatively low concentrations. Cerium is the exception, but most of the other rare earths occur in very low concentrations.

Nigel Steward: So when you extract a rare earth element, you naturally generate a significant amount of waste. The second issue is that some of these ore deposits are associated with uranium and thorium.

Nigel Steward: As a result, you end up concentrating uranium and thorium as well, and you have to find a use for those materials within the nuclear industry. Those are probably the biggest challenges we face with respect to rare earths.

Nigel Steward: I think that's why people are increasingly starting to think about recycling. A great example is the digital world. We're all familiar with our computers, tablets, mobile phones and televisions.

Nigel Steward: The phosphors that create the red, green and blue colours in displays use europium, terbium and yttrium—all rare earths. So, literally, when you're looking at a screen, you're staring at rare earth elements.

Nigel Steward: They're ubiquitous. They're everywhere, not just in lasers. Given the rate at which society is growing, we'll always need to produce more. Another thing we can do is look at whether rare earths occur in existing ore bodies from which we're already extracting other elements.

Nigel Steward: That allows us to recover much more value from an ore body without additional mining. Those are some of the pathways we're looking at to address this challenge.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Leah, Nigel mentioned recycling, particularly for electronic components that contain rare earth elements. Your spacecraft clearly contain a lot of those materials.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Is there any discussion about recycling spacecraft or satellites—recovering valuable materials from objects in space that perhaps we originally never expected to bring back or reuse?

Dr Leah Alconcel: There's a lot of concept work going on to understand how spacecraft could be recycled in space and what that might look like. Aluminium is a particular focus because most spacecraft structures are made of aluminium, and it's relatively easy to repurpose.

Dr Leah Alconcel: Other spacecraft components tend to be things like printed circuit boards, which are very complex layered structures containing many different materials. Those would be much harder to break down into their constituent components.

Dr Leah Alconcel: However, there may be ways to repurpose entire circuit boards or other subsystems. Almost all spacecraft, for example, are wrapped in multilayer insulation blankets that can be cut into sections and reused.

Dr Leah Alconcel: Even if we can't break rare-earth-containing systems down into their constituent elements, we should be able to reuse many of them because most robotic spacecraft require very similar systems in order to operate.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Nigel, do you have any questions for Leah about what we've discussed—space junk or otherwise?

Nigel Steward: No, but perhaps in the laser world, what's the space community working on in terms of the next generation of lasers?

Dr Leah Alconcel: There's a lot of work going on around free-space optical communication between spacecraft, which is what I talked about earlier.

Dr Leah Alconcel: There's also a fair amount of work focused on understanding the upper atmosphere better. And by upper atmosphere, I mean beyond the cloud layer.

[Music interlude]

Dr Anna Ploszajski: So Leah, what's next for you personally? What missions or projects are you excited about?

Dr Leah Alconcel: One of the things I've started working on is with the Quantum Technology Hub in Birmingham.

Dr Leah Alconcel: Specifically, the Quantum Technology Hub for Sensors and Timing. They're interested in carrying out atom interferometry in space, which will involve lasers. It will be exciting to see where that goes.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Nigel, my final question for you. We've talked about rare earth elements as a family. Some are genuinely rare, some are difficult to extract, and some aren't particularly rare at all.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: If you were going to act as a rebranding manager for the rare earth elements, how might they better be described as a family?

Nigel Steward: When you describe their uses and the role they play in everyday digital life, in supporting the energy transition through things like electric motors, and in medicine and medical devices, you start to think of them as the essential materials.

Nigel Steward: They're not rare materials. They're invisible but essential materials that we don't talk about very much. That's probably the best way I would describe them.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Invisible but essential. Definitely.

Dr Leah Alconcel: "Earths" also has the advantage of alliteration. It sounds quite nice.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: It's true. I like it. Right, we'll start the campaign to rebrand.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: These essential elements are crucial for modern life: in our screens, in communications and in the energy transition. A huge thank you to both of my guests today for taking us through the world of rare earth elements—Dr Leah Alconcel and Nigel Steward.

Nigel Steward: Thanks very much, Leah. It was great to meet you and good to see you again, Anna.

Dr Leah Alconcel: Thank you very much, Anna, and thank you, Nigel.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: You can listen to more episodes of Things You Can't Live Without wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to follow, rate and review us to make sure that you don't miss an episode.

Anna Ploszajski: Welcome to Things You Can't Live Without, the science podcast where I, material scientist Anna Ploszajski, ask a special guest about the one thing that they can't live without. Despite us living for this stuff, we know that all of it has an impact on our planet. So together we'll find out from experts about the science behind the energy, materials, processes and people power that goes into making our favourite things exist, and what needs to be done so that we can continue making it all sustainable into the future.

Anna Ploszajski: Joining me today is Dr Hod Lipson, an author, speaker, and researcher at Columbia University who works in the areas of artificial intelligence and robotics. Hod and his students love designing and building robots that do what you'd least expect robots to do: self-replicate, self-reflect, ask questions, and even be creative.

Anna Ploszajski: Welcome, Hod, to Things You Can't Live Without.

Hod Lipson: My pleasure.

Anna Ploszajski: Really nice to meet you. So, tell us, what is the one thing that you can't live without?

Hod Lipson: Well, you know, the thing I cannot live without is a GPU. And probably you won't be able to live without one too.

Anna Ploszajski: So can you describe to us what a GPU looks like and what it does?

Hod Lipson: Well, a GPU is sort of like a computer, but it's really many, many computers stuck together into this enormous supercomputer, but it's something that's so compact, you can actually carry around, put it in your desktop, you can put it in your phone, but it really underlies all of the AI revolution that we're seeing today.

Anna Ploszajski: Fantastic. And to take us through what Hod's GPU is made out of, and how it came to be, we're also joined by Rio Tinto's Chief Executive of Minerals Sinead Kaufman. Welcome, Sinead.

Sinead Kaufman: Hello. Thanks, Anna.

Anna Ploszajski: Really nice to have you here. Can't wait to talk to you more. But first, Hod, I want to turn to you. Our listeners will likely be listening to us today on some sort of device, probably a smartphone or a laptop. Are GPUs allowing this to happen?

Hod Lipson: So, behind the scenes, GPUs underlie almost anything that involves AI, involves real-time processing. There's a lot of history behind it. It all started with gaming and things like that. But right now it's really all the horsepower of computing and learning, machine learning, image processing, all of that is happening on GPUs. And the more GPUs, the larger, the faster they are, the more stuff you can do.

Anna Ploszajski: So we're surrounded by these things. We all rely on them, even if we don't realise it. How about you? How are you using them in your research, in your work?

Hod Lipson: So, the beautiful thing about GPUs, and originally they were intended for gaming—the G is there for graphics, graphics processing units—we use them for machine learning.

Hod Lipson: So besides their use at home when I have a TV or a phone, we use them in the lab all day long, and we beg for these things to be bought. If you look at the bottleneck that's preventing big companies from becoming even bigger, the OpenAIs and the Googles, it's access to GPUs.

Hod Lipson: They're also one of the biggest consumers of electricity. There are materials involved that are hard to get.

Anna Ploszajski: Can you paint us a picture, maybe, of the sorts of applications that you're working on in robotics?

Hod Lipson: The sorts of things that, in the past, people thought it was impossible for computers to do, like be creative.

Hod Lipson: It was almost an oxymoron to say that a machine could be creative. But now we're seeing generative design everywhere. And it's growing in capacity and capability. That's the kind of thing we work on. We work on making machines that can design things—AI that can design and make engineering designs, not just write poems, but design antennas and robots and things like that.

Hod Lipson: But we also, in particular recently, work on this big question of self-awareness. Can robots be self-aware? Can robots be conscious? Can robots have feelings? I know it sounds fantastical. I think it's around the corner, and underlying all of that is a huge amount of computation.

Anna Ploszajski: Has that been the limit so far, the computational power?

Hod Lipson: Oddly enough, I don't know if it's the limit. It's certainly a necessary ingredient. Without having a lot of computing power, you cannot get to these very interesting levels of machine intelligence that are involved in things like creativity and self-awareness.

Hod Lipson: These are almost the holy grails of machine learning, if you like. And they definitely involve a lot of computing power. Now, it doesn't mean that just having a lot of computing power and we're done. There's a lot more to it.

Anna Ploszajski: Can you give us maybe one example of your favourite robot you've developed, or an interesting story, any surprises?

Hod Lipson: We are just now building a robot that's a humanoid face, a soft face, and it's learning to make facial expressions that are meaningful to people.

Hod Lipson: In particular, we're trying to get the robot to lip-sync. We want the robot to move its lips while it talks, to smile like you are smiling right now, to nod and look you in the eyes when it's talking, and make the appropriate faces at the right time.

Hod Lipson: This turns out to be an incredibly difficult challenge because we have so many muscles in our face. Our face is so expressive. I have to say, I'm a jaded roboticist. I don't get excited by robots, but when this robot smiles at me, I smile back. It's very powerful.

Anna Ploszajski: I love that. And so this is what we mean when we talk about machine learning. It's about giving it inputs that it can, as you say, teach itself based on, in this case, visual cues of how to move and how to react.

Hod Lipson: Exactly. It's getting a little bit less uncanny. It's getting real. There are pros and cons to this, which we can debate, but underlying all of that is the ability of this robot.

Hod Lipson: It's far too complex for anything that we could program. So we just let this robot watch itself in the mirror, and then it watches YouTube all day long. As it's watching itself and watching YouTube, it's gradually learning how to make authentic facial expressions, including some bad ones.

Hod Lipson: It's learning to eye-roll. It's learning to do some things that we don't want it to learn, but it's a lot better than anything we could program. So that's my surprise of the week, but really it happens all the time.

Hod Lipson: Of course, the next thing is it will listen to conversation and learn when it's appropriate to make a particular gesture based on the context of a conversation. That's a lot harder to do and likely will involve even more GPUs.

Hod Lipson: Behind the scenes, we actually have to put these GPUs inside the robot's head because it has to have all that computation in real time as it moves around. It needs to process it right there and then.

[Music interlude]

Anna Ploszajski: And to take us through what Hod's GPU is made out of and how it came to be, we're also joined by Rio Tinto's Chief Executive of Minerals, Sinead Kaufman. Very warm welcome to the podcast, Sinead.

Sinead Kaufman: Thanks, Anna. Hi, Hod. Nice to meet you both.

Anna Ploszajski: Lovely to have you here. Of course, none of our computing world would be possible without the physical materials to operate it on. Hod, do you know, or can you make any guesses, of what materials your GPU is actually made out of?

Hod Lipson: Well, I know it's made of silicon. That's kind of what underlies a lot of semiconductors, but beyond that, I am pretty clueless.

Anna Ploszajski: That's a very good guess. Silicon is definitely at the heart of your GPU.

Anna Ploszajski: The stuff of computers is really the integrated circuits, or computer chips. These are the small objects that contain billions of electrical components like transistors, resistors and capacitors that do the actual calculations.

Anna Ploszajski: The main material of computer chips, as you say, is silicon. Silicon is what we call a semiconductor. The super clever thing about semiconductors, and why we use them in electronics, is that you can change their electrical conductivity in useful ways by introducing impurities, which allow us to create these tiny electrical circuits in a process called doping, which is another strange materials word.

Anna Ploszajski: All of this is to say that you can put these different flavours of silicon in different patterns on a computer chip. Because we can make these patterns of different flavoured silicon on very, very tiny scales now, we can fit, as I said, billions of components on one very small chip. You can do different layers of them too, so that in a very small volume you can create an object that has a huge amount of computing power.

Anna Ploszajski: To summarise then, we've got silicon, definitely, but also lots of different elements from the periodic table that we rely on for computing power, including phosphorus, antimony, arsenic, aluminium, gallium, indium and boron.

Anna Ploszajski: It's the last of these, boron, that I want to talk to you two about today.

Anna Ploszajski: I'd love to bring you in at this point, Sinead, to tell us more about boron. It's a very common element in our lives, but most of us haven't thought much about it. Can you tell us first, what actually is boron?

Sinead Kaufman: Yeah, certainly. It is a really interesting material. When you ask people about what's mined, even within our own business, a lot of people don't really understand what boron is for.

Sinead Kaufman: But I've got to say, boron is anything but boring. It's in absolutely everything.

Sinead Kaufman: The geology you need to create boron is a combination of an inland lake or river where material can get deposited. You need volcanics, you need faults and you need a body of water. So it's not that common to have all of those in one location.

Sinead Kaufman: If you think about where boron deposits occur—Turkey, zones around the San Andreas Fault in California, Tibet and Chile—we can see those geological conditions at work.

Sinead Kaufman: When we look at research and development and ask where else boron can be used, the answer is almost everywhere. It's in micronutrients and soil to help grow plants. It's in GPUs, where it helps stability. It's in the hardened glass on your iPhone or iPad, and even in the flexible glass used in folding Samsung phones.

Sinead Kaufman: It's one of the key components that helps provide that flexibility.

Sinead Kaufman: But it's also in surfboards, ceramics and an incredible number of other products.

Sinead Kaufman: We all carry it in our bodies. Most humans need about two milligrams a day of boron to help absorb vitamin D and support hormone regulation.

Sinead Kaufman: It's also in things like Pyrex and heat-resistant glass. It'll be in the oven door glass when you're looking inside while cooking.

Sinead Kaufman: When it's used in pyrotechnics, it produces a bright green colour in fireworks. If it's absorbed into carbon in diamonds, it creates blue diamonds, which are the rarest diamonds in the world.

Sinead Kaufman: So it really exists around us in lots of different ways. It's one of the most versatile minerals we've ever seen in industrial use. I always refer to it as the WD-40 of the world.

Sinead Kaufman: One thing I find really interesting is that it's also a neutron absorber. During the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, one of the things they did to slow the nuclear reaction was dump large amounts of boron into the reactor from the air.

Anna Ploszajski: That's incredible. I had no idea it was used in so many different applications, but never really on its own. It sounds like it's often tied up inside other materials like glass and ceramics.

Sinead Kaufman: Yeah, that's correct.

Sinead Kaufman: I was thinking, Hod, as you were speaking about how many GPUs I have, even in the room I'm in, let alone in my house. It suddenly makes me think.

Anna Ploszajski: Can you take us a little bit more through that history?

Sinead Kaufman: The original mining of boron going back around 4,000 years was actually in Tibet, where it was extracted from lake deposits.

Sinead Kaufman: At that point it was used by goldsmiths and silversmiths. Its first uses were around metallurgy because it has a high melting point and is useful in high-temperature applications.

Sinead Kaufman: It's also used where temperature differences are critical, such as in the tiles on the Space Shuttle used during re-entry, or in domestic and industrial ovens.

Hod Lipson: I'm wondering—you mentioned it's been used for a very long time. In what form does it show up? Is it like a salt, a granular material, a liquid? How do you isolate it? And how much does it cost? Is it like gold or is it always tied into something else?

Sinead Kaufman: In its own right, it looks like a really boring brown powder once it's processed.

Sinead Kaufman: Essentially it appears in rock or salt deposits. We dissolve the surrounding rock to extract it, typically into an acid form.

Sinead Kaufman: As technology improves, we discover new uses. In modern history we've identified that it's a key component in ceramic and Kevlar-like materials used to protect equipment and people.

Sinead Kaufman: The question is always what's next?

Sinead Kaufman: When I hear you, Hod, talk about computers that can understand emotions and even generate emotional responses in humans, I think about our iconic mine in California and realise nobody on site is thinking that this material is going to help humans connect with machines better.

Sinead Kaufman: It takes us from what we once thought of as science fiction into science. Thinking about how materials enable that is actually quite humbling.

Hod Lipson: What I'm thinking when you talk is how difficult it is to understand how to use materials.

Hod Lipson: It's so unintuitive. This is something we're seeing a lot with AI and creativity.

Hod Lipson: Most people, when they think about generative AI, think about writing poems, generating movies or creating art.

Hod Lipson: But where creativity is really needed is in areas like materials science.

Hod Lipson: There are very few materials scientists who can anticipate all the potential uses of boron. It's not something you can just dream up. It takes enormous experimentation to build deep intuition.

Hod Lipson: Yet when it comes to AI, understanding how to generate new materials is actually easier for AI than writing Shakespeare. Shakespeare involves human quirks; materials science is functional and much more well defined.

Sinead Kaufman: Super exciting.

Sinead Kaufman: One example is that one of our biggest challenges is finding the materials we'll need in the future.

Sinead Kaufman: As a geologist, it's a little terrifying, but AI may become better at this than we are.

Sinead Kaufman: In the last few years we found a copper deposit in Western Australia in an area that had been explored before and largely written off.

Sinead Kaufman: Using computer-based technologies, we identified patterns suggesting there could be something there.

Sinead Kaufman: In our first drill hole, we found a copper deposit.

Sinead Kaufman: As we think about the future, technology itself is helping us discover the raw materials needed to build even more technology.

[Music interlude]

Anna Ploszajski: So, Hod, on this podcast I often like to transport my guests to a nightmarish future in which their objects can no longer be sustainably made.

Anna Ploszajski: Let's imagine we don't have a future with boron in it. What are we going to do? What would your world look like?

Hod Lipson: The bad news is we'd probably go back to where we were with computers in the 1990s.

Hod Lipson: We thought we had fast computers back then, but we didn't really know what fast meant.

Hod Lipson: But what's really going to happen is we'll power up the GPUs we still have, run new AI systems and find alternatives.

Hod Lipson: I'm sure there are alternatives.

Hod Lipson: Many materials were discovered more or less by accident. We find something that works, build an industry around it, and only later realise there may be alternatives that are even better.

Anna Ploszajski: You're an optimist. I love this about you, Hod.

Anna Ploszajski: Sinead, would you call boron a particularly finite resource? What are the risks that we're actually going to run out?

Sinead Kaufman: Being an exploration geologist, I'm an optimist as well.

Sinead Kaufman: I think we might need AI not just to find more uses, but to help us find more deposits.

Sinead Kaufman: Materials rise and fall in importance. Tin, for example, was a hugely important mineral historically.

Sinead Kaufman: Today, many former tin mines in Western Australia are now lithium mines. What was once the primary product has become the by-product, while lithium has become the main focus.

Sinead Kaufman: Boron often occurs naturally alongside lithium because they're generated through similar geological processes.

Sinead Kaufman: Around 20 years ago, Rio Tinto discovered a lithium deposit in Serbia.

Sinead Kaufman: It took years to understand exactly what we'd found because we were actually looking for boron. The material was something the world had never seen before.

Sinead Kaufman: That mineral became known as Jadarite.

Sinead Kaufman: I'm a firm believer that even though geologists have explored most of the world many times over, we'll always find something new when we return with better technology, new data and AI-assisted approaches.

Sinead Kaufman: I don't think we've run out just yet.

[Music interlude]

Anna Ploszajski: Hod, what happens to your computer components after you're done with them? Do you have a robot graveyard somewhere in the lab?

Hod Lipson: That's a great question.

Hod Lipson: We actually have a project called Robot Metabolism, which is all about robots that eat other robots.

Hod Lipson: Imagine a robot walking up to another robot, taking it apart and using its components to make itself larger, repair itself or become more capable.

Hod Lipson: We humans do this all the time. We consume plants and animals. Everything in nature gets recycled.

Hod Lipson: Because all life is built from a relatively small set of building blocks, those blocks can be reused again and again.

Hod Lipson: I know it sounds like the start of a horror movie, but really it's about creating a sustainable ecology of robotics.

Anna Ploszajski: That's a fascinating vision for the future.

Anna Ploszajski: Sinead, what are the biggest challenges in making sure we can continue supplying our digital world with boron?

Sinead Kaufman: I think there are probably two.

Sinead Kaufman: The mining industry isn't always well regarded, and many of the concerns society has are concerns we share.

Sinead Kaufman: How do we mine materials while managing environmental and social impacts responsibly?

Sinead Kaufman: Mining has a legacy that is not always positive, and we have to build a future where mining can genuinely be sustainable.

Hod Lipson: This discussion makes me wonder what other secret ingredients are underpinning the technologies we take for granted.

Hod Lipson: Boron is clearly one of them. What's next in line?

Anna Ploszajski: That's a good question. I'm not sure.

Sinead Kaufman: Earlier in my career, when I was working as a mine operator, I took a basic course in computer science.

Sinead Kaufman: Back then, I never imagined that computer scientists, governments and technology manufacturers would come back to the mining industry asking exactly what materials are inside these devices and where they come from.

Sinead Kaufman: Nobody was asking questions about supply chains or material sustainability.

Sinead Kaufman: So I think it's a really good question, Hod. What else is in there? What has been mined and why?

Sinead Kaufman: And what material that seems unimportant today might become the next boron?

Anna Ploszajski: Super interesting. Thank you.

Anna Ploszajski: So boron, as we've heard, certainly has a place in our future, and hopefully a sustainable future at that.

Anna Ploszajski: Thank you both so much for taking us through the boron in your lives, Sinead Kaufman and Hod Lipson. Thanks for coming on.

Hod Lipson: Thank you.

Sinead Kaufman: Thank you.

Anna Ploszajski: You can listen to more episodes of Things You Can't Live Without wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to follow, rate and review us to make sure that you don't miss an episode. 

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Hello and welcome back to Things You Can't Live Without, the podcast where I, material scientist Dr. Anna Ploszajski, ask a special guest to tell us one thing they can't live without. Like last series, we interrogate a host of experts to find out how these items are made, where their components come from, and how the future of those items is being planned for. Joining me today is Dr. Adam Rutherford, a scientist, writer, and broadcaster. Welcome, Adam.

Dr. Adam Rutherford: Hello, Anna.

Anna: And I'm also joined by Marie-Pierre Paquin, Head of Science and Partnerships at Rio Tinto, who will be taking us through the innovations in sourcing and processing the materials that we need for crucial scientific research. Welcome Marie-Pierre.

Marie-Pierre Paquin: Hi Anna. Hi Adam.

Anna: So, Adam, what is the one item that you can't live without?

Adam: Well, we had a bit of a problem getting to this point, because when you asked me, my initial response was poo poo’d. You banned it, and it was flesh. I mean, it was bodies.

Anna: Yeah.

Adam: And then my second suggestion was going to be temperature, or low temperatures, in order to preserve the bodies that we work on as geneticists. But apparently, cool is not a material.

Anna: Not a material. Yeah, correct.

Adam: So, we've gone for fridges.

Anna: Fridges. And yes, material scientists don't consider anything bleedy or squishy to be a material. No, thank you. Marie Pierre, what do you think about fridges as an item? Can you live without a fridge?

Marie-Pierre: No, no, I can't. And as like a lot of people I do own a fridge, and I do own a freezer. But I don't put body part, human body part in it. Last summer I went for a weekend, and I didn't close the door properly. So, when I came back nothing in the freezer was proper for safe consumption anymore. And I will leave the details out. It made the freezer like very obvious that's something that we need for health and for general wellbeing and I'm reading this book by Anna Ritchie and she's proposing data on how access to clean water changed the life expectancy health of different communities. And it got me thinking like, how would it affect different regions of the world where they don't necessarily have access to electricity, or a freezer, or a refrigerator to keep their food safe, or even vaccine and certain medicine. How would that affect their life expectancy and the quality of life in general?

Anna: It's totally something we take for granted, isn't it? So, you thought fridges wasn't an interesting option, Adam, but we've already got into it.

Adam: Well, and the defrosting thing is, I mean, yes, it's incredibly annoying when you leave your fridge or your freezer open and the food goes off. Imagine how bad it is when you do that for a freezer which is a minus 80 and contains literally unique samples of DNA or tissue taken from the ground, from a fossil, that's why minus 80-degree freezers in biology labs have alarms on them.

Anna: That sounds like a very useful feature for sure. We're going to be thinking much more about how important the fridge has been, not only in scientific research, as you've been saying, Adam, but also to our lives. I also really want to get into how research and development is helping innovation and progress in general. But first, Adam, I want to get a bit more stuck into you and your job. So, you're a geneticist and lecturer at University College London and I know some of your books have been related to science, eugenics, race, a brief history of everyone who ever lived and how to argue with a racist. Where did your interest in genetics and the human body first come from?

Adam: Well, I went to university in fact to do medicine and I had decided not to be a doctor, and I think the third day, when I just had no particular interest in practicing medicine. I finished a year, and I wanted to pass my exams and then I transferred to genetics. It is the science that underlies all bits of biology, right? You know, it's a young science. It's only 100 years old in any sort of meaningful sense. The word gene was only invented in 1900. But it is also the study of families and inheritance and sex and disease and those are things that have been preoccupying people's minds for well since people have had minds. In the 90s, I started as an undergraduate in the same year the human genome project did so we were about to enter this Golden Age of Discovery just by chance and go through this process, this sort of transformational process in our understanding of genetics, which is ongoing and we're in the thick of it now.

Anna: Okay, well, let's get back to fridges and dead bodies. Fridges and freezers are really important pieces of equipment for laboratories everywhere. Why is that?

Adam: Because bodies degrade, they need to be maintained at certain temperatures during life, where all of your tissues are being replaced by very active processes to replace molecules and to do the functions of, and that all takes energy. As soon as you turn off the power supply, we start decomposing. Now, the bit that I'm interested in is how bodies get preserved when they die. And there's a specific reason for that, which is that in the last 15, 20 years, we invented the ability to extract DNA from people and other animals who have been dead for thousands, tens of thousands, and in some cases, hundreds of thousands of years. And that has completely revolutionised our understanding of evolution, particularly human evolution. Now the temperature bit is relevant here. Because DNA is well preserved at cold temperatures, but badly preserved when it gets warm. So, we've got lots of DNA from the Northern Hemisphere, and the further north you go, the better preserved it is. But we've got none, none from Africa. And that's a real shame, because most of our evolution occurred in Africa.

Anna: Wow, so we need cold temperatures and for that DNA to have been stayed frozen basically for thousands of years.

Adam: Yeah, I think I'm right in saying that the oldest DNA we have so far recovered, it's about a million years old.

Adam: It's not from human. I think we've got some equine DNA, and we've got some plant DNA from about that time. Animals or plants that were buried in snow and ice and have been compacted. So, they're really, really well preserved.

Anna: That is incredible, isn't it? So that's why you need these fridges and freezers in your lab is so that you can. continue to preserve those tissues and be able to get as much information as possible out of them.

Adam: Exactly.

Anna: But Marie-Pierre, I'm guessing that Rio don't do a lot of genetics research, similar to what Adam's describing, but could you take us through this sort of research and development that does go on at Rio Tinto?

Marie-Pierre: We actually do some with some of our partners. So, one of the team we're working with is looking at all kinds of bugs. Bacteria and other organisms that you can find in like a mine site, for example. And they're studying these organisms to see if they could extract some of the valuable material. For example, a bacteria or bug that lives naturally in a copper mine environment, would be able to sustain a high level of copper in its own organism and will survive to that naturally. And understanding those type of organism might help us find ways to extract those material in a very different manner than what we're doing today. So there is some study, and they actually use those, very fancy fridge to keep the sample at the right temperature and be able to do the sequencing, of these samples.

Adam: Well, I was just going to say that caves and mine systems have become an incredibly rich resource, not just for the minerals that you're looking for, but also for novel biology. Because what we've discovered in the last few years is that there's life everywhere and you can go down like seven or eight kilometers and find new bacteria. As Marie-Pierre is saying, they often have extreme behaviors because they live in these unusual environments. We call them extremophiles. And so we find life that lives at extremely hot temperatures in hot springs or ridiculously cold temperatures, but also things that process, for example, high levels of copper because the environment is such, that's what they have to feed off or methanogens who process methane rather than oxygen. Looking in caves and looking in mines for extremophiles before unusual biology has turned out to be a very rich potential source for new antibiotics. So, there is a real link between environmental geology and both genetics and subsequently medicine.

Anna: That's so interesting. And it reminds me of, people might remember those headlines from a few years ago, where scientists in Japan discovered that bacteria were munching on plastics in landfill sites. They had evolved to metabolise, digest, I don't know if that's the right word, these polymers as food. And it sounds as if they've also been munching on copper and other minerals that we might mine as well.

Adam: Yeah. I mean, the cliche, the line from Jurassic Park is ‘life will find a way’, and it is true. It is mostly bacteria. Most life on earth is bacteria by weight, by number, even on and in you, you are more bacterial cells than you are human cells, but pretty much wherever we look, we find bacteria and similar types of cells that are doing things that we were previously unaware of.

Adam: So, I think R&D departments should always be talking more to each other about what is in there. Because if you're exploring, it doesn't matter whether it's geology or biology, we're going to find new things which are going to be interesting and potentially of use.

Anna: For sure. So, Marie-Pierre, as well as the genetics research that you mentioned that Rio is working on, what are the other sort of major R&D areas?

Marie-Pierre: There's so much I was thinking about it and it's like picking your favorite child, but I'll try I'll try to share a few with you. There's a team in our iron and titanium business that is working with one of the startups we invested in that are looking at new ways to use biocarbon to replace fossil-based carbon in our process. That would have a tremendous impact on our greenhouse gas emissions.

Anna: What's biocarbon? What do you mean by that?

Marie-Pierre: So, we call biocarbon carbon that is from biomass. So, whether it's barks, it's like trees or it could be other kind of like biomass residue that can be harvested in a sustainable manner. Other project, we're also investigating carbon mineralisation. So, it's a way that we could potentially store CO2 in a safe and permanent manner in a rock form. So, no risk of leakage or anything like that. There's also a team called NutonTM looking at heap leaching of copper. So, heap leaching is a technology where you build some mountains of ore. So, you put it in a big pile, once it's mined, and then you will put a reagent on it. And the reagent will just percolate through the heap and collect the metal as it just percolates it. So, it's kind of a passive way to extract material from the ore and get it into solution. So, it's very low energy and low impact on the environment.

Anna: Love that, stick it in a big pile.

Marie-Pierre: Which would remove the need for a very expensive smelter being built and reduce the footprint in general of copper mining. So, these are all super exciting projects. They all have one thing in common. They have a reduced impact, whether it's less water use, whether it's less land disturbance, whether it's less energy consumption or greenhouse gas emission. And environmental impact in general and societal impact in general, they all aim at reducing that.

Anna: Awesome. As I said earlier, most material scientists like me won't go near anything squishy or anything that is liable to bleed on them. There’s that funny kind of separation in my mind between kind of biological materials and my materials, the material scientist materials. But of course there are massive crossovers in both. Do either of you have any guesses on how many elements of the periodic table are contained within a human body? Do you know the answer already?

Adam: Ooh, that's a great question.

Anna: There's 118 elements.

Adam: I would guess it's fewer than 20.

Marie-Pierre: I would guess it's more than 50.

Anna: Okay. The answer is surprisingly low. It's actually 21.

Adam: Hey, not bad. I reckon I could rank them.

Anna: Go on then.

Adam: So carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, obviously. That's going to be most of them. Yeah. Then there's quite a lot of phosphates because that's one of the key elements of DNA. Then there's going to be plenty of iron, magnesium, calcium. And then lots of other much more tracey metals. Not very good.

Anna: Yeah, you're doing really well. There's a big one that you haven't mentioned. If you think about like hydration.

Adam: Oh, sodium.

Anna: Yes, sodium, exactly.

Marie-Pierre: I guess you would need magnesium and potassium.

Adam: That is an excellent pub quiz question. I wonder how many of my biology colleagues could do 21 of them.

Anna: Yeah, that's so true. Yeah. So we've been talking about mining and minerals, but also minerals in the human body. One of the kind of the big metals in mining is of course iron. And we know that this is important to the human body. What does it actually do, Adam?

Adam: It's so fundamental to human biology because it's the oxygen carrying molecule in red blood cells.

Adam: And the reason they're red. is because they have iron in the centre of them. Hemoglobin are protein molecules. The oxygen is transferred in the lungs to the centre and carried by iron in the body. And that's why our blood is red. I mean, interestingly, not all organisms use iron as the oxygen carrying molecule. So for example, crabs and other crustaceans use copper. And so that is why the blood of crustaceans is blue and not red because copper is in their oxygen carrying molecules instead of iron.

Anna: What? That is a great fact. Marie-Pierre, I want to ask you about mining copper. How fundamental is it to Rio's operation?

Marie-Pierre: We do have like quite a few operations in copper. We have this huge mine in Utah near Salt Lake City, Kennecott Copper. We have our operation in Mongolia and a couple of a joint venture and a lot of our resources around exploration are turning towards copper. And the reason for that is that the amount of copper that will be required for the energy transition is tremendous. There's estimated around in the public domain that we'll need as much copper between now and 2050 as ever been produced by humans ever. Like, since the beginning of time, since we started to use copper.

Anna: And that includes the Bronze Age, which was really, like, big on copper.

Marie-Pierre: Yeah. So, we need more copper between now and 2050 than whatever we've produced before. So, obviously, recycling is a big part of it, but we don't have enough copper in circulation even to sustain our needs for the energy transition. So obviously copper is going to be critical moving forward. Think about AI, all these data centre and everything. This will all require copper to be implemented. So that's why copper is such an important metal for Rio Tinto.

Anna: So what are you doing about it? How are you meeting that need?

Marie-Pierre: We are dedicating a lot of our resource towards exploration of copper, but we're also looking at different resources where we can find copper. We launched, last year, the Centre for Future Material in collaboration with five different universities. We have a university of California, Berkeley, that is working with us, UBC in British Columbia, Canada, we have WITS in South Africa, ANU in Australia, and the centre is managed by Imperial College of London. We put the challenge to ourselves to look at the material required for the energy transition. This was launched to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Rio Tinto. So looking at what are the material required for the energy transition - copper is obviously one of them but there's many others. Where can we find those materials? So is there different sources than the one we've been exploiting for a long time? And then how can we extract those material in the most efficient and sustainable way? And there's a big social component to the centre where we look at how can we make those operations socially acceptable for the very nearby community, the first owner, or the traditional owners, the government, and the society in general. Because the time between a copper deposit discovery and actually moving it to a mine in operation and getting copper out of the ground, the average time is about 20 years. So, 20 years is a long time when you think about the energy transition and meeting all of those requirements in the coming decades. So, we cannot wait 20 years to have more copper available. So how can we do differently? How can we do with different type of resources? Can we extract copper from waste? We usually extract copper from copper sulfide, but is there other source like copper oxide that can be unlocked with different process?

Anna: Do you have anyone voicing the crab community so that to protect them from copper mining of their blood?

Adam: I think that it would be such small quantities that you'd need a lot of crabs.

Anna: Good, okay. The crab community are safe.

Marie-Pierre: It has not been proposed yet.

Anna: Good, okay. No, but seriously, that does sound amazing and looking at it being a sort of necessary for modern life, but making sure that it is being done responsibly and from lots of different angles as well.

Anna: Adam, what in your research is exciting you at the moment?

Adam: I don't actually do any wet work anymore. And so even coming in and saying the fridge is essential. It is essential for my work as a field, but it's not essential for me. The fridge in our lab is for keeping milk and beer cold. So, all of our work is now computational and we get huge data sets. And process them, look for patterns. We're looking for patterns in DNA. So, our genomes are the most complex data sets that exist in the world. So as Marie-Pierre was saying, we need more data storage. We need more internet capabilities. And all of those things are going to be reliant on the extraction of rare minerals. I mean, lithium is going to be a big problem for battery storage going forward. And so it just shows the interconnectedness of disparate fields, right? We need fridges to do our work and we need chemicals that make those fridges and we need copper wires to do things like this.

Anna: Yeah, exactly. And thinking about research and development and, how some of it can be, I suppose, quite fundamental, do either of you have a kind of a way that you sell that sort of fundamental research to funders who would be needing to invest in it?

Adam: What you're referring to is we sometimes call blue skies projects. So things that don't have direct applied or translational economic value. So, curiosity driven research is more lucrative to society than directed research. If you can show the numbers on that and do the economics and show that to governments who tend to have shorter lifespans than research projects. But if you look at the economics of the Apollo missions, the most conservative estimates are that the return on investment was seven to one. For every dollar spent, seven was returned to the economy, and that is what long-term planning in blue skies research and science can do, and that's what governments should be listening to.

Marie-Pierre: I really like your comment here, Adam, and that's very similar to the approach we're taking with the Centre for Future Materials. For us, it's a new way of working. It's a new way of working for the university also because often they are used to being told, like, work on this specific issue with the industry, but now we're telling them, tell us what are the key breakthrough that needs to happen.

Anna: For sure. I want to do a brief beat on thinking about the future before we wrap up. And Marie-Pierre, maybe I can come to you first. In thinking about our understanding of the planet and how the research and development going on at Rio is teaching us about that. What key discoveries are you looking forward to? What's on the horizon that will really change that understanding.

Marie-Pierre: I might talk about two things I'm very passionate about. One is understanding biodiversity. So, we pledge to protect biodiversity, but how is it that we're going to measure biodiversity? What's a good level at which we need to restore biodiversity? The other one, it's the ability to drill deep wells at a much reduced cost. So, drilling in exploration is very expensive. Drilling in mining is expensive drilling for geothermal is extremely expensive and it's a big hurdle for the development of a lot of project. So, if we were to develop a drilling technology that allow us to go very deep in the earth crust at a very low cost, that would unlock so much potential around like brine mining, potential around geothermal power generation, carbon mineralisation, resource exploration, and even things that are emerging like geological hydrogen would be accelerated quite a bit by the ability to drill at a lower cost.

Anna: Thank you. And same question for you, Adam. What are the key things that would represent breakthroughs that would really teach us about how genetics work?

Adam: I think that the key thing for us is we need more genomes. Right, so this is now a field which is dominated by large data sets, and the only true way we can understand life on earth, human life, human disease, human evolution, but also the evolution of all species, is to get more DNA. It's a data driven issue. Geneticists have become bioinformaticians, but we've also become historians as well. And so really understanding the way that evolution has progressed can only be revealed if we just get more data. So, we're just data hungry right now.

Anna: And all of that's going to need copper. Well, that brings us to the end of our discussion today. I think from my perspective, maybe before I accept any dinner invites from either of you, I might just check the fridge for dead bodies or dead crabs we've got onto now. Yeah, I've certainly found a new appreciation for copper for sure. You know, a material that is primarily thought of as being one for electronics and for heat applications, fridges, bodies, the planet, all of it has copper in it, and that's something that I never tire of with material science is that there's always new things to find out about these familiar friends of materials. A huge thank you to my guests this episode, geneticist Dr. Adam Rutherford and Rio Tinto's Head of Science and Partnerships Marie-Pierre Paquin. Thank you both so much.

Adam: Thank you.

Marie-Pierre: Thank you, Anna.
Anna: And now it's time for me to responsibly store away the first episode of this series at minus 80 degrees celsius for optimum freshness. You can listen to more episodes of Things You Can't Live Without wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to follow, rate, and review us to make sure that you don't miss an episode.
–Ends–

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Hello and welcome to Things You Can't Live Without, the podcast where I, material scientist Dr. Anna Ploszajski, ask a very special guest to tell us the one thing that they can't live without. As well as that, we interrogate a host of experts to find out how these items are made, where their components come from, and how the future of those items is being planned for. Joining me on the podcast today is Jon Lampley, trumpet player extraordinaire, and part of the house band on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Welcome, Jon.

Jon Lampley: Hello, hello. Thank you so much for having me.

Anna: I'm also joined by Shawn Lyndon, Chief Digital Officer at Rio Tinto. Welcome, Shawn.

Shawn Lydon: Thanks, Anna. Great to be here.

Anna: So, Jon, tell us, what is the one thing that you can't live without?

Jon: The one thing that I could not live without is my trumpet.

Anna: There it is. Finally, a thing you can't live without that I can relate to because I am also joined by my trumpet on the podcast.

Jon: I love it.

Anna: I am totally with you there. I also couldn't live without mine. Shawn, can you live without trumpets?

Shawn: I love the sound of trumpets in music generally, but myself, I wouldn't know what to do with one. If you put it in my lap, there'd be some awful sound. So, I'll leave it to both of you.

Anna: Brilliant. A world without trumpets would not be a world that we'd want to live in. So in this episode, we're going to be exploring the relationship between analogue and digital, whether that's in music or in mining. And to kick us off, Jon, would you give us a little fanfare to open the podcast?

Jon: Absolutely. It would be my great honour.

Anna: Incredible, thank you. So, Jon, you're both a trumpet player and a sousaphone player, love that, as well as being in the Stephen Colbert House Band, as I mentioned, you're also part of the jazz funk group Hunter Tones and have performed worldwide with rock band O.A.R. Where did it all begin for you?

Jon: So for me, music was something that started at home with my family. I grew up in an Apostolic church where there was gospel music all around, and everybody in my family either sang or played an instrument. And then by the time I was nine or ten, fifth grade, that's when you go to school and the band program starts. And I was like, you know what, the trumpet is really calling to me. I don't know, I've always been kind of an outgoing personality, and I don't know if it was because it's the loudest one, and that's kind of like me. But I was extremely drawn to it, and I started playing in school band, but also I started playing at church. And so that was the very beginning of my musical journey.

Anna: I love that. Yeah. For me, it was, we had a women trumpet player come into our music lesson and give us a demo and she just inspired me so much. She played jazz and she played classical, and I was like, right. I want to be like you teach me how. Let's dive into your object of the trumpet. If we may, can you describe it for our listeners? What kind of trumpet is it?

Jon: All right. So this trumpet. is actually a custom-built instrument.

Anna: Beautiful.

Jon: Something that is really important to me and kind of how I think of music is like, this horn is an extension of my literal voice, but also my personality. So, as long as I can get to the purest version of my voice out of this instrument, that's all I really care about. And I've always been able to do that on this horn.

Anna: That's awesome. Do you know what it's made from?

Jon: Raw brass is the material that makes up most of the horn. It kind of has a little worn-down look to it, which I really love. Over time, it kind of wears and it doesn't stay so shiny. And I also think that those horns are able to get to a sound that is a little darker when you're going for that, which is something that sometimes I like to be able to get to.

Anna: And there's something lovely about an instrument changing with you over time. Does a particular performance stand out as being your favorite, a really magical moment that you can tell us about?

Jon: I'll give you two. So, I went to The Ohio State University, which is a school that is known for its football team, and also very notably for the marching band. The nickname is “the best damn band in the land” and something that they're known for is a formation called Script Ohio, where essentially the band writes out Ohio on the field as if a pen is like writing it out in cursive, and at the end of the formation, every time the band would do it, a senior sousaphone player gets to dot the I, and it's this great honour, and it's, you can find videos of it on YouTube, and when I was a little kid, and I saw that, I was like, you know what? I want to do that. I was obsessed with Ohio state football. I shared it with my dad and in 2011, my senior year of college, I actually got to dot the I three times. Something that I will never forget in my entire life. And the other one that I will give actually happened much more recently. The horn section from the band Hunter Tones has been playing with the band Lake Street Dive, which is kind of an incredible pop soul band. And they asked us to come out and do some tour dates with them. Most notably, we got to play right here in New York at Madison Square Garden. You know, you grow up and you start doing this and you see concerts in very legendary venues. To get to play at that arena here in New York was a very, very surreal moment.

Anna: Yeah, I love that. Shawn, I want to bring you in at this point to play a bit of a guessing game or maybe an educated guessing game. I still want to stick with trumpets, and I still want to stick with materials. But the thing that I love about the trumpet, apart from its versatility and that you can play pretty much any genre on the trumpet, is that it is probably one of the oldest instruments. Shawn, I wondered if you can guess what different materials have been used to make trumpets throughout history?

Shawn: I'm wondering if it was wood. The reason I think of that is I, you know, growing up in Australia and being here, I think of didgeridoos and those types of things and the incredible sort of culture that the first nations people here of Australia have built.

Anna: Yeah, that's a really good guess. I think that's Jon, any others? Any other early trumpet materials?

Jon: I mean, maybe some form of clay, but like, not like Play-Doh clay, but like the stuff that they would imagine they're making vases and that kind of thing. Maybe they crafted instruments out of that at one point.

Anna: You can imagine that would be quite resonant as well.

Jon: Right, exactly.

Anna: The conch shell, I was thinking, you know, things from the natural world, like people going down shells and animal horns. I don't know if you've seen pictures of Tutankhamun, ancient Egyptian king. He was buried with some silver trumpets. And they are apparently cursed. That's the whole story about Tutankhamen's trumpets being cursed and the times that they've been blown in recent history have been just before like terrible tragedies and wars and things. So I don't know if they're allowed to be blown anymore. And then Roman Bronze was the first sort of engineered metal. By that point, people were starting to able to bend tubes. Bending a tube is actually quite hard to do because it often just folds. So the technology of bending tubes took a while to be developed. But during the Industrial Revolution, when people were starting to engineer metal, we were making steam engines using airtight valves, and some trumpet engineer just thought, ah, that would make a better trumpet. So they took the same technology in steam engines and stuck three of them in a brass pipe. And those are the sorts of trumpets that we play today. But it came out of an engine, which I think is quite cool.

Jon: That is amazing. Something that I feel very fascinated by with our instrument, the trumpet specifically, is how it has developed but also how there is still this human element where it's not one trumpet is the best trumpet and it all kind of depends on what your style is or where your technique came from or what's your preferences of how you play or how you're trying to sound.

Anna: Yeah. There's definitely a little bit of magic in it.

Jon: Absolutely.

Anna: So Shawn, how do you best enjoy your music?

Shawn: For me, I find music's my happy place and a great escape. I really enjoy everything from live music to recorded. I would say probably the place I'd say I enjoyed the most is in Colorado, Red Rocks, often, and it's an outdoor amphitheater. Just spectacular sounds, and I don't know, I've found that it doesn't matter what music it is, it has just this otherworldly sound, and the experience of being outdoors, connected to nature, that's my favourite place to go and listen to music.

Jon: I've been able to play there quite a few times over the past decade, and I will agree with you. I think it's the greatest venue in the world. Anna, you talked about magic. There is a very specific magic to a place like that, that you just can't describe. Yeah, Shawn, that's a really special place.

Anna: It's so interesting that you mention an amphitheater, which is a kind of analogue type space. Because in this episode, we're talking exactly about that. The idea of analogue versus digital and the differences and similarities. Jon, do you think about that element in your work that analogue to digital switch?

Jon: I think about that often as an artist, as a musician, as a human who does this and cares about it very deeply. I always am aware of what I sound like. This instrument is the definition of analogue. So we're literally talking about the vibration of one's lips against the metal that creates the sound. You know, I put out my first record last year and it's a live album that was recorded in a very small space, and everybody is hearing exactly coming out of all of the instruments, the trumpet included. But then as you said, I'm playing on TV every night and that sound is going into a microphone and sounds very different than what people are hearing in the theatre. What I do have control of is my sound, what I sound like on the instrument. And something that I have worked towards over many, many years is coming up with a distinct sound. Because I think that all of my heroes, both on the instrument, but also like singers and artists, they have the most distinct sounds. And I think that is a way to kind of really cut through the digitisation of what the sound is when you really have your distinct voice on your instrument.

Anna: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Shawn let's talk about digitisation in your world. Rio is in the process of digitising a lot of its traditionally, analogue processes. Can you first explain maybe what digitisation actually means in your world?

Shawn: Can I just pick up on what Jon was saying? I mean, I think digitisation, as we talk about even music or anything else, it's taking those analogue, those sounds, those vibrations that are actually occurring, you know, in the air, reverberating off objects, and converting those into something that is essentially ones and zeros at the end of the day, but there are a lot of ones and zeros that end up being able to as closely as possible represent that analogue world. And, and imagine Jon playing at Red Rocks. And as you mentioned, like all the sounds and where all those sounds are going and bouncing off rocks and people and audiences, and we're able to now sample those things at a higher sort of quality than we have in the past, a higher density to try and get closer and closer to being able to represent what is the real world. As everyone's seeing, like, with the rise of generative AI and chatbots and your photos now, which you can manipulate and automatically be updated. That sort of ability to take what is previously on film or previously a set of vibrations or photos or video and convert that into ones and zeros so that we can then not only represent it but interpret it through software and other computing programs. That's really what sort of digitization and the digital transformation is about. And it's been a journey we've been on for a long time. I think the one thing that comes up as people think about generative AI and chat bots as being something that creates, it doesn't create, it really is recording. And what Jon does and the artistry of people who create is very critical to continuing for digital to also go ahead. And I think that's just an important point of where its limits are, at least today.

Anna: Thinking about digitization in the context of a company like Rio Tinto, why would a company like that need to digitise?

Shawn: When in the process of mining that we disturb the environment. But we also go to great lengths to restore the environment and preserve the environment as we go. We were very concerned with making sure that the natural habitat was coming back and the birds, the animals, the fauna that was there that was coming back and growing and was healthy. So in the past, in that situation, we would send people out surveying and they would try to manually cover thousands and thousands of acres and sometimes these are areas that, you know, are the size of a small, medium sized state in the US. And this is just, to do this, you, it's very difficult to cover that much. So now, we, as an example of what we're doing, interestingly tied back to music, we're studying and monitoring the Palm Cockatoo. It's a beautiful bird. It's this black and red bird is really important to the ecosystem, and it's called the Ringo Star of birds because it actually makes its own drums, believe it or not, from branches. We're able to make sure that it's able to nest and rehabilitate. And so, in that case, we're able to use cameras, and we're able to digitise those images. From that digitization, calculate the number of birds, the increase in the population, their nesting habits, whether they are breeding in a healthy way, whether that's increasing, and whether that is rehabilitating in a way that is inline or even in this case better than before. Rio Tinto operates the largest automated robotic trains in the Southern Hemisphere, it was the first to install it. But we have these robotic trains that are traveling all over the country, you know, over expanse the size of Texas, all automated. How do we make sure that the space that the tracks that they're traveling on are in good condition? Physically getting people out there to do that just does not scale. By digitising the condition of the tracks, the conditions of the trains, simple things like vibrations. They tell us a lot. They can tell us if the train is about to fail, and we're able to predict failure from that data. Very importantly, we're able to avoid derailments or accidents that may happen. It's just a couple of examples of why Rio Tinto's using digitization to inform the ways that we do things.

Anna: All of that sounds really positive. Jon, do you have examples in your work where digitization has made a positive contribution to your creative practice?

Jon: I mean, absolutely. I listened to a lot of music that was recorded before it was possible to digitise sounds. They went in the studio. And they set up and they recorded straight to the tape. And there is a beauty in the way that was captured the sound of it, the honesty of literally what you heard on those records is what was played. And that kind of changed the way that you had to play and perform. I hold massive appreciation for that. That being said, as a creator, I am amazed at the idea that I can create full horn sections of 10 to 30 trumpets and balance it all out and make it sound as if you're listening to a full horn section that recorded in a big, big recording studio with this microphone in this room. And I can do it very quickly because of the power of digitization. All of these things have not only become possible, but they become easier and easier to where you hear about an artist like Billie Eilish making one of the biggest songs in the world, mostly in her bedroom. And I think the ability to have an idea, create it and manipulate it so quickly with so little is a really powerful tool for musicians and artists like me. But I will always believe that the best way to create is kind of this middle ground where you're using the power of digitization to facilitate the process, but you're also committed to an honesty in the capture.

Anna: How do you feel about the honesty of artificial intelligence being another tool in that toolbox?

Jon: Shawn, you said something very powerful earlier. To the effect of, as incredible as it is to be able to say “Hey, ChatGPT, write me a song about dominoes in the style of Taylor Swift meets Stevie Wonder,” and it'll spit something out that is kind of that. It is very powerfully and efficiently regurgitating what it has learned. Through what we as humans have actually lived and experienced and I think something that people connect with is the struggle the human struggle and I believe that Artificial Intelligence can be a powerful tool to help us, you know, can I say, “hey can you alphabetise these track listings so I can access it easier?”. I think that's really great. But I am wary and pray that we do not go down the path of ChatGPT, “here's the idea that I have, make this sound like Freddie Hubbard meets Louis Armstrong.”

Anna: Absolutely. Same question to you, Shawn.

Shawn: Jon did a really great job of summarising it. I don't really need to add much more. It's blending a lot of different pieces from areas together that has been modelled, analysed, etc. I would say that today for the role for sort of AI and being able to really help us model how things work and to be able to do different simulation scenarios and to improve how things work. I'll share an example on that. In fact, in doing digital, there's two parts to it. And one of the things that happens a lot is that even creating new software, there is a creative element to it. You only have to look at how much the software and digital world keeps evolving. And applying AI in ways it hasn't been is innovative. But innovative to me is really looking at a problem or a need or something that we haven't really solved well. And creatively and typically collaboratively. Thinking about different ways that we could solve that and build something that would do that in a way that is better than we've done before. And that is very different. And that is creative. And that happens a lot in digital, just like AI. But even as Jon mentioned, I think, you know, as an artist, I'd want to make sure that we are thinking about how we use artist’s content.
There is an obligation to ensure that that content is not reused in a way without their consent. So there's a lot of these sort of questions that are very ethical, the ethics of data and AI that are coming up. I think that's probably more of the issue. I think it's fun to think about, oh, AI takes over and it creates all these problems. But really, I think right now, I would say that the thing that concerns me most is that we do AI in an ethical way.

Anna: Looking to the future, Shawn, are there any exciting areas that AI or digitization more generally, is going to really make a big impact? Can you give any examples within the realm of Rio Tinto?

Shawn: I think one of the most exciting areas is using AI to analyse all of the different steps along the path. When we go to explore a new mineral deposit, we may be going onto lands that are owned by First Nations and Native landholders. How do we do that in the way that is most respectful to them and minimise the impact we are having as humans generally on that land? How do we use lots of data to know more quickly without doing lots of disturbance to the land, whether or not there is something there that would be very useful to extract and mine, but then how do we then plan our mining in a way that we reduce the impact on our environment? Another area that I've had some exposure to, aluminium processing, and it takes a lot of power to produce aluminium. There's certainly a lot of work being done to move to hydro and other renewable energy, whether it be wind and power, but to be able to efficiently model the processing. It's very expensive and difficult to actually just build a plant and see if it's going to work with a different energy source. And how do you reduce the energy you're using? We're looking at how we can actually model the physical process of these very large vats of solutions that are boiling at 700 plus degrees and so we're building digital copies, twins, duplicates of this process using AI and digital. We can start modeling the most efficient way to take something from ground to the consumer or to the market and we can keep iterating on it in a way that has very little impact on the world but actually then creates a massive positive impact as we can optimise for things like reducing carbon emissions.

Anna: And Jon, what about in your world? Where do you feel that technology maybe will have the biggest opportunity to transform the world of music in the future?

Jon: We're getting so many different sounds because of technology. We're getting so many different applications of combinations of sounds. And another thing that I feel is a benefit of this is it helps to make the process. And the ability to create music at a high level, not something that you only can do if you get a big record deal, or also you come from a family or a place where you have access to all of that. And to me, that's a really powerful way that we hear a lot more voices in music kind of come above the phrase. So I hope that as technology develops and we can do more with less, you start to hear a lot more types of creativity, be able to be created at a higher level.

Anna: Absolutely. Well, we've come to the end of our conversation today. I think tying both of those threads together, one thing that I've taken away is that digitization or the digital world in some ways enables creativity, enables, as you've just said, the democratization of creativity and sharing of that. So it's not something to be feared, something to be celebrated. Thank you both so much for those contributions. Trumpeter extraordinaire, Jon Lampley, and Rio Tinto's Chief Digital Officer, Shawn Lyndon.

Jon: Yeah, this has been really wonderful. Thank you, Anna. Thank you, Shawn, for having me.

Shawn: Thank you, Anna. And, Jon, lovely to meet you.

Anna: Well, it's now time to play ourselves out. But remember, you can listen to more episodes of Things You Can't Live Without wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to follow, rate, and review us to make sure that you never miss an episode.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Hello and welcome to Things You Can't Live Without, the podcast where I, materials scientist Dr Anna Ploszajski, ask a special guest to tell us the one thing that they can't live without. We also interrogate a host of experts to find out how these items are made, where their components come from, and how the future of those items is being planned for. In this episode, I'm joined by world-renowned photographic artist, Edward Burtynsky. Very warm welcome, Edward.

Edward Burtynsky: Great to be here.

Anna: Also joining us is Jonathon McCarthy, Chief Decarbonisation Officer at Rio Tinto. Welcome, Jonathon.

Jonathon McCarthy: Thanks, Anna. 

Anna: So Ed, tell us what is the one thing that you can't live without?

Ed: Well, my knee jerk reaction was going to be my computer, my iPhone, but I think that's kind of too standard an answer. So I went to, it's a carbon fibre tripod that I've had for, gosh, over 30 years. It's something that has been on every shoot and every country and every place that I've poked my nose into. There's no camera that I have that's done that. So it is the enduring piece of equipment that has followed me around the world.

Anna: That's been your faithful friend and more well-travelled than me, it sounds like. That's very impressive.

Ed: Fifty countries, I think.

Anna: Oh my goodness. Wow. Jonathon, were you surprised to hear that I didn't choose a camera as a piece of equipment?

Jonathon: I was actually surprised to hear that 30 years. I mean, it's just, it's phenomenal endurance. When I thought about this, I was thinking, well, aluminium is light. It's easy to replace. You know, it's a bit less fragile, perhaps, but maybe all of those things are not true. 30 years, 50 countries. It's a stunning life for that piece of equipment, if I'm honest.

Anna: So in this episode, in our conversation together, we're going to be talking about energy as a central theme and how Edward's tripod has enabled him to document the human impact on our planet. And we're also going to learn about some projects that are underway to decarbonise our energy in the future. Let's dive a bit further into your item. Can you describe that your tripod for our listeners and tell us what actually is it that makes it so useful to you?

Ed: So it gives me about a height of about seven feet. So if I'm at the very top of the tripod, I have to go find a milk crate or some block or something that I can step onto to actually get the view through the camera. So it's got just that little bit more elevation that is beyond me and that height is very important. And then, you know, the other thing that I found is that you're working fast and when you lock it, you don't want it to slide because I might have a camera, a 30, 40, 50 thousand dollar camera on there. I work with large formats. So the reason why when you get in front of one of my prints. You know, I've always wanted to be like two viewings of that print, two ways to experience it. One, the whole picture and kind of as you go up to it and where is this place or what is this place? Literally all my pictures need a tripod. I don't shoot from the hip. I don't shoot with a 35 or your iPhone. You just walk around. You can take pictures. No, I have to actually stop, open up my tripod and put the camera on top. So it is like a key to every picture I've taken.

Anna: Wow. That's so interesting. So your trusty tripod really does have to be trusted.

Ed: Yeah. And at the time when I bought it, it was a big reach for me because carbon fibre was just hitting the market up until then. They’re all made of aluminium with steel bushings. And by the time they designed this one, it was half the weight. The carbon fibre itself was like almost impossible to break. It actually was broken once. A porter that was pushing the gear through a door in a hotel, but the tripod bag was sticking out, and I just saw pounding the cart, and it actually cracked the central post, which I just replaced the central post. Even on that shoot, I was able to use some Krazy Glue and put the central post back together until I got a new one. So never been put down by this tripod and never failed me once.

Anna: Ed, you have an epic body of work from decades long career. You've captured industrial landscapes across the globe, which focus on the impact of human industry on the planet. Because this is an audio medium. I wonder if you can describe for our listeners, the style of your work.

Ed: Even as a student, I was starting to look at a subject for my camera that wasn't a standard landscape. I wanted to do something unusual. I wanted to do something that was very different. And I also was in love with painting. I wanted to bring in ideas from the world of art, abstract expressionism, and even some of the early German romantics of the painters, and then incorporate that into my photography so that my photographs had a sense of the painterly in them. I started thinking instead of just pure landscapes, I should actually possibly consider the human altered landscape and feeling that we are in a population growth. So in almost every decade of my life, we've added almost not quite a billion, but just under a billion people. So it has been this spectacular population explosion. I wanted to go into something that people never expected to have an aesthetic quality to it, like a mine, or a quarry, or a factory even. So I was trying to find a portal into those worlds that invoked what I would hope is a sense of wonder, and a sense of where is this, and this is something very unfamiliar to me. And that's what the industrial landscape has become, very unfamiliar. We don't go to the big mine sites, we don't go to the big quarries, we don't go to the big factories where our cars come out of. So to me, it was my camera was able to enter that space. And because I wasn't entering it politically or as an environmentalist, but as an artist, you know, a lot of shoulders went down in terms of industry. They said, okay, come on. And I want to see what you're going to do with my, with my industry, whether it's, you know, oil refineries or oil fields or factories in China or anything like that. I was able to talk my way onto those places and into those places because of my approach.

Anna: What are some of your standout experiences in going to those places?

Ed: I would say the one that this is like now 25 years ago, but the one that floored me was going to the breaking of the largest vessels created by humans, which is oil tankers on the shores of Bangladesh. And then it would take a half a year, four or five months to break a ship like that. And all they had was a cutting torch. That was the most sophisticated tool they had. The rest of it was a pry bars and shovels and winches that they built from all the anchor mechanisms and the cables from these ships. But that was otherworldly. It was like stepping back in time. It was almost as if I was looking at the beginning of the industrial revolution through Dickens eyes, the satanic mills and the, and where life and environment were not even considerations in industry. The first day I went there, there were two burning pyres and that was two workers that were killed from a cable that snapped and just bifurcated the two of them because they were in the way of the cable. And when you have a two-inch-thick metal cable snap, by pulling a big chunk of your ship in, you don't want to be anywhere near that cable. Apparently, at the time, there were, like, about 700 casualties a year, not to mention all the loss of eyes and arms and fingers and all that. And they have no safety gear, no cutting glasses, no, no gloves. They're working in flip flops.

Jonathon: The Dickens reference and the sort of two different worlds. I grew up in heavy industry, 500-ton excavators, all this amazing equipment. And I was traveling up the west coast of India, 20 years ago and there's these two ships on the beach and people doing exactly that. It was a really big moment for me, the amount of impact you can have without all of this heavy machinery just being able to do things by hand. I just couldn't believe it. How much those groups of men got done over the course of a day with literally a cutting torch and, you know, a pair of pliers and a rope.

Anna: And Ed, what was the standout image that you captured from that experience?

Ed: There's one I got that I thought was a portrait and it was an inside of an oil tanker. So you can just see the black oil almost as a patina on the wall with all the big pipes. So this is where oil would normally be sitting in a big oil tanker and I just put this young, he looked like he was 14, 15-year-old worker who had a kind of dignity to him. And he had this vest, this kind of golden vest he was wearing. I kind of saw him and standing there and I got everybody else to move out of the way. Like I don't do a lot of portraits, but that one's still, I think. It resonates through time and it still tells an incredible story. And then this guy with nothing more than a shovel and mud on his bare feet, in a scrapyard. It's a telling picture.

Anna: It's another world. Yeah. Actually, if listeners want to see some of your photos for themselves, Edward, they can go to the link in the show notes, and that will take them to your website and they can see the images there. Jonathon, when you first saw Ed's work, what was your impression as somebody who's maybe a bit more familiar with big industry than most of us?

Jonathon: I must admit, like, I've always found that wonder with industry. I grew up in industrial towns. I chose to come back to industry for my job. But when I looked at it, when I see the work, there's this feeling of sadness that I think a lot of people would have. The human impact and that evoking of sadness is probably the one thing that captures me of, how can we keep doing this? And also, perhaps for yourself, you've got this beautiful ability to go and capture the moment, to go and capture those sorts of moments. Quarries, ship breakings, not always clean and beautiful sort of nature. How do you feel about going into that moment and capturing it? Because I think there is a sort of underlying sadness at times, that at least a lot of people would see there, even if that's not the intent.

Ed: Well, I wouldn't say it's not the intent. I hail from Canada, right from a very young age my father was an outdoors person, so fishing and, and hiking, all part of my growing up. And so I was very kind of connected to nature. But when you're out there and you're in this kind of pristine world where this is what the planet intended before humans, this is what it looks like before we come along and rearrange it. And there's a lot of that untouched unspoiled land in in Canada and I got to see it firsthand. And so when I looked started looking at what we as humans do and I got to work in the mines. And I got to see big open pit mines and I said people don't realize the scale at which we operate so we only kind of cast our thoughts forward and we completely forget about the fact that we still live in a material world and the reason we can talk on a computer or on a phone is because of copper and aluminium and all the other things that we need in the plastics and the silicon and all the things that we need to be able to do that. So for me it was that ability to, you know, take that as a kind of loss, a lament of a loss of nature to our success. The common thing through all of it is there is a bit of a sadness because, you know, there's a price being exacted on biodiversity, on the planet, on atmosphere and all that. I think by the time you go from one end of my book to the other, or through my films, or through the multimedia pieces that I've done, you know, I think it's clear that what I'm hoping that you do take away from it is that there's reason for concern. That we are at a kind of unprecedented moment in time where humans can actually change the trajectory of a planet. And this is probably the first time that a single species on the planet can flip it into an ice age, or completely send it off course for where it was naturally going.

Jonathon: And I think, Ed, it's a great capture of how I feel. Because the sadness sits there, but I worked in industry but just minutes or hours away from beautiful parts of Northern Australia. I worked in the Canadian Rockies, and I was in the Gobi Desert, and you don't have to step very far to be in a pretty untouched wilderness once you get out of industry in the Gobi Desert. And I had this moment there, and I really thought hard about staying in industry. Can you be part of this machine that keeps on rolling and doing this? I stepped away from industry for a couple of years and thought hard about that. Tried to sort of re-skill myself, do some other things, but sort of drawn back to, and Ed said it earlier, this is humans and it's what we do, and this is the moment. And I actually thought, you know what, what if I can come back in and play my role in at least shaping how we do that just a little bit in the right direction. And so, I'm very, very lucky my current job has big scope and impact to sort of turn that ship just a little bit. But the sadness is sort of overcome by at least a little bit of, I don't know if the word's hope, or a little bit of agency. But probably a desire to sort of embrace that, be part of it, try and move things in the right direction. And I think, pleasingly, we're starting to get that investment in technology. We're starting to get that awareness. Things are starting to come together very different than even when I started my career 20 years ago. But it's going to be a very long road. It's multi-generational, it's not for this decade.

Anna: For sure. Ed, when I look at your work, there's learning in looking at these images, you learn where stuff comes from. You don't often see that. So, yeah, thank you for that rollercoaster of emotions that I feel when I see your work. Because it isn't, it's not as black and white just as this is horrifying, or this is beautiful. It's all of it.

Ed: You know, we're storytellers and we can tell stories through images, through films, through words. And we have soft power, so it's not incumbent on us that we're going to change the world. But what we can do is shape consciousness. And shaping consciousness is the beginning of change. So there is a kind of ability that I think artists can also have in terms of telling the stories and reconnecting us to these places where our existence, and often times people will come after me and say, Oh, you're aestheticising disaster, and I'm saying, well, if you think that that's what I'm doing, then you're going to wake up in the morning and you're going to turn on the lamp beside you, which is electricity that probably travels through copper lines from a big nuclear power station that is massive in scale with tons of concrete and copper. And then you're going to go over and turn on your metal faucet which is made out of steel through copper pipes. Need I go on? I mean, you, for the moment you go, you get up, you are engaged with a world that comes from materials. So if you think you've moved past it, you haven't. It's there every second of the day.

Jonathon: There's a global mining CEO for the last decade famously would get on stage and just simply say. Everything in your life was either grown or mined as a precursor, and you just have to accept that, and now we work together on how we want that to look. But that's where all the things in your life came from.

Ed: Yeah, and when I had this show in London, I was often brought to those questions as well, but I would say, well, if you want to really understand what's threatening, in particular biodiversity, but also adding to the carbon footprint, if you look at all the mining in the world, it's of arable land. It's less than 1%. If you look at like in agriculture in America, it's 30%. So all of the wetlands that have been drained and turned into farmlands, all the prairies that have converted to wheat fields, all the forests that have been turned into farm fields on and on and on. If we're looking at what do, what have we as humans done to reshape the planet more than anything else? It is agriculture. It is growing enough food for 8 billion and growing population and so comparatively speaking agriculture has, is doing more damage to water and biodiversity actually than mining is.

Anna: Absolutely. You mentioned earlier that your trusty tripod is made of carbon fibre and that back when you first bought it that was quite a sort of futuristic material or very expensive material. These kind of composite materials are a lovely family of materials. I find them quite optimistic they're all about kind of making the best of their components and bringing those together and creating something new that hasn't been made before and things that want to be lighter and stronger and stiffer tends to be composites because you don't often find those properties in materials that you get on their own. Jonathon, in your role as chief decarbonization officer, do composites play a big part? I'm thinking lightweight, strong?

Jonathon: You know what Anna, not yet. And so what, yeah, why is that? When we look at the portfolio and things like energy efficiency, which is absolutely the best possible way of improving the footprint of the planet. Efficiency is great because you're just using less of what you needed. You don't have to produce it differently. You don't need an extra solar farm or an extra wind farm or an extra something. You just need less. So when we look for efficient projects, that's the starting point, but there's plenty of improvement, but we're not at the low hanging fruit stage on efficiency. Composites aren't at the point of really revolutionizing these big energy value chains that take bauxite into alumina into aluminium or that take iron ore into steel into sort of finished steel products. They're huge energy intensive value chains and so it's not so much about the efficiency on the boundaries of how do we get there. Composites will have their moment if they can actually replace things like steel. Imagine a building that could go up and be reliable and safe and do its job having a tenth of the steel that we use today, that will be a big change.

Anna: That's so interesting. It reminds me, you know, in cycling they used to talk about marginal gains, lowering the weight of your bike by a tiny amount that would get you an extra 0.1 second. That kind of was brought back by composites and that was the very final way to optimally optimise your, in this case, bicycle. Is it kind of like a similar analogy maybe?

Jonathon: It’s a super analogy and I'll stretch the analogy because it is helpful. If you go to Copenhagen, you go to New York, you go somewhere and look around at all the bicycles, not many of them are going to be $70,000 carbon fibre Tour de France bicycles. And so it's almost the same as having this conversation and saying, why can't an architect come up with a skyscraper that uses this cool new composite alloy that takes a fifth of the materials out. And the answer is, probably it can be done. But of course, that's for one building. We're not at the point where we're going to do that 30,000 times. And so of course, even at the pointy end of material science where we could break that, it's almost exactly like the bike analogy. The marginal gains at the pointy end of professional anything have to reach mass market proliferation.

Anna: Yeah, that's an awesome answer. Thank you. Ed, your work started in the late 1970s and throughout your working life, energy has changed drastically over the last few decades. I'm really interested, because you have this unique view of, of that period. What are your reflections on capturing literally energy landscapes across such an interesting period of transformation. Can you tell us about what you've seen and how it's changed?

Ed: The challenges of the, you know, energy challenge in that we're still burning over 10 billion tons of coal every year and we're burning 100 million barrels of oil per day and not to mention natural gas. So what we're doing is clearly unsustainable. And the direction that we're heading into, and Jonathon is actually a foot soldier in that world, and we need lots of them to kind of make the conversion, but it is a paradigm shift. And it's interesting that I've actually been able to kind of understand a paradigm shift in a very visceral way as a photographer where when I began my work it was all analogue. So I was using film that was from plastics, from oil, with silver from mines, silver mines, gelatins from farming. And then the digital camera comes along and now light is captured in ones and zeros. And then once it's captured, now you can send it to a printer, and it can recreate that, or you can send it to your friend on your phone, or whatever. So all of a sudden the whole paradigm shifts. And I'm saying the same thing is happening with fossil fuels. That we need to go from a consumables to a durables. And when I started thinking about that, the whole idea of mining became really important because the best estimate is that we started mining copper as a species about 5,000 BC. So, let's say for about 7,000 years we've been mining copper. And if you look at all that's been mined from the beginning of time till now, the best estimate is something like 750 million tons of copper. The amount that we're going to need to get to net zero is that again in the next 20 years. And if you look at any material iron copper lithium to get to net zero is a durables play. We're moving from a consumables energy paradigm to a durables paradigm. So solar panels, fusion, even you can look at nuclear as durable, and wind turbines, and geothermal. And all of them are about building pieces of equipment that can convert natural energy into usable electrical energy. And that is really what we're moving towards to a sustainable world. So the idea of that we need our, that the future to be sustainable and for us to survive it, we have to remind our way to the future.

Anna: So how's the decarbonisation process going, Jonathon?

Jonathon: Look, I want to start with a small anecdote because this one factoid just went through society in the last few years really strongly. And I think it helps to paint was if you take an electric vehicle and the example was a Tesla and you take the carbon footprint just to put it on the road on day one. So all of the emissions from my industry and the midstream industry for lithium processing just to get the lithium and the nickel and all the elements into that battery, you could drive an F150 pickup truck for like six years using petrol, using gasoline, before you had the same carbon footprint as just driving an EV off the lot. And that's a fact. It wasn't sort of misinformation. It wasn't the fuel lobby trying to put that in. And it gives you a sense of the intensity of putting EVs or this new sort of durable world in play. And so I think the thing that I've been really grappling with if that's true, is this really the right way to go about it? This is good in theory. It's good emotional people feel great about buying an EV, but actually we're adding to the footprint. No one's owning their cars sort of eight nine years to make that payback. And what I've started to realize in this job is we are turning that stat around. And two things have happened in a massive way. One, batteries have fundamentally shifted. And I don't think people have realized in the last four or five years, the efficiency and cost and the durability, it's totally different. We waited 30 years for this moment and people kept saying, Oh, batteries will be better. The last five years, batteries have shifted. And so, all of a sudden, that equation that I just described cuts in half just purely on technology advancement of the good old lithium battery. No breakthrough into some new chemistry, no different sort of thing, no need for some new and very hard to find metals, just the same chemistry, brought down, cheaper, better. And the other element is that we are finding ways to power industry with renewables. And so, for a long time, the other argument that sat in lockstep with this was, well, you can't run big industry off renewables, they're unreliable. The sun and the wind powered, it moves around, it's not there. And there was this really big push about six or seven years ago for net zero everything. And in some ways the conversation has moved into that space where people are starting to say, well, net 90 sounds fine. That compromise moment of being maybe not net zero right now, because the technology is not quite there. That's at a macro Anna, like we are now. How's decarbonisation going? It's right at the moment where it's about to sort of be in the money on a global footprint basis. And it's actually making good business for companies like ours, which obviously helps you to reinvest really strongly.

Anna: That's so exciting. We're going to have to wrap up our conversation soon, but Ed, I really want to ask you before we do, where's your work going to take you next?

Ed: I'm going to Australia on my big shoot next in May. It used to be a tin mine in the southwest, just below Perth. It's called Greenbushes. I don't know if you've ever heard of it or not. But what's interesting is it's now become the largest supplier of lithium in the world. And basically what they found is that in the crushing, in the tailings of the crushing of the rock and taking the tin out, one thing that they didn't bother with, but it was full of it, was lithium. So now what they're able to do is to go right in there and start to mine the tailings, which are already half the cost of crushing taken out. And now they can just take it and reprocess them for lithium.

Jonathon: It holds a fascinating place in the world's lithium supply chain now. It is the benchmark, but that's not what it was built for.

Anna: Well, thank you both so much for this fascinating conversation. I think reflecting on it, one thing I've taken away is the importance of conversations between art and science and what both can tell the other what we can learn from observing and yeah, Ed your work really speaks to that and the kind of what we can learn from the material world, not just in the sciences. Thank you so much to both of my guests this episode, photographic artist Edward Burtynsky and Rio Tinto's Chief Decarbonisation Officer, Jonathon McCarthy.

Ed: My pleasure. Yeah, thank you.

Anna: If you want to see more of Edward's photos for yourself, you can find a link to those in the show notes. And that brings us to the end of this episode. You can listen to more episodes of Things You Can't Live Without wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to follow, rate and review us to make sure that you never miss an episode.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Hello and welcome to Things You Can't Live Without, the podcast where I, material scientist Dr. Anna Ploszajski, ask a very special guest to tell us the one thing that they can't live without. We also interrogate a host of experts to find out how these items are made, where their components come from, and how the future of those items is being planned for. In this episode, I am delighted to be joined by Ruby Wax, OBE, comedian, performer, and author. Welcome, Ruby.

Ruby Wax: Thank you. Hi.

Anna: Also with us is Nigel Steward, Chief Scientist at Rio Tinto, who you might remember from Season 1. He's going to be taking us through how innovations in processing allow them to create more from less. Welcome back, Nigel.

Nigel Steward: Good to meet again Anna.

Anna: So, Ruby, what is the one thing that you can't live without?

Ruby: Well, clearly it's a computer, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation. I mean, I don't know what else to say. I could send you a dove with a pen in its claw, but I don't know how many years that would take. So, it's a computer.

Anna: Yes. Enabling us to talk today and to do many other things beside. Nigel, is that the same for you? Could you live without your laptop?

Nigel: I don't think these days, no, it's so much an integral part of our lives, everything we do.

Anna: Yeah. Same here. I use my laptop for everything, for work, for entertainment. I live on my own and much to my mother's disgust, I often will watch TV on my laptop while I'm eating.

Ruby: The whole point is it alleviates loneliness. I sleep with mine.

Anna: So in this episode going to be using the laptop as a conversational jumping off point to discuss the theme of creating more from less in both the physical world, as in the materials that go into making computers and in the mental health space. As in your work, Ruby. And many listeners will know you from appearing on our screens and stages around the world. But you also have a master's degree in mindfulness based cognitive therapy from Oxford University. And you've been awarded an OBE for services to mental health. And Ruby, fun fact, I think you might have been at my graduation because I did my undergrad at Oxford and I think we graduated on the same time, 2013.

Ruby: No, Did we throw our hats in the air at the same time?

Anna: We must have, yeah.

Ruby: Yeah, it's the happiest day of my life. Yeah, because I flunked out of nursery school, so it was such a surprise, 80 years later to get that award.

Anna: Not 80, but yes. Yeah. Wow. It's such an achievement. Well, for you too. Thank you.

Anna: Can you tell us what brought you to want to study mindfulness formally in that way?

Ruby: Well, I had done a lot of therapy clearly since I was a child. And, you know, eventually you realise you're repeating the same story over and over again. And I polished it up so much that I thought, well, why shouldn't I be charging you? Well, eventually I did turn it into a show. And did charge. Because all you're asking the shrink to do is to please help you have some insight or be able to run this machine called the brain. It's like we have a Ferrari on our heads, but nobody gave you the keys. Here we are 2025 and we still can't pull the brakes. I mean, it's a no brainer. So I thought I'll try mindfulness because you do cut out the shrink. I like the neuroscience of it. So that's why I went to Oxford to say, explain to me what you do and what happens in the brain and sure enough, you can't see in an MRI scanner. In certain areas, becoming more activated, in charge of self regulation, focus, attention, all the things that we're lacking today.

Anna: So do you see the brain and the computer as operating in a similar way then?

Ruby: Well, the computer doesn't have consciousness, nor does it have a sense of humour? And I don't think it ever will, because it has to understand irony. I don't think that's coming with a piece of equipment or software.

Anna: Neural networks.

Ruby: Neural networks, which is emulating the brain as much as it can, and it's going to get more and more sophisticated. But I think emotionally it's going to have a tricky time.

Anna: So speaking of emotions, how do you feel about your computer?

Ruby: I love it. I can't live without it. And I'm addicted to it. Addiction is what you can't live without. And interrupts your life. And this certainly interrupts my life. I mean, I'm ashamed to say, I'm not, I, you know, oh yes, I just use it to write my books or I just use it to answer an email, except I'm answering spam. The adrenaline and the dopamine of answering somebody I've never even met is a kick. And every day I try to get to the top of that list. And I think, you know, I would be a drug addict if it wasn't for my computer.

Anna: So how does mindfulness help to short circuit that?

Ruby: Well, I can, I can sometimes shut it down.

Anna: Yeah.

Ruby: And while I'm meditating, I can feel my fingers reaching for the computer and on a good day I can stop myself. And I don't think I would have even thought of that if I didn't do mindfulness.

Anna: Yeah. Gosh, I sort of catch myself reaching for my phone for no reason. Or 20 minutes later, I remember why I went to my phone in the first place was to check something.

Ruby: Do you feel it vibrating even when it doesn't?

Anna: Yes

Ruby: Because what does it represent? How many people will come to your funeral? I mean, how much love do you need? And you don't even know these people, or do you like them?

Anna: Yeah, gosh, that's so true. Do you have that, Nigel? How do you feel about your computer and devices?

Nigel: I don't have the same challenges that you two have. I quite happily leave my computer and leave my phone to one side. And I tend to focus on one thing at a time. I've come to terms with that. I switch off all of the alarms. You know, all of these like buzzes, vibrations and things on my phone. It's the very first thing I do when I get given a phone. So I switch everything off.

Anna: You could teach us a thing or two, I'm sure, Nigel.

Nigel: That's my version of mindfulness. I just focus on one thing at a time.

Anna: That's the definition of mindfulness, I think. No, not really. How do you define it then, Ruby?

Ruby: I think it's just being aware in the moment without kicking your own arse. Okay, okay. So if I multitask or I, people think, oh, I think 3,000 thoughts a second, you're supposed to, that's what's keeping you on earth. The machine of the brain keeps working, keeps working, but we all know there's an observer bit and that gives you a little pause before you act on it.

Anna: Got it, and forgiving yourself for that, yeah. Let's get back to the hardware of this. Nigel, tell us, you're in the business of metals, materials, minerals coming out of the ground. What are the materials that go into our computers?

Nigel: Well, there are many. I think on the previous podcast, you, you mentioned the iPhone and you know, an iPhone is just a mini computer at the end of the day. So there's a huge range of elements in it. But there are some significant ones. The casings are quite often in aluminium. All the wiring inside of it is copper. There's gold in there as well. There's the obvious things like the silicon and the dopants that are used to make the silicon function as a semiconductor. The screen with the rare earths. Of course lithium. Portable computers have the lithium ion batteries. So a huge range of materials.

Anna: I always think of our electronics as kind of like a celebration of the elements.

Ruby: We're celebrating, but there's a depletion somewhere else. They're borrowing them from the earth.

Anna: Yeah, absolutely. And the tension that we've come up with is that we rely on this stuff for work, for mental health, every day. I like your word borrowing, Ruby. I think that's a really thoughtful way of putting it. And in order that we'll be able to create these things in the future. We need to be able to do more from less and be more efficient about it, more sustainable about it. Ruby, you are such a creative person. Your list of TV episodes, comedy shows, books is almost endless. It's, it's such an impressive body of work. And I'm interested in the environment that you need, the conditions that you need to create. Can you take us a bit through your creative process?

Ruby: No, that's impossible to say. I'm a mere mortal. I don't know what makes me creative. I know when I write Absolutely Fabulous, it's the night before. And Jennifer Saunders also, there's a bolt of lightning and suddenly she, in real life she's not that interesting. And then suddenly this genius comes out, it pours out of her and there's no question there's a comedy rhythm. You can't mistake it for anything else. It's like jazz instead of a symphony and it's notes that you wouldn't expect. It surprises you and makes you laugh, which is just a scream and a surprise. So, I don't know what brings that on. It's just the way I think.

Anna: Wow, so an iterative process then? Or just a..

Ruby: It's chaotic, it's just chaotic. And it can happen anywhere, usually in the back of a bus.

Anna: Wow

Ruby: Or it has to be movement, or on a plane. If I sit still I can't create.

Anna: Yeah, I find that too. I used to write a bit of comedy and I used to do my best writing in the swimming pool, which is really annoying because you can't write it down, you have to remember it. Do you find that the creative process is a way of processing events in your life or things that you've seen, conversations that you've had?

Ruby: Well, the books that I've written, How to Be Human with a Monk and a Neuroscientist or Say New World, they weren't science. And, but I did it with a twist. So I used for my dissertation at Oxford, I talked about neuroscience and mindfulness and then I just flipped it with comedy and took it on tour for three years and wrote a book called The Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled. So I'll kill three birds with one stone. I am not a fiction writer, so I take something like evolution or relationships or sexuality or whatever. I'll read up on it. But then I'll steal from everybody and then flip it into comedy so they can't find that I've plagiarised.

Anna: Right. Nigel, can you take us through a bit of what processing means to you?

Nigel: Well, yeah, it's the way in which we transform the rocks that we take out of the earth into the materials, the minerals, bauxite and chalcopyrite. So the bauxite, which is the source of aluminium. And the chalcopyrite, which is the source of copper. So you have to take that copper and the aluminium out of those rocks. And in the case of copper, there are two ways in which we can do it. We can either take the ore that we mine and leach it with acid or with water and bacteria. And then you leach the copper out into solution. You then concentrate it. And again, you use an electrical current to deposit copper. An alternative way of doing it is you take copper, you concentrate it, and you then take it to a smelter. Where you inject oxygen into it and heat it at a very, very high temperature. And it forms copper sulfides. Then you boil off the sulphur. And when you purify the copper, you can co generate things like silver and gold, because they often co-exist with copper as well.

Ruby: You could make gold? 

Nigel: Yeah.

Ruby: Now I've woken up.

Nigel: Oh, so in our operations in Salt Lake City in Utah, we make not only copper, but we also make molybdenum disulfide, gold, silver, and more recently we've been producing tellurium because that coexists with copper and that tellurium goes to make cadmium telluride for solar panels.

Ruby: Wow. I can't turn this into comedy as much as I could try. There's no way I could flip it. But keep going. I'm fascinated.

Anna: I think what's interesting, you know, Ruby, you said you can't make comedy out of this. That's because there are no surprises. Or are there, Nigel?

Nigel: Well, I think this is the connection with human beings and what we call human factors. Most people in our industry, they're like me. We tend to have to focus and we can't remember too many things. And when we're overloaded with too many things, we make mistakes. So our processes can go out of control. So, we tend to think about how do we simplify our operating instructions so that they're easy to remember and easy to implement. The more complex they become, the more likely you are to have a procedure which will take your process out of control. So the general rule is you don't want to really have a process that a human being has to go through with more than seven steps. And the other thing that we work a lot on in our process is where often you'll come into our process plants and you'll see these massive control rooms full of screens showing everything that's going on into the process, every single pump and, you know, injection point, everything is there and all of these things can be alarmed and the equipment manufacturers send these things with alarms. So imagine when something starts to go wrong. All the alarms go off. And you think, well what the hell am I going to do? If you're an operator, you're in utter panic, right? So what we have to do is we analyse all of this and possible events in advance. And we minimise the number of really, really critical alarms. And it's a process called alarm management to make it easier for a human being.

Ruby: But you know, in a way, it's so much like the brain, it's that, you know, you have all the meat and there's all the components, but how does it eventually go into thought? How close do you get to making a human, ultimately, not with the iPhone, that's just voice, but with the internal thinking, do you think that the components will ultimately be able to make decisions? They already do.

Nigel: Well, there's some interesting work that we've been doing using what they call deep learning surrogates, which is a form of AI. So you have to train it with data from your processes and from computer models that exist that we've put together as human beings. And you can train a deep learning surrogate and it can make calculations incredibly quickly. We've done some work recently where a simulation took six days and the deep learning surrogate can do that same simulation in less than a second once it's been trained.

Ruby: Is there a moment where you think they use creative thought?

Nigel: No.

Ruby: No. Do you think there will be?

Nigel: It depends what you mean by creative, creative. I've seen some quite interesting things where it's created some very unusual objects. I've seen one with the heat exchanger, the deep learning surrogate actually designed that did look very, very creative rather than being sort of standard rectilinear channels where a coolant would pass in a heat exchanger. It came up with this very curvaceous object. It looks like some sort of flashy designer object. And that for me is something that was creative because an engineer would never actually do that because an engineer would be thinking, well, I have to actually make this at the end of the day. Whereas that limitation on the DLS system wasn't there. And it came up with this highly curvaceous object. It was very, very unusual. So you, you look at that and you think, well, this is possibly creative, you know.

Ruby: Yeah, and maybe comedy someday.

Nigel: I'm not so hopeful about that because of your irony point. I've seen some AI generated joke and it’s not funny.

Ruby: So have I.

Anna: Oh, gosh. Yeah. It's bad. So Nigel, is that an example of using machine learning to be able to innovate processes, to make them more efficient, to create more from less?

Nigel: And that can certainly be a big part of it. It's less in the processing, but more in the product end use, where we can use a lot less of something. Or it might be a component that goes into a processing plant. In processing itself, the type of thing that we tend to think about is how do we actually consume a lot less? How do we get a lot more from the ore that we mine? How do we reduce the energy consumption? How do we use less water? How can we generate other byproducts that can also be useful to society that would avoid digging up something elsewhere. So, it's thinking more like that.

Anna: Nigel, can you tell us about the change in process in ElectraLith?

Ruby: Tell us what it is, Nigel.

Nigel: Oh, ElectraLith is a start up in Australia that we're working with. It has a membrane technology that can extract lithium selectively.

Anna: Lithium selectively? What does that mean?

Nigel: Yeah, so one of the sources of lithium are the brines, deep underground brines. So they're a mixture of different salts, all sorts of other materials, and what you want to do is try and selectively extract the lithium. So the way that's done today is the salts are brought to the surface and they're evaporated and you can extract the lithium that way. What this technology can do is you basically pass the brine with all the mixture of salts on one side of the membrane and what comes out the other side of the membrane is just the lithium. So it's a special material they’ve designed that only lets the lithium through. So there's no water loss.

Ruby: Who started, you know, can you imagine the trial and error that goes through this? How did they figure it out?

Nigel: Well, it's the same kind of creative process as you, but in a different field. These people, they're imagining, how can I design a solid that's a lithium ion conductor? And they think about the physics and the solid state physics and chemistry of that.

Ruby: Right.

Nigel: And they're saying to do that, I need to find this solid membrane.]#Ruby: I've never gotten up in the morning thinking I've got to find a solid membrane. It just hasn't happened. I'd like to have Nigel's brain.#

igel: Different people are switched on by different things. That's the creative process for us. There's a challenge out there that we're trying to solve, usually around how do we produce the materials with a zero carbon footprint and a much improved ESG footprint. And then you put your mind to solving those challenges.

Anna: Nigel, you were talking about what motivates scientists and surely one of the biggest motivators for scientists these days is the environment and is trying to do things that are going to be more sustainable and better for the environment. Ruby; the environment is a cause of major worry for a lot of people and, I would imagine in your work you come across people who have poor mental health because of environmental concerns.

Ruby: I don't know. You're making a jump there. I mean

Anna: Do you think?

Ruby: A mental disease is like having cancer or diabetes. So, it's not a thing because you're thinking incorrectly or you're fearful. You know, what Lewis Walpole said, “a tumour is to cancer what thought is to mental illness,” It's the outcome of it, not because of it. They're not worried about the environment. They've got a disease. It's in their DNA. It isn't what you're thinking. It's what you're, your physiology.

Anna: Yeah. Okay.

Ruby: It's not because they're worried about the environment.

Anna: No, of course. Of course.

Ruby: It may be a byproduct, but they're sick and they need medication. Isn't it interesting, you're mining lithium and a lot of people need lithium for their mental health. Isn't that interesting? The same thing that's put in an iPhone is put in a human body.

Anna: It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah. Who needs it more, do you think, Nigel?

Nigel: I think many elements have many uses. I think that's the interesting thing with the chemical world. If you think about nuclear fusion going forward, if that ever happens, the nuclear fusion actually needs lithium as well.

Ruby: Does quantum computing need lithium?

Nigel: Not sure.

Ruby: Well, that may be a way of saving energy. I'm not going to give you any more ideas, Nigel, because, you know, if I see you've stolen them, there may be a lawsuit.

Nigel: Yeah. We use lithium to make aluminium alloys even lighter. So some aircraft use aluminium.

Ruby: There you are. Yep. You outsmart me again.

Nigel: Lots of uses

Anna: It's incredible the diversity of uses. So we've talked about lithium as being such an important material that we need it to be future proofed in order for us to have not only computers, but also every other battery powered thing that we know of. What are the other ways then that we are trying to future proof this vital material?

Nigel: Well, I think in the example of ElectraLith, Anna, that's one way, that's a technology for the future. But what we're actually doing now is we're using a resin technology. So this achieves a similar result to ElectraLith. It's a way of extracting the lithium from a brine and then returning that brine back into the ground rather than evaporating off all the water so we get that water loss. So the way the resin works is you pour the brine with all of the magnesium and the calcium and sodium, lithium, everything in it, and the resin just picks up the lithium. You then take it to a next stage where you wash out the lithium and you selectively wash out the lithium. So that's a way in which we can drastically reduce our water consumption whilst producing lithium. So in, in Rincon in Argentina, we use this process for the first time. And in December, 2024, we successfully produced our first lithium using this extraction technology.

Anna: Ruby, tell us about your Frazzled Cafe then.

Ruby: Well, you know, a lot of people say that working on through the screen doesn't really help the situation of loneliness or human connection, but I created Frazzled Cafe, which is I'm emulating AA. Steve Rowe, who owns Marks & Spencer, gave, you know, the cafes up and down the country, and we could have small meetings. And people would speak from the heart, and they would be more human than they are probably in the office. And that made them feel heard. It isn't from mental illness, but who knows, there might offset something severe, because talking is half the cure. And you meet your own people, and that's such reassurance that you're not making this up. Cause you don't make up diabetes and you don't make up mental illness, but in this culture, they seem to think it's part of your imagination. Anyway, I've created that and we, because of COVID we met online, but when you're not using it for business and you're just staring in the whites of somebody's eyes and they're speaking from the heart, believe me, that oxytocin passes, you know, compassion oozes off that screen. I do about 80 people every two weeks. And when people speak, and a hundred heads nod in agreement, you see just this person light up. Because stuck in their little home, they're too afraid to tell their family or friends or whatever's going on. It doesn't have to be heavy, but just the human condition. It's got a format, and we've been going seven years, so that's where hurrah for computers.

Anna: Can you tell us a bit more about the format for it?

Ruby: We top and tail it with a little mindfulness so that you get that brain down because if your mind is still in the office or it's past or future thinking you're not in the room, so we try to get everybody settled, defrazzled and then there's a moderator. And they say, please put up your hand and don't speak for more because there's so many people. So somebody just speaks from the heart. I always start off saying, what's the weather condition going on inside of you? I don't want what happened last year, or I don't want to hear about politics. The news is out. So people start to use that muscle of, this is what I'm about right now. And for some reason that really resonates and it makes it human. We really want to hear the expression of the heart. Nobody ever takes over. They don't go on for hours and hours the way they do on television. But when you have all those people listening, they just state their truth. And then the moderator says who else resonates with this story. We don't give advice. It's not therapy. Then there's breakout groups and you meet your people and it does feel like a community and that's what we're lacking. So I'm using an artificial means to create community and I don't know why the government or somebody else hasn't emulated it because it's so necessary. So I hope we can keep the funding up so that we keep this going or there's something else like this. I don't need your point of view about the news. I can listen to the news and that just riles you up anyway. Let's think what the news does to you. You know, if you're talking about cortisol overload, well, how much do you need?

Anna: Yeah, I totally agree. It's like Nigel's machines just turning all the alarms off, not being bombarded constantly.

Ruby: Well, I hope that they make a piece of technology that gives us that neural feedback. That's what mindfulness does. You get feedback from your own mind as to where you are. Are you going into a danger zone? Where, you know, constantly in a state of FOMO. This didn't exist a hundred years ago.

Anna: Yeah.

Ruby: Hopefully there would be some technology that can help us with that, to say you've got enough. It's enough now.

Anna: Yeah. I like that concept of enough. If our listeners could do one thing to improve their mental health, to take a step in the right direction, to take a step off that frazzled path, what do you recommend?

Ruby: It's not for everybody and it's probably detrimental to some people, but you know, if I didn't do mindfulness and it's got a physiological empirical evidence for God's sake that, you know, the amygdala does reduce in its activity, the insula where you have more focus on the body rather than the constant loop type of thinking. There are things that do happen that you can reduce exactly what the problem is. It's as close as we've gotten to that piece of technology that says you're burning out, but at least you're aware you're burning out and awareness is everything. It takes effort to say, okay, I'm in trouble now. I'm going to stay in trouble because I need the money, but it's your conscious decision. This isn't to say chill out. This is to say step on it when you need to step on it. But at some point, when you go home or when you're on a holiday or whatever, you better come into the present, otherwise what's life worth living for? The problem is most people don't do it, but they go to the gym seven days a week.

Anna: Yeah

Ruby: And so just by listening, who says that we can't switch on and off our cocktails, our chemicals by the computer? Of course it gives us the same stimuli as a human does. But ultimately we still have to meet and form a community and I think Frazzled comes as close as it can get before we meet in public.

Anna: Yeah. Nigel, same question to you. I imagine it'll be a very different answer, but if our listeners could do one thing to help themselves feel better about the environment maybe, or to do one thing to help the environment, what would you recommend they do?

Nigel: Well, I think one of the things that we have to get much, much better at, to talk to Ruby's point earlier about, you know, resource extractions, we need to get much, much better at recycling. That's certainly an interesting area for processing that we've been embracing more and more within the company. So I think we need to get a lot better at that. There are a lot of huge scientific and engineering challenges associated with some forms of recycling. If you think about the computer, how do you extract and recover all of those elements within it? That's a very difficult challenge to do that cost effectively. So there's a huge, I think, opening there, an exciting period for science and technology to try and solve some of these challenges.

Anna: Absolutely. Thank you both so much. I've taken a huge amount away from this. I think the thing I'm going to try and do is to turn off my notifications and to notice when I'm reaching for that cortisol again. A huge thank you to my guests this episode, comedian and mental health advocate Ruby Wax and Rio Tinto's Chief Scientist, Nigel Steward. Thank you both so much. Ruby's new book is I'm Not As Well As I Thought I Was and she's taking that on the road on tour in 2025. And that brings us to the end of this episode.
You can listen to more episodes of Things You Can't Live Without wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to follow, rate and review us to make sure that you never miss an episode.

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Hello, and welcome to Things You Can't Live Without, the podcast where I, material scientist Dr. Anna Ploszajskii, ask a special guest to tell us the one thing that they can't live without. We also interrogate a host of experts to find out how these items are made. Where their components come from and how the future of those things is being planned for. In this episode, I am delighted to be joined by Mark Mangini, two-time Oscar winning sound designer. Welcome Mark.

Mark Mangini: Good morning, Anna. Thank you for having me.

Anna: And also with us is Didier Arseguel, Vice President of Technology at Rio Tinto, who will be taking us through ways of creating from a better place using repurposing and recycling. Welcome Didier.

Didier Arseguel: Hello, Mark. Hello, Anna. Very pleased to be with you today.

Anna: Thank you for joining us. So, Mark, you know, the premise of the podcast, what is the one item that you can't live without?

Mark: Unequivocally a microphone, my portal into the world of sound.

Anna: Which makes complete sense. So, what we're going to do in this episode is we're going to learn more about how the art of sound design first of all relies on the technology of microphones, of course, but also your massive sound library. I want to get into that, how you've cultivated that over a lifetime and the commonality between you two is this idea of repurposing and recycling and the materials that make up the microphones, you know, it is, of course, a physical object as well as a portal into the sound world. So, we will be talking about how those processes can hopefully ensure that there'll be many generations of sound artists to come and that you'll be able to have your sort of prize technology. As a sustainable object as well in the future. I just want to get into a bit of the background of your career, Mark. As a sound designer, you've worked on lots of movies that our listeners will have heard of winning two Academy Awards: Dune, Mad Max Fury Road for those. And you've also been nominated six times. You know, you are. Obviously at the top of your game. Movies that people would have heard of, Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, Gremlins, Aladdin, Anchorman, any more favourites to name?

Didier: I'm a big fan of Dune, so it's a real privilege to be with you today.

Mark: Thank you. I'm glad you mentioned Dune because, Denis Villeneuve is, is a very progressive filmmaker and Dune takes place in a universe that doesn't exist. So, everything you hear, we have to create bespoke. And his way of framing that universe was, “I want to hear my movie as if we had dropped a documentary film crew on the planet of Arrakis and everything we hear could have been captured by the boom mic.”

Anna: Right, so that's important for listeners. So, we're not talking about a soundtrack, we're talking about the sounds that would happen in that scene and more, right?

Mark: I'm responsible for everything that you hear, the dialogue, the sound effects, the ambiences, the foley. I'm responsible for everything except for the music, and that's an important distinction. Although I am a musician and a composer, and those skills deeply inform the way I design sound, because I bring to bear all the skills that a composer uses. The thoughtfulness of timbre, time, tempo, dynamic, but with sounds that are non-melodic.

Anna: I love that description, that's incredible. And if listeners want to hear more about foley artists, I interviewed the wonderful Shelley Roden in series one, so you can go back and listen to that. Didier, do you have any favorite film sound moments that spring to mind?

Anna: Yes

Didier: Yes, it is Star Wars.

Mark: It's a great sounding film. The sound designer Ben Burtt achieved so much greatness with the sounds from that film. He used a similar technique as we've on Dune, which was he built a universe of sound out of found sound. He didn't use a lot of electronica synthesizers. He went out into the real acoustic world, as we did, to capture the real world and repurpose it in ways that you wouldn't recognize. The Wookiee is a baby bear sound. The lightsaber is the sound of the arc lamp of a film projector. That's part of the fun and the magic of what sound designers do, is this repurposing or recontextualizing to make things feel unique and yet oddly recognisable, but you don't know why. Everything that we can do in cinema as artists to convince you that a sound is real is to start with something that is real in the first place. So, there's this interesting antagonism in my community of when do we use electronic sound, which inherently does not check that subconscious box of, that sounds real.

Didier: One of my favorite sounds is really, you know, the TIE Fighters. Do you know how they were produced?

Mark: Absolutely. It is made from an elephant scream. He didn't do anything to it. This is the genius of Ben Burtt. He heard spaceship engine and it's just as so he added a little bit of doppler shift. You know, that, that change in frequency when something travels by you, the pitch shifts. That's a TIE fighter.

Anna: That is so amazing. And that really actually touches on the point that I wanted to put to you, Mark, which is that you must have to have trained your mind to have made those connections between sound and totally random things like an elephant screaming.

Mark: Yes, that's kind of the training we go through, which is to extrapolate or find metaphor in the world.

Anna: Yeah, I love that. My example of my favourite film sound is in Jurassic Park, and particularly, you know, the bassy thump of the T Rex's feet before we see it for the first time. It just transports you right there into the car.

Mark: You know, what's interesting about that to me is the sort of psychological nature of that it's the audience's and our anticipation that that's what a big heavy thing should sound like. It should shake the firmament and it should frighten us and in that idea of being frightened comes a deeply evolutionary thing going on in sound which is low frequency sounds are terrifying because a hundred thousand years ago, the things that rumbled were things to truly be frightened of - volcanoes and earthquakes. Now, we leverage that as a cliche to induce fear that may not have an actual origin. Especially in things like horror films. You're always introducing some kind of rumble to get the audience on edge.

Anna: That's amazing. So, you're, you're kind of an emotional manipulator through sound as well.

Mark: Oh, very much so because we are constantly navigating our world with sound.

Anna: What sort of microphones do you use? Let's get nerdy about the tech and then we can talk about what they're made of.

Mark: Well, I have somewhere on the order of 50 microphones. A microphone for me is much like a lens to a photographer. And all of these microphones have a very specific purpose. So, most of my microphones are traditional diaphragm-based capture devices. Diaphragm meaning there's a very sensitive piece of material that receives sound waves. Sound moves in waves, and it vibrates the diaphragm, and the diaphragm converts those movements into electrical impulses that you can record. But I have a lot of other specialty microphones. I have hydrophones, microphones designed to work underwater. I have EMF microphones that capture electromagnetic frequencies. I have contact microphones. What other kind of crazy microphones do I have? I have subsonic microphones designed to capture only those at a frequency well below human hearing. So that's a broad description of the types of microphones that I have.

Anna: That is quite a box of tricks. I've heard about your rig for rain sounds, and I really want to hear more about it.

Mark: Well, that rig came about as an outgrowth of my philosophy, which is how do I place my microphones, hence the audience, as an extension of the audience's ears? Rain is particularly antagonistic to sound recording because you don't want to put expensive equipment out in moisture. So, I had to figure out a way to protect the equipment while capturing rain the way we hear it when we're stuck out in the rain. So, I built a canopy for my microphone rig, but it had to be an inert material because I didn't want to hear the rain dropping on my canopy. I wanted it to only capture the sound of the rain around the microphone. Yeah. So, I found a particular kind of foam that would absorb water, that would not reflect sound. You wouldn't hear tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. The microphones are right there. And I could run for about ten minutes before the sponge material absorbed enough water that it would start to leak. Now mind you, I'm out in the middle of the rain. So, I could only be out in the rain for ten minutes till I had to take off my cotton jacket and wring it out. And then go back out into the rain. Now, what that achieved was recordings that I used for Blade Runner 2049. We had a lot of rain sound.

Anna: That is incredible.

Didier: You know, listening to you, Mark, I think what you describe is really fantastic in terms of innovation and, you know, breaking the rules. And thinking out of anything, really impressive.

Anna: So, getting back to materials, you mentioned your microphones have got diaphragms in, they've obviously got a structure. Any guesses about what materials go into making your microphones?

Mark: The good microphones almost always have an alloy like aluminium as a casing as the body that contains the parts, and the shape of that body is critical in terms of how the microphone captures the sound in the way you want it to capture sound. And the diaphragms, I would love to know more about the science of those materials because the diaphragm of a microphone mimics what your eardrum does.

Anna: Yeah, I did some research into this. And in a way, I was surprised to read that sometimes those diaphragms are made of very thin plastic material, which surprised me because we think of plastic as being quite cheap and quite weak as a material. But thinking about it, it's probably one of the most similar synthetic materials we have to the human body materials, so yeah, I was sort of surprised to think, like, oh, it's just a plastic membrane that's so important in the working of it. Didier, you have any further guesses on microphone materials.

Didier: I think you say metals. Yeah.

Anna: Yeah. If I think about the materials that maybe Rio Tinto would be involved in, in some microphones, there are magnets involved and probably, sort of alloys of iron, boron, neodymium maybe would be ones that Rio would be involved in.

Didier: Yes, I would say that the first one that Mark was highlighting, aluminium.

Anna: Yep.

Didier: Rio Tinto is really super well involved. Iron as well, you know, obviously. Overall rare earths is quite challenging for different reasons. You know, it's a type of material that economical environmental viability, it's a big technical challenge.

Anna: Yeah. And actually that brings me on to what I wanted to talk to you about in terms of sustainability and recycling, because we think of metals. We're familiar with the fact that they are recycled when you put them in our recycling bins, but I want to dig much deeper into those processes and how recycling is only going to become a much more important part in both the Rio business but also in the products that are ultimately made out of their materials and how that fits into a circular economy. Didier, how does repurposing and recycling come into your very different line of work?

Didier: Yeah, very different. I think there is no ideal recipe. I really believe it's all about having an open mindset by looking to what is already available externally in the open world, but as well internally. It’s about having no hesitation to take, to adjust and to adapt to your current situation and purpose. I believe it's really about having an open mind.

Mark: An open mind is so vital in cinema, certainly in cinema sound, because to create, to design sound, is to be open to anything. To sort of approach a problem with no preconceived notions.

Didier: Exactly. You know, these things may be 20 years ago, from an economical technology standpoint where possible, but that now became possible. The world is dynamic. Technology is evolving. One best example is what we call heap leaching. Heap leaching is about recycling copper tails via bacteria which will process this tail.

Anna: So that's an example of how you're sort of repurposing what would otherwise be classified as waste and getting useful stuff from it.

Didier: Exactly. It's a way to maximise what the nature, what the earth gives us.

Mark: You just made me think of a nice little wooded area behind my home, and there's a lovely barn owl that I wanted to record. But of course, you can't ask a barn owl to speak on command. So, we put out what we call a drop rig. We put a recorder out there and we turn it on, and we leave it for 24 hours in the tree branch right near where the owl existed. And I recorded for 24 hours, and I came back, and I put that recording of 24 hours into my timeline. My sound processing tool, and in that 24 hours was about 15 seconds of great owl vocalisations.

Anna: Amazing. Didier, can you tell us about biocarbon maybe as an example?

Didier: Yes, for sure. Biocarbon is a project that we are developing within the context of our decarbonisation strategy. The purpose of that is really to replace fossil anthracite for cycle and biocarbon is a high-quality metallurgical carbon, which could be used in our processes based on wood recycling. And with no incremental CO2 emissions. That's biocarbon.

Anna: So is it a material that would be used when you process iron ore, you need a lot of carbon involved. Would it be, instead of using coke and coal, you could use this carbon that came from wood?

Didier: Exactly. Assuming it works. It could be a key element, you know, to decarbonise the steel industry, which is one of the largest industries in the world. But as well, you know, it could be a titanium feedstock production, because you need to remove oxygen from the ore, and a way to remove the oxygen is using carbon. But the value, the beauty of biocarbon is, you know, you develop high quality, carbon with no incremental CO2 emissions. And you don't need to mine for fossil anthracite. Knowing that would be based on wood and especially on wood residues.

Anna: Brilliant. One thing that really surprised me is it's not just about sort of repurposing and recycling in an outward looking way where you're kind of taking feedstocks and you're recycling and making existing products greener. It's also about looking internally and finding ways that you can repurpose and recycle in terms of your own, processes, your own ways of doing things that aren't actually about making products. It's just about making the business more efficient.

Didier: Exactly.

Anna: Mark, I want to touch on your relationship with recycling because we talked a bit earlier about you reusing sounds and I'd love to know to what extent is recycling or do you think of recycling as part of your portfolio.

Mark: I've never made that direct association, but in that context, it's certainly a way to look at the way I work, which is to say there's this universe that all of us in sound aspire to, which is to have everything that you hear in a film be an original recording. For that project, but time and budget have never allowed for that and may never allow for that. Thus, we record sounds constantly and master them to be part of a sound library, a collection of sounds that is browsable and recallable. So, I am constantly recycling, if you will, sounds from my sound library when I'm not able to go out and record the new sounds that I desire to use.

Anna: Do you have any questions for Didier about what elements might be recycled or recycled in the future?

Mark: Well, I have sort of a personal concern because it's harder and harder to find a recycling centre here in Los Angeles. And I generate a fair amount of electronic waste. And I know there's a lot of rare elements in my electronic waste that could or aren't extracted or repurposed, and I'm just curious what the future is for electronic equipment. Are there advances being made on how to recycle electronic waste?

Didier: Well, it's a super challenging question, but the fundamental element is how can we develop technologies which will allow to recycle these things in an economic way. You need to target multi metals, multi elements, you know, in order to be able to build the business case, the business value, and address the cost issue. Another way to recycle sometimes is about using an existing asset, an existing process, which is already in place and recover material like rare earths. In Rio Tinto, an example is we are recovering scandium, which is a type of, you know, critical material type of rare earths. And the challenge is, how can you make, you know, economically viable? One of the potential avenues is exactly that, is developing synergies with an existing already, you know, processes in place, which will address the cost dimension.

Anna: Electronics, they're so complicated. There are so many elements that go into making those sorts of components. And if you think about all of the energy that it takes and effort to extract all of those different elements and process the parts and then construct them all together into an amplifier or a phone or a laptop or whatever, to then try and reverse that process. And if you had 50 elements that went into it. To try and get 50 piles of all of those different elements out of it again is virtually impossible. These components that we make are so finely engineered that the materials are mixed at such a small level that we can never really hope to extract them all and recycle them as if they were fresh. I guess that's the importance of the repurposing part, is that we wouldn't necessarily want to turn an amplifier into piles of material again, we might want to turn it into a different type of amplifier or into a microphone, even changing what it is, but not exactly deconstructing it down to its individual parts. And this is what we mean by circular economy, right? Is that, that the repair culture just has to become much more embedded in these products that we use.

Didier: Maybe the innovation, you know, technology improvement can bring part of the solution. That's where we need to keep going in terms of innovation, and maybe it would partly, look, address this concern.

Anna: I want to end on an optimistic note. And Didier, I'll come to you first. When it comes to this repurposing and recycling work, what outcomes are you hoping for? You know, what impact do you want to have?

Didier: Well, I would expect the least impact from an environmental standpoint and the best outcome in, to our, in terms of communities.

Anna: What do you mean by that?

Didier: In fact, you know, bringing the best to the society and our community. Practically, what does it mean? Can we avoid waste? Can we maximise, you know, what the earth gave us?

Anna: What about the sort of the size and the scale of this?

Didier: What does it mean at scale for Rio Tinto? It's all about improving performance. Improving energy efficiency. We have an active development in renewable energy. Wind, solar, we are testing electric car, trucks, bioiron, biocarbon, new way of producing titanium metal, fantastic metal, you know, which has a fantastic ratio, weight and strength, which will open as well, new field for the world. We have still work, but we're focusing on that.

Anna: And Mark, how about for you? What will future technology allow us to do when it comes to sound design in your work?

Mark: I would say the first is the development of microphones that can capture in a true binaural, meaning the way we hear, receiving with two points of access, immersive content. The other area is artificial intelligence, the ability of artificial intelligence to inform sound in a film through the creation of sounds that we've never heard before.

Anna: Going back to our conversation at the start, the way that you've trained your mind to make those connections between physical object and a sound that would represent something entirely different. That skill is something that you've honed over decades of work. You could maybe put a description into an AI, make a thing that sounds like this. But you still need your skill set to be able to make those connections.

Mark: Thank you for saying that. You led me right into what I wanted to say, which is that it can only generate through iteration from something that has already existed. So that, in and of itself, speaks to this idea that AI, to me, is never very original. It can originate ad infinitum, but it will always be reflective of something that has already existed. The corpus is built out of my work. And so, while, to me, creativity is about the fusion of two disparate ideas into something that is greater than the sum of its parts 100%.

Anna: Maybe in a few years’ time, you'll have a completely sustainable titanium microphone made with bioiron and all sorts.

Mark: I'm looking forward to that.

Anna: Whoever's on the end of the boom mic will thank you for that, I'm sure.

Mark: Oh, what it takes to hold a boom pole. Oh my god, the arm shake.

Anna: Well, we've come to the end of our conversation. A huge thank you to my guests. This episode's sound designer, Mark Mangini and Rio Tinto's Vice President of Technology, Didier Arseguel. Thank you both so much.

Mark: Thank you, Anna.

Didier: Thank you.

Anna: You can listen to more episodes of Things You Can't Live Without wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to follow, rate and review us to make sure that you don't miss an episode.

–Ends–

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Hello, and welcome to Things You Can't Live Without, the podcast where I, material scientist Dr. Anna Ploszajski, ask a special guest to tell us the one thing that they can't live without. We also interrogate a host of experts to find out how these items are made, where their components come from, and how the future of those items is being planned for. Joining me today is Beatrice Galilee, founder and executive director of the architecture and design platform The World Around. Welcome, Beatrice

Beatrice Galilee: Thanks for having me, Anna.

Anna: Really, really happy to have you here. And we're also joined by Brett Capper, General Manager, Asia Pacific for Studies and Product Shaping at Rio Tinto. A very warm welcome, Brett.

Brett Capper: Thanks for having me, Anna. Excited to be here.

Anna: So, Beatrice, tell us, what is the one item that you can't live without?

Beatrice: This is an object called Botanica. It's a vase that was designed by the Italian design studio, Forma Fantasma, that is made of resins and different types of plant-based materials. And the vase was designed as part of an exhibition to provoke the question of what would design look like in a world if oil hadn't been invented. The object itself, as beautiful as it is as a formal object, that it really appeals to the aesthete in me. What I love so much about this vase is that it contributes to a conversation of what if, and sometimes objects are solutions to things like, oh, I need a vase to put my flowers in. And sometimes objects ask us to think about the whole world. And they ask us to consider what if there were no plastics and what would that world look like and what if every object didn't extract but that somehow contributed to a better world and what if design and architecture could be a leader in that conversation and not a follow up?

Anna: I love that. Yeah, I'm from the world of science and I feel like in that world we think about like a hypothesis as kind of like a what if question. It's sort of the same thing. So yeah, I see your vase as like a hypothesis of a world. Brett, what do you make of Beatrice's vase?

Brett: I think it represents a really interesting view of what could be.

Anna: Yeah.

Brett: I make no bones about the fact that I'm a mining engineer and I've spent my life figuring out how to extract things out of the earth, but the idea of a world and starting a conversation about what does the world look like without a plastic and then where that takes my head to is I start to think about how our definition of sustainability would be different.

Anna: Yeah, I really want us to get onto those potential imagined futures, Brett. And this is an interesting choice, I think, because, you know, previous episodes, we've had things like a bicycle and a water bottle and things you utilitarian objects that people rely on practically every day. But the reason I like your choice is that it really demonstrates, I think, the significance that we put onto intentionally made and handmade objects and the meaning that we impart into objects through those processes.

Beatrice: Just really generates so much beyond the object and I think that's how I see design and the role that I think about making an exhibition or I think about telling the story of an object. The materials, the making, the beginning story begins with a kind of an intention and then it comes to the material and then it comes to the object and then it comes to the user, and an object can be part of that conversation and not just a utilitarian solution. It can be utilitarian as a provocation, as an intellectual stimulation.

Anna: I love that. Yeah, we're going to dive into a lot of those concepts in this episode, including with materials as the kind of core concept and how they're used in design and architecture, what innovations are underway to construct the built environment in the future better as well. Beatrice, to give our listeners an idea of quite how successful you have been in the world of architecture and design. You are the first ever curator of contemporary architecture and design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And you're also an author, you've written a book called Radical Architecture of the Future. Reading your portfolio of work, what really struck me about it was the diversity of materials combined with global architectural styles. Can you tell us a bit more about your platform? I mentioned it earlier, the World Around.

Beatrice: World Around is a platform. We organise events, exhibitions, talks, and the idea of the World Around is to be the place for global architecture that has a progressive ecological and social cause, and we champion the architects and designers that are moving the discipline forward into that direction. So we organised talks about the idea of radical repair, looking at designers and architects who are aware of the role that the construction industry has played in causing a lot of the climate catastrophe that we're facing, but also in resolving many of them, and we try to be as productive as possible. And we tried to give a platform to the people and ideas that we see as the way to go, like the kind of lighthouses on the rocks, you know, this is the direction we should be following as an industry.

Anna: That's awesome. If we stick with the kind of theme of materials and also going back to your vase, can you tell us a bit more about what is the significance of drawing from these sort of nature derived materials?

Beatrice: So, there’s a series of 12 vases and each of them have a slightly different combination of materials. Some of them use kind of hair, they've used some have blood for dye, which is also a very old-fashioned way of making things. So, I think that looking into nature as part of the solution to a lot of the waste that we see in the world is super interesting to me. So, there are many types of plant fibres that can be turned into plastics right now. And for example, water hyacinth is an aquatic plant that's native in Kenya that's actually a kind of invasive species, if it undergoes a certain number of chemical transformations, it is actually a really effective single use plastic alternative and can be, and is currently being rolled out in Kenya where there is no single use plastic allowed. Looking to nature as a number one choice is actually really smart.

Anna: Brett, does this idea of biomimicry come into your work at all, being nature inspired, or nature derived? It does,.

Brett: It does, from a number of perspectives. It's about how do we manage the legacy before we build? Before we start, what's the end? And when I say the end, it's not getting the stuff out of the ground. Its once things are out of the ground, what's the end look like? Where do we want to get it to? Probably the climate challenge is, it's what's opened the Pandora's box. But all sorts of technologies are coming to the fore. What can we use from nature to support us in the industrial activity that we need to do and then to minimise the legacy? I mean, concrete as an example. So, concrete as a material is an amazing material, but it's not actually that great for the environment, creates a lot of carbon dioxide in its building. But you know, the work and we've got teams of people that do this work working on geopolymer solutions. So, silicate solutions, different styles of concrete that not only can we use material that wouldn't otherwise be suitable to go into concrete. But they also sequester carbon dioxide as they set. These are solutions that are out there in nature with a little bit of chemical magic that is well above my education. But does amazing things to transform the way we choose to plan. And the way we choose to implement the projects that we do. I did really love the talk about radical repair though. I think there's really something in that concept about how do we something different and something balanced when we build it. I think is such an amazing concept that should flow through all the thinking that we do predesign for the projects that we build.

Beatrice: Yeah, I mean, I think for us at least radical repair is a way for us to show that architecture and design as part of the conversation right at the beginning can really make an impact, can really make a difference. When you integrate design thinking right at the beginning, it will always pay off. And we are working with a very young woman in Bolivia who is part of an indigenous community. The Amara people based in El Alto in Bolivia. I don't think it's you, Brett, but you know, a lot of what happens with mining, of course, is metal gets into the water where it gets into the lakes, gets into the ground, affects the byproducts of a lot of these mining activities are terrible, but the solutions are actually right there in nature.

Beatrice: And so, we're working with this young woman who has found this plant called the Totora plant and the roots of the Totora plant naturally filter metals. This is a native plant that her community have been working with for hundreds and hundreds of years, maybe thousands. She's creating rafts from the plastic waste that is floating around on these lakes. And then she's planting Totora plants into the rafts and letting them float out onto the lake. And the lake is cleaning itself. And, you know, it's not about who did this wrong and, you know, who's responsible, it's actually just like getting in there and fixing the problem, using the knowledge, using design, using architecture, working together. And this is so exciting for us, you know, as a design platform, how can we spread the word about this?

Anna: I just think Indigenous knowledge is so obviously important and such an untapped resource at times. Brett, is there, are there examples at Rio Tinto where Indigenous knowledge has impacted any sort of activities or how the mines are designed?

Brett: Absolutely there are. The best examples is, so we run bauxite operations on the northern tip of Australia at Cape York and we've had a relationship with the traditional owners since the 1950s, really, when we started working up there. When we came to do our most recent expansion up there, probably a decade ago, we knew that the area that we were going into was very sensitive from a native animal perspective. So lots of the sea life in particular, sea turtle habitats, swordfish habitats, stingray habitats, amazing shark habitats, lots of work went into the team and extensive interface with the Indigenous owners who understood, they understood how the turtles, where they nested, how they moved up and down the shoreline. They understood the annual migrations and that work continues. So, we're, we've got a very long dated potential operation a little bit further to the north and doing lots of work now with the local Indigenous team to understand the movement of the stingrays and the swordfish in and out of the area. But there are other places in the organisation where we're doing lots of experimental research to understand how do we use nature going forward? How do we use technology and local knowledge in order to minimise carbon footprint?

Anna: Beatrice, we've been talking about decarbonisation and sustainability generally, thinking about architecture specifically, what are the big global challenges in architecture right now?

Beatrice: Well, it's complicated with architecture because, of course, the housing crisis. And, rapid population growth is happening, for example, in Africa and Asia, where cities need to be built. At the same time, you have a problem of the building industry being one of the largest contributors to carbon emissions. You have in different regions, really different solutions and really different crises. As a global answer, I think there's a real crisis of the role of architecture. Why be an architect? You know, there is a potential misunderstanding about the responsibility of an architect. What is the role of an architect who has a training in history, has an understanding of cities and humans and nature and society? One of the biggest issues in the architecture community is what is architecture and how to better defend it, explain it, and champion the best architects and designers.

Brett: There's a really interesting crossover there between your first point, which was about the volume of waste in the building industry, and the role of the architect in that design. And again, my head goes to that same project we did, which, you know, the marine architects that we used did a really amazing job to understand the impact that this wharf facility could have had did the design work accepted that building it in place over water, not only created a whole bunch of risk for people, but a whole bunch of risk for the environment. They modularized it overseas, built it in a factory, cleaned it and everything brought it to site. And instead of having to put 100 odd piles into the sea floor, we put 28 piles into the sea floor. And then every time we need to do a repair, instead of using the solvents and stuff that we could use in a controlled environment, they use bicarbonate of soda. It sounds funny, but it's using the appropriate tool for the job, but all of that's enabled by great design.

Anna: Beatrice, do you have any favourite examples, maybe some projects from the world around have been really outstanding in kind of sustainability or kind of future focused materials and building?

Beatrice: A few different one’s pop into my head. Design and architecture can extend into what we call like design for multi species and there is a whole movement in the current architecture and design, which is more than human, how to design for the more than human, for example, there is a school in Madrid designed by an architect called Andres Hacker, which has, designed in its skin, kind of made of cork and it's designed to allow for bees it's designed to allow for birds, it's designed to allow for all of the insects, and the biodiversity of the area to inhabit the building and age with the building. And so, the building itself, like this living skin and the school itself is like a living diagram of the ecology of the community. And the children that are going into the school are going to school with their teachers, with their colleagues, but also, they're going to school with the bees. They're going to school with the birds. They're starting to build a habitat and understand their place in the world as something that's not just humans over other things, but humans with other things. And understanding our role in that is a really interesting through line that runs through a lot of the architects and designers that we work with and have spoken with.

Beatrice: One interesting project that the World Around was involved in is Times Square Arts asked the World Around to write a brief for an installation in Times Square. We're not really into the idea of wasting materials. I think the brief is basically going to be, do no harm. How can you create an installation that does no harm and maybe goes one step further and is part of our radical repair conversation. The winning project is so smart, and I love it so much. So, the architect Penela Orsted from Sweden, she's based in New York. She said, well, instead of recycling, I'm going to pre cycle 40 oyster gabions that will then be transformed into this kind of cube structure inside Times Square. We're going to use natural organic pigments to create this beautiful heart shaped structure, but directly afterwards we're going to collaborate with an institution called the Billion Oyster Project, which uses oysters as a kind of climate resilient infrastructure all the way around the harbour of New York. Oysters are absolute miracles and New York used to be full of oysters. And so the whole structure is going to be, it's temporarily in Times Square and then directly afterwards, each of the gabions are going to go and be research centres for the Billion Oyster Project, where they will be filled with oysters and then used to teach children about oysters and about the reefs and about coastal resilience and the role of oysters in cleaning the waters around Manhattan and how we can use oysters and oyster beds to build climate resilience.

Anna: And listening to both of you, I think one theme that I'm picking up on, I suppose, if we think about the kind of past, present and future of both of your lines of work really is this idea of scale and scaling responsibly and scaling sustainably. Brett, I'll come to you first. Rio Tinto is very, very, very large scale. It's kind of by definition. What does scale mean to you and what are the big challenges with scale at the moment?

Brett: I guess scale comes from two perspectives. There's the straight economic perspective of scale and economy of scale. There's a reality that says we do things that are big. Because we can do them more efficiently at scale. But the other side of scale that we're really chasing is about replication. So, what we want to be able to do is figure out how to do something, do it well, and then replicate that. We've got operations everywhere and trying to replicate what is great practice and accelerate the sharing of that. Whether that's wetland filtration for water before we release it off site. Whether we end up having to go heavy technology routes like reverse osmosis for water cleaning. The most recent example I guess is the adoption of biodiesel. So, our boron operations in California. Went 100 percent renewable diesel 18 months ago. Very, very rapidly, what we learned in that small operation in California, we transferred to our very large operation outside Salt Lake City at Kennecott and went to renewable diesel there.

Brett: So, one of the more interesting ones, and it harks back to the conversation we had on modularisation. The wharf that we built, and I love the wharf because it was really cool, but, you know, it's got the same amount of steel in it as the Brooklyn Bridge. But it was built in 10 months, not 14 years. It's not a fair comparison from a point in time perspective, but what it talks to is about, you know, in our case efficiency from scale and it talks about how do you minimise waste, you know for every day that a person turns up to a job site they're going to create waste associated with that job and so the better we can get at doing big things quickly our ability to minimise the impact is significantly larger. And again, you know, it's all driven by architecture. Good architecture, good design, allows us to rapidly replicate really good practice.

Anna: Do you recognise themes of replication in your work, Beatrice?

Beatrice: We have a mentorship program called the Young Climate Prize, which is open to anyone under the age of 25 who has their own self started, design-based initiative that solves a climate environmental crisis in their community. And what we do is create these mentorships between very young, very driven, very talented people from all over the world with a pretty famous, important designer or architect at the top of their career. So, we create these intergenerational relationships that transfer knowledge. Both ways, like the example of Bolivian woman who is solving cleaning polluted lake water with plants. She's in a mentorship with an Argentine entrepreneur. And so, by making these connections between generations, that for us is a kind of a scaling. And then what we do with these young people, we have a cohort of 25 of them. They all go through what we call a design academy and every week we listen to people like Brett or others in the industry and other different industries who can share their knowledge with these young people. We do workshops and training. The sequential impact of these cohorts one year after the next for us is about scale and it's about scaling the stories of young people and connecting them to the major industries that we're connected with as the world around, and we're getting our young climate cohort, people who have found ways to reuse corn husks to make furniture, people that are using plastic waste that they've scraped out of the beaches where they live and turned into school furniture, people that are cleaning the waters to create kind of bricks out of melted plastic that could be providing work for women in their communities. People that are using education and skills training inside prisons to be part of the part of the criminal justice system could be about providing work in reducing recidivism as well as increasing the green transitions in US prisons. The range of projects is huge, but we're getting these type of people in front of real champions of industry, even though we're very small and we're just starting, we're like a little tugboat, you know, like we're trying to make a difference in the way that we are. And we have connections to people that have so much more power and so much more influence. That's our scale, my scale idea.

Brett: I think you've hit the point though. It's about connection. That's what generates scale. It's about dispersing the idea, you know, we get to do it within a very nice formal bureaucratic and controlled structure set. You get to do it in this amazing organic interface with just a whole bunch of really driven people. But, you know, scale and sharing and information is what generates the change.

Anna: That's beautiful. I love that. So, we've nearly come to the end of our conversation, I think, and it has led to a place that I wasn't expecting. Actually, I think one of my big takeaways is this idea of knowledge and where knowledge comes from where we find it. Beatrice, you were talking about the knowledge of your young people in the Young Climate Prize. We heard about Indigenous knowledge from Brett and your examples of how Indigenous knowledge is really important in Rio Tinto's operations. And going back to the vase, which started our conversation, the knowledge of nature as well, the knowledge of nature and building polymers that are able to do all these incredible things or have all these incredible materials, properties, and we can go back and we can learn from that knowledge as well.

Anna: So, a huge thank you to my guests this episode, the World Around founder Beatrice Galilee and Rio Tinto's Brett Capper. Thank you both so much.

Beatrice: Thanks for having us.

Brett: Thank you.

Anna: You can listen to more episodes of Things You Can't Live Without wherever you get your podcasts and don't forget to follow, rate and review us to make sure that you never miss an episode.

–Ends–

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Hello, and welcome to Things You Can't Live Without, the podcast where I, materials scientist Dr. Anna Ploszajski, ask a very special guest to tell us the one thing that they can't live without. We also interrogate a host of experts to find out how these items are made, where their components come from, and how the future of those items is being planned for. In this episode, I'm delighted to be joined by global bestselling storyteller and illustrator Cornelia Funke. Welcome, Cornelia.

Cornelia Funke: It's my pleasure, Anna.

Anna: I'm so excited about this. And also joining us is Kellie Parker, Chief Executive Officer, Australia at Rio Tinto. Welcome, Kellie.

Kellie Parker: Thank you. Great to be here.

Anna: So, Cornelia, let's kick off. What is the one thing that you can't live without?

Cornelia: It's made from plastic, metal and ink. The plastic is transparent. So, you see the black ink inside and it has a metal tip. And Kellie would probably know from which kind of metals it was made. I will solve the mystery. It is a pen.

Anna: Brilliant. I can't wait to talk to you more about that. Kellie, what do you think of Cornelia's pen? Do you have a similar one yourself?

Kellie: Well, my pen is electronic, and I use it on my iPad, but the thing that I really miss is not being able to draw. You can write a lot of stuff, but you can't draw very well.

Anna: Well, in this episode, we're going to be talking about sustainability and the rehabilitation of nature, how Cornelia's pen has enabled her to conjure up many nature inspired worlds. And we'll also learn about the projects underway to regenerate nature at mine sites. So, Cornelia, your fantasy stories have been read by millions of people around the world, especially children, and translated into more than 30 languages, which is amazing. Listeners might particularly know the Inkheart Trilogy and the Thief Lord, just to name a couple of examples. And I actually read that you first started out your career as a social worker. So what was it that brought you to writing?

Cornelia: I have art in my family. So all my family wanted me to study art, actually. But I thought I have to save the world. And I became a social worker. I was also very interested to work with children from not so happy families. I think still I owe them my whole career because they taught me so many things about the world that I, as a sheltered middle class child, did not know. And what I caught myself doing, though, was I drew with them, I sketched with them, I told them stories. And at some point I thought, oh, it seems one cannot live against one’s talents. I think we’re all at certain tools in the toolbox of the universe. Oh, however we want to explain this. But I think you have to tell stories and you have to draw. I felt like a traitor. I have to say to all the kids, but luckily I can by now make up for it by reaching so many children all over the world and also donating to the causes I used to work for.

Anna: That's wonderful. Actually, I want to hear more about your pen. Why do you work longhand in that way rather than on a laptop or on an iPad.

Cornelia: Well, I guess it has to do with my age. I was raised in a time when you did nothing digital. I really think that has a strong impact. And I just love to get my fingers dirty and to draw and to work with my hands. I always say I have hungry hands, and they cannot be satisfied digitally and it's very interesting. I have many young illustrators here as visitors and they're all a little bit burned out because they only work digitally by now. Whereas I have that wonderful satisfaction to put my paints together, to choose my brushes, to choose my pens, to check the paper. And I think we all are such sensual creatures that we almost miss to be connected to the world this way. As a writer, I always prepare every book in a notebook with sketches, with handwritten notes.

Anna: Beautiful.

Cornelia: I think we underestimate what materials do to us. You know, and what kind of strange exchange there is. All the illustrators here and writers are scared of AI. I am not. Because I think when you work by hand, there's a flawedness. There is, there is something surprising. I once saw an exhibit at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angelas about Rembrandt and his students. And they said, can you recognize who is Rembrandt? Whose designs are Rembrandt? Look for the lines that make no sense. They make it utterly unique and beautiful. And your hand, my hand constantly surprises me. Whereas when I open my computer, it gets serious. It looks printed. So for me, it's absolutely necessary for my creative process.

Anna: Do you have any of that Kellie in you? Are you a drawer or a somebody who kind of likes to work things out in long form before you get it down digitally?

Kellie: I was just loved listening to you Cornelia about the creativity, the spontaneity, the innovation, that you're not sure what will evolve. And then I love it. My work is very, very different, but I love the big, complex, complicated problems because you have to think outside the box and dream about how could this be solved and you've got to use different ways of doing that. But yeah, creativity is fascinating. We need it to help drive us forward.

Cornelia: Yes, in many ways. There is no, Oh, it's only analogue. It's only digital. We have to also stop thinking in these boxes. I have, for example, some brilliant illustrators here who draw by hand and then they colour in digitally. And there are so many ways.

Anna: Yeah, absolutely. Cornelia, can you tell us a bit about where you are? You’re mentioning people coming here, illustrators, writers. Tell us a bit about that.

Cornelia: I'm on Etruscan Hill near Volterra, which is one of the oldest settlements still inhabited in the world. And I invite artists from all over the world to work with me. And I always say we stand on four paws of visual arts. Music, writing, and environmental activism. So, these four, I hope, are melting together here to really believe once again that the world can be an exciting and also maybe a better place one day again.

Anna: Absolutely. How did your passion for sustainability in the natural world start? I think for me, as I lived for 16 years in California, I feel like I lived in the shop window of climate change, you know, and Australia, Kellie, your reality is a similar one, especially countries where there's still a lot of wilderness, where so much of European wilderness is in a way cultivated, or at least has a long history of being entangled with humans. To see that wilderness, and I, for example, escaped from a fire very similar to the one that just devastated Los Angeles, the Woolsey fire in Malibu. And I was evacuated for many months, and I came back to burnt trees and burnt fences, and I had a big lesson about where the world is going. I always was interested in sustainability, in environments. I was always a plant nerd. But to see it on this range, to see the droughts, to see a complete lack of management, all this ignorance towards the natural world, I could say, it brought me to waking up and also integrating it even more in my stories. Because a storyteller always tells about the world I see and I see a world where everything I really love and need for life is being threatened. So, what I try here is to say, look at us, we don't know the alphabet of nature anymore. As Robert Macfarlane pointed out, words out of the Encyclopedia Britannica that describe trees and plants and put computer knowledge in there. Yes, fine, that's also important. But we can't lose our knowledge about the world. But then, being a creature of contradiction, I write with a plastic pen. There you go. So, well, they're not necessarily mutually exclusive and I want to come on to the materiality of our pens in a second. But Kellie, you're also switched on to the environment and sustainability. How did your journey start?

Kellie: I grew up in a part of Australia called the Pilbara in Western Australia. And I just feel so incredibly grateful that I did because it's a really ancient land. When I was growing up, I went to water holes and swam on the islands with turtles, but just knew that there was thousands and thousands of generations before me. I was really lucky that I went to school with probably half the school that was Aboriginal people and just knew that there was just a different way of living. It just made me know how important nature is, which is, you know, you then ask the question, why do you get attracted to mining? We lived in the Pilbara because of mining. So to see from quite a young age, why we needed steel, we needed to have buildings, we were building bridges and we needed steel. So you needed to mine iron ore, but you had to have a full life cycle. And I learned that as a child that you might need to use the materials or the resources in the world. But how do you restore and repurpose what's there. And that's quite a lot of what I do in my job now.

Cornelia: How interesting, but Kellie, because I live on a hill that was mined by the Etruscans 3,000 years ago.

Kellie: Yeah.

Cornelia: They were very great miners, you know, copper and, and the ironworks are so famous. So I always wondered why do certain peoples on this planet, start mining and others don't? Is that maybe the big question, to start a dig in the ground or, and look for this and all to say the ground is sacred. It's our mother. We will not tear up the chest.

Kellie: In my view, a life cycle that you care for what you're doing.

Cornelia: Yeah. It's the take and the give and the give seems to have been forgotten in this world.

Kellie: Yeah. Yeah. And it's so important. One of the things that I think is really rewarding is I run part of the Closure portfolio. Just an example, there's a mine in Jamaica, an old mine, it's closed now, and it mined bauxite that went to alumina refineries to then goes to make aluminium. It's about five tonnes of bauxite to three tonnes of alumina to one tonne of aluminium. And in that process, you make this slurry at the beginning of all the waste and that waste is called red mud and it just gets pumped out into a farm area. And it can be quite toxic depending on the process that they've used to extract the alumina. Jamaican bauxite red mud started in the fifties and it's all closed now. And when we took it over, we went through a process of trying to put goodness back in the soil, which we were able to figure out and then trees could grow, plants could grow. And we had a goal that it would be 70 percent vegetation within 20 years. Well, we're over 90 now and we have like 40 different types of butterflies and all sorts of different things that have come back. And it's a real great success story. And one of the great things about Jamaica is it rains a lot, so you can grow things fast. So, but it's, that is part of the whole mining process. So you live on a hill Cornelia, like someone will be able to live near this red mud farm. Yeah. So, and I think that's the full cycle. Like we can't just think we're digging things up and you know, leaving it behind. It's got to be the full cycle of mining when you explore all the way through to close.

Anna: Yeah, absolutely. You know, all these materials that we have in all of our objects, we're just borrowing them from the land, aren't we? And a full circularity system, as you say, Kellie, would be that we plan for what happens when our pen runs out or when it doesn't have no use for it anymore. Cornelia, you talked about your plastic pen as quite a negative connotation in plastic. Talk to me more about that.

Cornelia: So originally I always said I will never again never ever use plastic pens because I don't see the cycle I don't see how it comes back. So I always used quite expensive pens I could reload but the problem for example with a fountain pen is you cannot draw with it I know it the line it you can't do a line in a certain direction. But to go back what you have to do for drawing is not possible, right? So fountain pen is not an option. I've tried bamboo pens, so worked for a long time with luxury pens, but I always received the refills and so much plastic that one day I thought, you know what, this is absurd. This is not any better when it comes to sustainability than ordering these pens, which last quite long, actually longer sometimes than the refill. I use them because at least I feel they are honest. This is what they are. They are ink and they are plastic. And so for now, sadly, that is my solution.

Anna: It's tricky, isn't it? I think sustainability is so often limited by our combinations of materials and the functionality of a pen. It requires steel at the end or something metal at the end to get the hardness of the nib and to be able to draw the ink around in the way that you want. So you'll always need metal at the end. And so I suppose it's, can you have the whole pen be metal? That seems overkill maybe, but then to combine it with plastic. Yeah. It's impossible to get those two materials separated and back into the circle.

Cornelia: Maybe I have to go back to the quill - to the feather. Many people did for many, countless centuries. You know, it was possible and incredible art was created.

Anna: Maybe it's all about wooden.

Cornelia: I have wooden pencils, of course, for my drawings, but for writing, the pencil wipes, or it does not stick on a page as much as the ink does.

Kellie: It’s so great that you're so thoughtful about the materials that you use because there's so many people aren't. It's from my perspective, I would love people to know that the phones that they're using, that they were addicted, to have aluminium and copper in them, and they can't work without either of those, and sometimes when people are talking to me about the perils of mining on their phone or messaging me with the copper and aluminium, it's like they can't make the distinction. It was like when I was growing up, people thought milk came from the fridge. Like, how do we make sure that people actually know where things come from? And that it's a society choice. If you want the latest, you are wanting more and more copper and electrification of having EV cars. And it just takes way, way more copper, a lot of copper and copper mines are very impactful on the environment. And there’s lots of research and R&D around how do we use waste piles from copper mines to extract more and be more efficient. But they’re going out and finding new copper mines and starting your copper mines, it takes a long time just because they’re so impactful in the environment.

Cornelia: What is the substitute? But that production may also be very harmful for the environment then.

Kellie: I think our, you know, innovation, our creativity is about how do you use what's in the waste? What was mined kind of and put to waste that are sitting in waste piles? Like how do you actually mine them it's already part of the impact that's happened. So you get the most out of that so that we don't have to start a new area that's pristine.

Cornelia: Yes. I just read a book. There's a book called waste about that waste is a very modern invention and there used to be no waste because people just couldn't afford it. Right, and it's quite shocking how young that development is, right? Maybe it's a hundred years, maybe 150, but certainly not more. And well, the plastic crisis started when I was already born.

Anna: Kellie, I’m really curious about your role in ensuring that we’re looking after nature and that the biodiversity can continue to thrive. Even acknowledging that at the same time, our modern lives require these materials and it’s our demand that is creating the need for mines in the first place. Can you take us through the process of how do you ensure that the environment and that nature is taken care of alongside mining?

Kellie: Yeah, so when you apply for a mining lease, you get that from the government, what will be important for us as we apply for that is that we've done environmental impact study. So we understand what is the environment, what is the plants, the flora, fauna, how does water flow, digging holes to know what happens with water and how can you re-inject water back into that aquifer and not just pump it out down a waterway and then change a different direction of the water. And then we'll also talk to First Nations or Traditional Owners to understand what they need, like what's their cultural connections, what's their tangible archaeological history, but also the intangible cultural values of the land. So as people see landscapes differently, they see different values. So, like really understanding from them, what are their stories, the intangibles. So, we do all of that before we even say, yes, okay, this is economically valuable to mine and then ensuring that you meet your environmental licenses and continue to modernise that.

Anna: Cornelia, do you have any questions or thoughts for Kellie?

Cornelia: Lots of thoughts, but of course, you know, it's really the thought about would humans ever consider to stop all that? I don't think we will. I think in that we are like, oh, I can do this, so I will do this. We have no morals when it comes to that, when we are curious. It's so interesting that curiosity is something that is accepted as, okay, this is how we are. You know, what Kellie describes about her work, they're trying that. Oh, we learned that by now. But I don't see that in many areas of modern life, this thinking ahead.

Anna: Kellie, looking to the future for you, what are you most excited about in terms of looking after the planet and the biodiversity that you can influence in your role?

Kellie: I think that the more that we do use our curiosity and our innovation, I think we'll think outside the box. We've got a copper mine in America and we've started to mine the waste in there, half the critical minerals that the world needs in the waste. And so one of them. You know, is tellurium. We have another little product that we can get, which is called scandium. They're very, very small, but they make things stronger. Tellurium goes onto, you know, solar panels. So it's all part of our world that we need, but it's come from the waste that's already been created. And I think if we can you know, tap into much more of that to really understand there is a lot of opportunity I think, there. I'm excited for kind of the next generation that does come into our business. You can see them asking those questions. Like, circularity is definitely part of their lives. What's primary aluminium? What's secondary aluminium? How's it been recycled? And how do you keep reusing it? How many, because it's infinitely be able to be recycled. People are asking different questions, which I think means that they would ask different questions about the world and it feels like mining is going to be very different. We've got a very big project going on about what's called low impact mining. So how do you actually contain all the waste and the water in the aquifer so that you don't have ongoing impacts that, you know, happen that you can see in some of the very old mines that have ongoing impacts. And I think that that thinking came about by actually sitting with Aboriginal and First Nations people who care for country in a really different way.

Anna: Brilliant. And Cornelia, what are you excited to be writing next?

Cornelia: At the moment, you know, I did the first nonfiction book on moths, because I was so fascinated by their names because our ancestors were so inventive and watching all the diversity of creatures and finding names for them to describe them. Because the world maybe it was also not that visual yet. You could not look up a photo so the name in many ways described the creature and I have a brilliant illustrator here who every day enchants me with another moth she has a portrait. So I'm very excited and what we also do with a biologist an ornithologist and a few artists we are watching the new farm we just bought and we want to do a book on the first year we have there, and that has been quite an adventure. All the things we find and we don't know.

Anna: Yes. I love that. Well, we've come to the end of our conversation today. Thank you to both of my guests. To this episode, storyteller and illustrator, Cornelia Funker and Rio Tinto's, Chief Executive Officer for Australia. Kellie Parker, thank you both very much,

Cornelia: And we thank Anna.

Kellie: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Anna.

Anna: And that brings us to the end of this episode. You can listen to more episodes of things you can't live without, wherever you find your podcasts. And don't forget to follow rates and review us to make sure that you never miss a new episode.

–Ends–

Dr Anna Ploszajski: Hello and welcome to Things You Can't Live Without, the podcast where I, material scientist Dr. Anna Ploszajski, ask a very special guest to tell us the one thing that they can't live without. As well as that, we interrogate a host of experts to find out how these items are made, where their components come from, and how the future of those items is being planned for. Joining me today is chef and food writer Sabrina Ghayour. Welcome, Sabrina.

Sabrina Ghayour: Thank you so much.

Anna: And we're also joined by Nigel Steward, Chief Scientist at Rio Tinto. Welcome back, Nigel.

Nigel Steward: Hi, Anna. And hi, Sabrina.

Anna: So, Sabrina, what's the one thing that you can't live without?

Sabrina: I have to say it has to be a really good quality knife. Can't live without them in my line of work.

Anna: Beautiful. Nigel, are you a knife guy? What are your kitchen skills like?

Nigel: I can cook and I use a knife for once in a while. I like those, you know, Damascus can knives with the funny patterns on them.

Anna: Yeah, as a materials nerd, that's talking my language. I love that. And we're going to get more into the materials in this as well. The theme for our episode today is about partnerships, the tools in the kitchen that are our trusty partners. And we're also going to be learning about how important collaboration is across industry and how the best changes are made when done together. So, Sabrina, you specialise in Persian and Middle Eastern cooking with many award winning books and TV appearances. You work across various roles as chef, writer and food consultant. Which of those roles brings you the most pleasure and why?

Sabrina: You know, I would have to say I am definitely a, it sounds so corny, I'm a people person, but I really am, I really revere interaction with people. I don't cook in a restaurant, so having contact with not just chefs, but also like a customer who's just come to eat food is just, I love that, so I think it, also hints at how hosting is so part of my culture as well. So, it encompasses so many things, this chef role. It's a sum of many parts.

Anna: Tell us about this knife then.

Sabrina: When I was a kid, I didn't use this kind of knife. I wasn't really aware of these sorts of bigger chef’s knives, but I used just the small knives that you just find in the kitchen. And when I became a chef, I started really looking at the kind of product that I used. Because you want sturdiness, you want stability, you want durability, you want something that's going to aid the fluidity of movement and chopping, specifically. And a lot of years chopping. So much so that it's done my back in, but you know. Well, because it's a repetitive act, so you really do need something that's going to make movement flow and also do as much work as you can in a short space of time because with a good knife, you know, you have speed on your side. So, I started looking for a good knife and I met at a trade show a lady who owned this knife company and she was just so awesome. Those are my days just starting out. So, I didn't have a lot of money and she was very kind and said, do you want to just try some of my ex demo knives? So, I just chuck me postage money and that's how it started. But moreover, lots of other celebrity chefs had endorsed her knives just through their love. And I thought, oh, this must be a good brand. Chefs use big knives. Usually 20 centimetre is, is on the money. And that's what's actually called a chef's knife. It's about, for me, having a handle that is weighted. So, this weight gives you steering almost in the same capacity that a rudder of a boat to some element gives you sort of steering of a boat, and it guides your movement.
And I think probably in non-professional cooks, it gives you confidence because you become better at chopping because your knife is a good quality knife.

Anna: Definitely. Yeah, Father Christmas bought me a chef's knife for Christmas, and I love it. I felt so professional the first time I used it because never before had I chopped a tomato, and it actually went through first time.

Sabrina: Although you need to beware with tomatoes, peppers, grapes, those are the real no no's when it comes to a knife that's not a serrated edge because they do blunt them.

Anna: Oh no

Sabrina: So yeah, I would say with a tomato, poke a hole using the tip of the knife and then use the fatter end of the blade at the bottom, which is the less used end. So, you will more balance out the bluntness of your knife over time.

Anna: All the top tips are coming.

Sabrina: Better serrated edge all the way for a tomato.

Anna: Excellent. So, your knives. Do you know what they're made out of? What are the handles and what are the blades?

Sabrina: I'm reliably informed they're made of steel, and I would say that that has a massive factor to do with it. Stainless capacity is from hygiene and, you know, from my perspective they don't rust very easily if you look after them. The handle on these ones are called tang handles, so I'm sure it's a composite that encapsulates the steel itself. So no, I'm over to you. If you know about these knives, I'd love you to tell me more because perhaps I take for granted one of my most important bits of kit and I don't know much about it.

Anna: Gosh, well, steel is probably one of my favourite materials. And Nigel, you mentioned your knife as Damascus steel. It's a very special sort of steel. If listeners can imagine it, it's the one that has a kind of mottled effect on it, mottled look. And that's from folding different sorts of steel into the same knife. Your knives, I think, are very special. So, one of the big problems in material science is you can either have strong and hard or not breakable. So, brittleness and hardness always go together. So, if you want a really hard knife that you can sharpen to a really, really sharp edge, it's going to be quite susceptible to breaking, could shatter when you're using it. So, knife makers have to try and balance these two properties, and what they do is they will often layer different types of steel, and that's what you see in Damascus are those different layers sort of folded together. So, you have a very brittle but hard and easy to sharpen blade wrapped around more soft stainless steel. So, you can have basically both of those beneficial properties that you mentioned together in the same blade.

Sabrina: Wow, that's quite deep. I mean, you really do need to look after knives.

Nigel: Oh, we sent ours to a sharpener down the road at the kitchen shop. But I have a question for you, Sabrina. Back in the, like, late 1980s, early 1990s, people started to make kitchen knives out of ceramics. Toughen zirconia ceramics. These are the knives with the white blades. Have you tried any of those? And what's your thoughts on those, compared to steel?

Sabrina: My mother always told me if I didn't have something nice to say, that I shouldn't say anything at all, so..

Nigel: I'm just intrigued as to why they haven't really taken off.

Sabrina: You know what? It's not for me, but I also hate judgment on people. I really, it really frustrates me when you go, no, you shouldn't do that. That's like this. And I think just that that's an adult with their own mind. Let them do whatever they want to do. And the one thing I love watching someone as iconic as Nigella on screen, she always apologises for her terrible little knives that she loves using. And I just think that's it. She uses what works for her, but if you're, let's say, Greek or Turk and culturally, and Persians as well, they use these tiny knives that are so dangerous. The blade always goes through an apple or a pear straight into your thumb. But, I mean, they don't cut themselves, but it does open up the capacity for danger so much more. So, it's just what you're used to, really. And I just don't think that those ceramic knives..they don't have the right movement and the right stability that I am personally looking for. Plus, ceramic, I'm sure I could probably break it. Give me a week and it would probably be in the bin, so I am a bull in a china shop when I've got eight hours of cooking ahead. So, I need something sturdy, durable and high quality, you know, for the longevity of it rather than being fancy.

Anna: Yeah. One of my big things, you know, I wanted one knife that I would hopefully have for many, many years and that will do pretty much everything that I need it to do. I also have one cast iron pan. I have one stainless steel pan, and I have one sort of casserole dish and that's it. I'm really into the stage of my life where I just want good things that are going to last a long time. Is your kitchen like that? I imagine you have a few more things than me.

Sabrina: I think if it was just my own domestic kitchen, and my kitchen is my office. Unfortunately, I haven't quite made it into the field of having a proper test kitchen outside of my own domestic kitchen. If it was just my own kitchen from just me and my family, it would be very much that. And you're absolutely right. I do have those iconic, you know, cast iron pans in many colours and they're great as long as you know how they work on which cooking things. There's so many givens. It's not just. That's a whole other conversation for another day, but it's like that old adage where you, people say, oh, I like to just invest in good knitwear. That's a great thing. If moths don't sabotage it, it is very good to invest in something that's good quality, basic and appearance, but has durability and a good bag, a good jacket, a good whatever. There is a beauty to buying something that you treasure because you know how much it costs, but you also know how much it serves you in the house. So yeah, for me, I am definitely that girl and I really appreciate those things. So, I get absolutely incensed, like incandescent when people take my good quality pots and they're in the sink. And then the kids, my husband or whoever, throw the knife straight into the pot and I'm like, every, every alarm bell in my being goes off because it's mistreating two of my key equipment pieces.

Anna: I sometimes think of cooking as perhaps quite a solitary pursuit, but you've mentioned that you work with lots and lots of different people and you partner with lots of different people. How do those partnerships serve you in your work?

Sabrina: I think being solitary comes naturally to me. I'm an only child. I'm in my element when I'm left on my own. I like it, but I also thrive from interaction like a, like a minicomputer. Like I like taking in other people's experience. I really value that because I'm not a master of everything. I'm very well aware that it's, you let everybody contribute to what they know and then you really learn because you learn what other people do.

Anna: Yeah. Nigel, what about you? How do partnerships come into your world?

Nigel: Well, it's interesting how it's evolved, you know, as a company we've been around for 150 years and I think we've gone from this sort of siloed approach in, in the world where each company kind of makes what they make and provides them as a product at the end. And we've gone much, much more towards a world where we're all trying to really fulfill society's global needs. And therefore, because of that, we have multiple stakeholders. You know, it's not just about us as a company. It's about our customers’ customers, the communities in which we work, our shareholders and our employees as well. So, what does everyone collectively want? And that sort of forces you to think about how you collaborate with everyone to produce what we really need for the future. And so, it's very much about listening to what everybody needs and wants and trying to work together collectively to come up with the right solutions.

Anna: Can you give us an example of maybe one of your favourite partnership that Rio's embarked on.

Nigel: Well, if we touch on one steel, we've just been talking about steel and we've got several partnerships in that space. One, for example, is with the car industry. BMW is one of our partners and they're very, very keen on decarbonising and reducing the ESG footprint of their products. And that aligns very, very well with what we want to do as well. So, we are actively looking at how we can decarbonise steel production. For example, with BHP and one of our steel companies, BlueScope in Australia, we're looking at developing a particular melter technology to enable us to produce steel with a low carbon footprint. We're also partnering with some steel companies, big steel companies in the world like POSCO, BAUWU and Nippon Steel to, to decarbonise the primary steel production. Because one of our big challenges when we think about climate change is we have what we call our scope one and two emissions, which are the emissions that we generate from our own processes. But our biggest challenges are scoped through this, so this is when our customer takes our iron ore and transforms that into steel, and they use a lot of carbon to do that, which produces CO2. So, there are alternative ways of actually smelting the steel to eliminate carbon using things like hydrogen, for example, or electrolysis processes. And we're working actively with those customers to try and achieve that. Collectively trying to produce a decarbonised steel product that you can then provide to a car maker like BMW, or, in the case of Sabrina, a knife maker, to make a low-carbon steel blade.

Anna: Is there anything that you sacrifice when you partner with others?

Nigel: I don't think so. No, I think it's more of the opposite. I think we all have to realise that we don't know everything that we need to know to solve problems. And partnering with people who bring complementary skills to bear, I think is really, really important. If we were trying to do it on our own, there is that always that temptation to think I can go quicker because I don't have to manage relationships, but you don't end up going very far because you don't have all the capabilities that you really need. So, it's really bringing in all of those complementary skills, building that up as a collective and going slowly, but surely, is the way in which we'll succeed.

Anna: Do you recognise that in your work, Sabrina?

Sabrina: Honestly, I was so mesmerised by what he was saying. I'm just realising how much I don't really think about what goes into one of these knives. I was literally, my mind is just utterly blown. I thought I don't think about the steel and then I don't think about what they have to do to minimise these things. And I guess I don't recognise obviously the level of seriousness involved in that kind of production. But you have to evolve. Like you have to change, you have to adapt, you have to move forward, and you have to take into account time, environment, what the world wants today, how things need to be traded. You know, I trade my recipes, for example, I can't liken myself to this really integral, important work. But on some levels, I think we all have elements in all of our jobs that we need to suddenly look at things that we weren't perhaps taking into account before. I'm sure you do too. Things that are suddenly irrelevant or have become very relevant as a course of what's going on in the world, the planet, people's demands, etc.

Anna: What about in terms of partnerships that you create. Maybe, have you got an example of a specific recipe that you co created with someone?

Sabrina: So, I'm too stubborn to co create a recipe because most of my recipes are so simple, they just don't really require a second person, but I have had partnerships with other people and other venues in creating. Let's say, a good example is I had a partnership with Fortnum & Mason last year where we co created a gin. I know it sings to Britain because we do love our gin, don't we? But it was just a really interesting process of a huge series of things I didn't understand but had this idea of what I wanted to produce. And as with the knife process, you just got to trust those people that know better know how to do it. So, I was thankfully in expert hands in the distillation process and we produced a beautiful pistachio gin.

Anna: Oh, cool. Yeah.

Sabrina: Collaborations essentially. It's very much part of what I do career wise. It's almost touches every single job that I do really in one sense or another because you're always better when there are other great people around you.

Anna: Definitely. Nigel, you mentioned that there are so many stakeholders in Rio Tinto itself and then in the sort of wider collaborative space. Is there ever a case where there's sort of too many cooks can spoil the broth when you're looking at kind of big problems like decarbonisation, for example?

Nigel: I think it is a really good question. I think you need to think very carefully about choosing the right partners. And you need to choose the right partners that share the same strategic goals and values as you, and that have the same sort of, I think, organisational and financial capacity to sort of follow you on the journey and to be with you. We have a great example, I think, and this is in the case of aluminium. So, I'm sure you use a lot of aluminium in the kitchen, aluminium foil and things like that, Sabrina. But one of the things that we've always tried to do as an industry is to produce aluminium, but without producing carbon dioxide, and we created a joint venture called ELYSIS™, and this was actually precipitated by one of our customers, Apple, that uses a lot of aluminium and things like iPads, iPhones, and iMacs and things like that. And we got together with one of our competitors, Alcoa, who’d discovered kind of the new material and ourselves, we brought the complementary skill of actually being good designers of aluminium smelters. We also worked with the government of Canada and the government of Quebec who've, actively contributed to the funding of this and combining that with clean, renewable energy from Canada's hydropower. And we all had this sort of shared vision for how we could fully decarbonise the production of aluminium using this new technology. And we've actually been successful in producing the world's first smelted aluminium without generating CO2. And some of that first material that we produce from our pilot cells has gone into some of Apple's products like the MacBook and the Apple iPhone SE.

Sabrina: So, wow. Yeah, my mind is just blown on so many levels. I'm just always astounded at what goes on in our world on a daily basis. That's just every day we don't, most of us don't think about. It's incredible.

Anna: Sabrina, for your partnerships, I guess I'm thinking of you and your trusty knives. Do you have a particular fruit or vegetable or item that you love most to chop with your knife?

Sabrina: It's not because it's my favourite fruit or vegetable, but it's just really where suddenly the type of knife that you're using, it really comes into play and there are better choices to be made and not so great choices to be made. It's butternut squash. It is. Why do we love the butternut squash? In this country, in England, we love a butternut squash. It has had heightened fame for the last 15, 20 years. But it's such a pain to a peel.

Anna: Yeah.

Sabrina: It's, it is the stuff of hospital trips for a lot of people, I'm sure, because its skin is particularly resistant. And that's why you really do need to have a very, very good knife to take care of it. But in terms of chopping it, you do want a particular knife that comes down on a not slightly angled blade, like it comes down and it's just a totally flat blade at the bottom. That is quite important to the vegetable itself. So yeah, that sounds so geeky.

Anna: When you get on a roll, you're in good company for geekiness for sure. I have a question for you about using my new knife. When, actually I cut a butternut squash recently, I chopped it down and then maybe because it's so sharp or something to do with the vegetable meant that the butternut squash just stuck to the sides of the knife. How do you stop that?

Sabrina: You don't. So you can do something, you can just take a little bit of olive oil and just grease the blade of the knife if you wanted to, but then you have to be very, very careful. So next time you do it. Take the stalk end top off flat, take the bottom end, not too much because you don't want to use waste, and then you have two flat surfaces, but roll it quickly on its side. Cut it in half, so you'll have the side that will have no seeds, and that's one portion, and then you just start with a flat surface, so the cut side down, you just slowly start sliding the skin off with your knife and then your hand is never in the way. And yes, it will still sometimes get stuck, but then you can afford to apply a little bit of oil if you wanted to, but I don't actually think with that method you need to. And then you can just chop it into bits and it's just safe. And also they stain your hands really nicely. Totally orange hands for like days basically.

Anna: Absolutely. So Sabrina, I'm going to transport you to a terrible new world where we have no more new steel knives. And also, I'm going to take away all of your old steel knives. What would a world for you without your knives be like?

Sabrina: Jokingly glorious, because I wouldn't have to cook again. But on a very serious note, yes, it would have a massive impact. I wouldn't be able to do as much as I do. But just like clever little humans that we are would probably come up with something, but really would it be as effective? No, because otherwise steel knives wouldn't be the top choice of chefs. Where there's a will, there's a way. We didn't always have fancy knives, maybe porcelain knives that were suddenly less redundant. I don't want to think about a world where we couldn't have steel, to be fair, because I think it would on a larger scale, affect buildings and structures and bridges and travel and very soon we would be pretty helpless, I think.

Anna: Yes. Yeah.

Sabrina: I think so. So knives would be very low on my agenda of panics.

Anna: And Nigel, what's coming in your future in terms of partnerships that you are excited about maybe? Any that you've got that may, yeah, make a big impact?

Nigel: Well, I think it was interesting your last question to Sabrina about imagining a future and that might be different from today and what we will need in that future. So, I think one of the things that I'm really excited about, one of the partnerships that we began last year. We realised that we needed more insights from people who could see a future that we couldn't see. So we went to the universities and we created a network of five universities. It's Berkeley in the United States, Australian National University in Australia, WITS in South Africa The University of British Columbia in Canada and Imperial College in London. And Imperial is leading the centre for us. It's called the Centre for Future Materials. And what we're doing is sort of bringing academics, not just from the sciences, but also the social sciences to try and help see what the future is going to be like and what the materials of that future will be like and how we can then develop new technologies to produce those materials with low carbon footprints of course. The first challenge that they set themselves was around copper because if we do decarbonise the world, we're going to have to electrify everything. We're going to need an exceedingly large amount of copper so there's a question of how can we unlock more copper in the world or how can we actually reduce our demand by engineering products differently so that we can still meet our goals in decarbonising the world but in a much more sustainable way.

Sabrina: Gosh I wonder what a copper knife would be like. Copper pans. I wonder if it'd be as effective. I'm sure it would. We're covered. We don't need to panic about a knifeless world. It's just, yeah, so low on your radar, I'm sure.

Nigel: Well, I think in the realms of material selection, so you're talking with two material scientists here, Sabrina, so you would tend to, you would tend to go for the steel definitely for the strength and as Anna was mentioning earlier, you kind of want that hardness for the knife.

Sabrina: Yeah. Copper doesn't have that.

Nigel: Copper doesn't have that. It's very soft.

Sabrina: See, just as soft as my brain. I wouldn't even appreciate that that was a factor. You just think, oh, I've seen it in the kitchen. It's obviously going to work. I'm sure they'll just figure it out in the Centre for Future Materials.

Anna: Well, we've come to the end of our conversation. Thank you both so much for being on the podcast. I think tonight I'm going to go home and chop my butternut squash with a bit more verve, a bit more precision, a bit more joy, and I'm not going to put it to my tomatoes. That's what I've learned from you. Thank you both so much to my guests today, chef and food writer Sabrina Ghayour and Rio Tinto's Chief Scientist, Nigel Steward. If you want to learn more about the ELYSIS^TM process, head on over to the show notes and click the link for more information. And that's all for this episode but remember you can listen to more episodes of Things You Can't Live Without wherever you find your podcasts, and don't forget to follow, rate and review us to make sure that you never miss an episode.

–Ends–

[Music] Hello and welcome to Things You Can’t Live Without, the podcast where I, material scientist, Dr Anna Ploszajski, ask a special guest to tell us the one thing that they can’t live without. And we interrogate a host of experts to find out how these items are made, where  their components come from, and how the future of those items is being planned for. Today we’ve got a very special episode that is going to be a little bit longer than usual as I’m joined by three people who are all poised to help me take a deep dive into the future of sustainability. Joining me on this bumper episode is journalist, economist, and author Ed Conway.

Welcome, Ed. Hello. I’m also joined by Nigel Steward, chief scientist at Rio Tinto. Welcome back, Nigel.

Hi, good to see you.

And last but not least by Froydis Cameron-Johansson, Rio Tinto’s global head of health, safety, environment, and security. Welcome, Froydis.

Thank you. Nice to be here. 

So, Ed, tell us the one thing that you can’t live without. I spent a long time thinking about this cuz there’s quite a lot of things like kind of items, gadgets, and things that I can’t live without. But in the end, I lighted on my earbuds. They go in my in my ears and I use them for listening. How about you two? Are you earpod type people? 

Oh, absolutely. I bit like you. I can’t go a day without Always plugged in. Always plugged in. But the thing I find so funny about those is that they kind of went from big to like super small and now they’ve kind of gone back to there like the big ones are you see them uh around as well a lot uh which I thought was really funny. 

Definitely Nigel. Yeah, for me it’s for phone calls. I find uh using them for phone calls is the way to go. 

Yeah, definitely. So these are pretty ubiquitous items. We all have them. We all listen on them. Um, and of course lots of different materials go into making something like that. We’ve covered electronics quite a lot on this podcast already. And for this episode, our theme is sustainability and the future of how we’re going to be able to keep our earbuds in circulation and uh in production for many years to come hopefully.

So Ed, let’s hear a little bit more about your item. You use them every day. They’re constantly in your ears pretty much. The fact that they’re so small means that you just
have them with you wherever you are. 

Yeah. I used to love when I was working in a lab a lot, I used to have headphones in all the time and I’d have podcasts just like twittering away in the background and it’s nice company, isn’t it?

Especially if you’re doing stuff on your own. Ed, I want to talk to you about your book. 

Thank you. 

Um, your book, Material World, discusses how reliant we are on on the world’s resources and sort of looks into all of the stories of where our stuff comes from, which is a big overlap with this podcast as well. But that’s not your world. You weren’t from a scientific or a material background. So, what was it about the material world that intrigued you?

I’m an economics journalist and I realised that within my world a lot of people talk a lot of the time about the fact or they have the idea that we’ve dematerialized and they get this from looking at statistics like GDP which have an ever increasing proportion  of GDP as services. It’s not materials. It’s not it’s not mining. It’s not any it’s not production. It’s mostly services. It’s kind of 80% in this country and similar in the US and even fewer people work working within mining manufacturing and production. And so as a result of that, I think within within my world,

I think a lot of people have led themselves into this kind of sense that this stuff doesn’t matter as much as it used to and that we have somehow we’re able to kind of uproot ourselves from the physical. It’s a seductive idea. I guess it always struck me that there was like there was more than that and that it was naive to think that and that was the kind of beginning.

Well, actually, well, the real beginning for me was I’d had that lurking around for a while. And then I ended up going to a gold mine um in the course of my day job. I was blown away by the scale of it. Completely blown away and just thought I had no idea this is the reality of getting stuff out of the ground. And and you know there’s with the good and the bad. I mean this is the reality. This is the scale of it is awesome. But also the scale of destruction that you need to do. You need to blow up a lot of earth in order to get this stuff. It’s important to remind yourself when we demand things like copper and iron and all of the living standards that we have, it’s important to remember that they have to start somewhere. And I think by thinking that we’ve dematerialised and uprooted ourselves from the world, we can just be a bit more oblivious of the reality and a bit we scrutinise it a bit less.

So part of this part of the book was just going down a lot of kind of rabbit holes and realising well hang on there’s this it’s not just gold. and gold isn’t one of the materials. There’s what happens with copper. There’s what happens with sand, with salt, with all of these other materials. And it turns out your entire life is dependent upon them. Um, and it was it was mind-blowing and in various different ways. Uh, and I spent a lot of time just yeah, with my mouth open thinking, god, this is this is amazing.

Have you have you had any of those kind of mouth open moments? Just the scale or maybe your first glimpse of a mine?

Well, I think for me the first time I saw an open pit mine was uh well in Ed’s book he refers to Bingham Canyon which is one of our operations. It’s called Kennecott Utah copper and uh it’s the biggest hole in the world or one of the biggest holes in the world. It’s a very large hole. Yeah. And I remember driving into it and uh and it catches you by surprise as you sort of drive in and you see it. It’s just and it’s absolutely enormous. 

Can you describe it for listeners? How does it...

Well, it’s incredibly deep. If you think about from the very bottom of the pit to the top of the waist stumps that have been built up around it, um you can put two of the world’s tallest buildings on top of one another.

So as the you know the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and uh it would just appear at the top you know so it’s incredibly deep and you see these hall trucks and you know they weigh 300 tons. They carry 300 tons of rock and they’re the size of, you know, a three-story house pretty much. And um and you see them at the bottom of the pit and they’re like little dots and then you stand next to them and they’re just absolutely enormous. So um the scale is uh is certainly something to behold. 

Yeah. How about you Froydis? 

The sort of human ingenuity and engineering, how people were able to harness these metals, minerals, um these products to actually advance society and where these were located and how they actually had to not only discover them, work out what to use them for. For me, that sort of really blows my mind. I’ve been to mines that are at thousands of metres of altitude in Chile and Peru and in the jungles in in Colombia.

And then I’ve also been four kilometres underground in a platinum mine in South Africa. Yeah. And so two vastly different types of geographies, but people are still going through these very physical processes to access the metals and the minerals that society is demanding and increasing to demand. 

Cuz if you’re buying something this I suppose this is where I’m not a geologist and I’m not a scientist but if the reason that it’s relevant that it’s me going to this is that we all need to just be more conscious that that is the backstory that that behind every item you know it might be your AirPods it might be just you know the house you live in behind every item that you’re using on a daily basis which most of which are kind of improving your living standards there is a backstory and it’s often a hidden backstory these places are amazing. 

But what are the compromises? And I think both of those things need to be talked about more. Yeah. 

And the true cost I guess was what struck me from your book as well is um not just financial cost and all the kind of economic side but also the energy side, the human side. There’s so much that goes into it that is just beyond totally those atoms. And economists just kind of talk about these things being externalities. 

And I that is that’s true. 

That’s a fair way of kind of assessing these things. Um they’re not really kind of baked into things like GDP, but um they are quite profound and important and actually these days they’re increasingly relevant as well cuz if you’re buying like I don’t know a solar panel for instance, what’s the backstory about how the metals were mined there? 

You know, what kind of environmental standards were there going on? It’s that social consciousness, right, that we’ve sort of seen in the food and agriculture business, the clothing industry as well. And I think that that sort of people really understanding. So like sausages, people like sausages for their breakfast, but don’t want to think too hard about how they’re made. And you know, consumers are very much like that often.

I like this product, but like you say, I don’t need to know the backstory cuz that doesn’t doesn’t relate to me. And price and price is important. Obviously, the fact that the price doesn’t always reflect the true cost.

Absolutely. That’s the difficult thing. And I think I only when you kind of dive a little bit down into okay, how does this thing actually come about, that’s when it really hits you, at least it did for me. There’s some really interesting work that’s been done at Cambridge University and uh they sort of shown that uh there are really three sources of waste. One is from the overdesign of a product. 

So again, we come back to the design. So we actually put more material in there than we need. then there’s a loss because quite often you know things like building codes or engineering codes require they over specify the need for a material. 

So if you actually design particularly with the engineering tools that we have these days we can design things and make things um much more efficiently and effectively than we used to that we can get away from those old codes. 

So that’s another source of waste and then there’s the actual manufacturing process itself. A lot of the recycling waste that we come that comes to us is from the manufacturing process itself to actually manufacture a product in the first place. And if you rethink the way you manufacture, could you actually manufacture um producing far less waste? So it’s uh these sort of three components together can actually drastically reduce the demand and I think that’s what we need to think about as well. 

So there’s a lot that needs to happen in the whole supply chain. 

No, I totally agree. So your book focuses on six raw materials and then through that you explore many more. Can you just take us briefly through those six and why you chose them?

Yeah. Yeah. Stop me if I bang on a bit too much. So So there’s sand which actually is kind of the biggest of all of them in that it encompasses uh glass.

I always had in my mind that the thing that that no one had really done before and I really wanted to do was to tell the story of um where a silicon chip comes from. Yeah, not just the kind of fabrication plant in Taiwan, which is something that more and more people are conscious of, but where does it come from in the ground? I would put my lay my hand on it. Um, so I always had that in my mind as the thing I was aiming for when it came to sand. But then glass came along and it’s totally fascinating. I know for scientific for material science purposes, it’s still one of these substances we don’t fully understand, which to me is, you know, confusing, isn’t it?

Um, that we could still have mysteries like that. Um so glass um concrete as well the built world around us that’s also part of the kind of sand and aggregate story again underrated but massively important. Um and then finally silicon chips and so that’s that’s sand then there was salt then there’s um iron copper oil and then lithium and you can tell from the last substance you’re kind of there’s a bit of an arc that the book goes through from you know the earliest days of materials. 

So glass is one of the early kind of advanced technologies that humankind worked out how to make through to the energy transition. So that was the idea was to try to having started with this kind of moment in this gold mind thinking blimey that’s how the world seems to work and I didn’t realise I was part of it. I’m a kind of data guy. I quite like spreadsheets and I thought at the start of this process um that there might be some spreadsheets somewhere which would tell me okay what are the main materials that the rest of the world depends on.

I kind of thought well someone must have a list what those materials are but they didn’t really and I so I it was a kind of journalistic exercise to try and think what are the things I want to focus on.

Nigel, do you recognise that you know in your career you will have talked to many people about what you do. Do you recognise that surprise that people have that we are still so reliant on materials? 

People quite often have a negative view of mining because of the impact that it does have. Um and it does have an impact. You know, we produce a lot of waste. We consume a lot of water and we’re constantly looking at ways in which we can do this better and more efficiently and more effectively.

But nevertheless, the demand for materials is actually growing of all materials. Um, and I think we all need to be conscious of that in society about how can we uh use materials more efficiently, how can we waste them less, how can we recycle them more, and how can we actually just reduce demand. Um, you know, I think there’s a lot that’s been done in the world from an engineering perspective to reduce demand.

If you think about something like an aluminium beverage can, I think it’s something like 70% less lighter than it was, you know, 30 odd years ago. It’s an incredible story and a lot of science has gone into that to make that happen. 

But no one notices. 

But no one notices. And in fact, generally what happens is that it’s that paradox. You know, as you make things more efficient, uh, we buy more. So, we need to be conscious of things like that. And the amounts of materials that we that we consume are just absolutely staggering.

And you know what I really liked about Ed’s book was the linkages. And you were talking about sand. And you know, sand is just fascinating. But when you look at sand and aggregate in the world every year, we mine 50 billion tons of that.

Wow. And like the engineering material we probably make the most of is concrete. We make 30 billion tons of concrete every year that use the sand and the aggregate. We’re running out of sand. Yeah. Running out of sand. And it’s, you know, and it’s crazy yet it goes into sort of really important things like glass is used to make the semiconductors. It’s used to make the semiconductors that go into the solar panels. 

So everything that we want to do around the energy transition um is going to require an awful lot of materials as we move away from the fossil fuels and we start uh you know investing more renewable in renewable technologies that’s going to put demands on electricity cuz we’re going to be electrifying the world. 

So it’s the copper and the aluminium that’s got to start being produced. So those markets have to grow. You know what it brought home to me Ed’s book was that you know we really really need to start thinking seriously as society about how we can reduce our demand because we having we’re really having a major impact on the world. 

Yeah. I’ve been sort of in the sustainability space for probably close to 30 years in the extractive sector which has been really interesting to see the sort of evolution over time. You know it started off very initially how are we thinking about environmental footprint and you know building hospitals and schools. So, but now it’s much more about how are we thinking about sustainability as really one of those foundational considerations for us as a business going forward. 

So, you know, sustainability and thinking about the different areas is a really key component of how we think about everything across the life cycle of our projects effectively. And I would say it starts at expiration when we’re looking for where the rocks are in the project space as we move into projects in development and then also into operation. 

But then there’s also bits that happen operational level where how are we minimising the impacts across the environment across our emissions?

Um how are we thinking about to really maximise the resources that we have in the mine? How are we looking to extend the life of the mine?

These are all things that are coming into consideration.

And then of course there’s closure.

So what do you do when a mine has the resources are no longer viable and how do you then you know move forward with that operation as it goes into closure and then rehab or restoration and there are some really great examples across Rio where we’ve actually um repurposed land um that have been old mines.

We’ve worked very closely with the community on other opportunities. What do they want to do with their communities etc.

So those are all really big considerations that are really needing to be part of our business decisions.

What’s interesting to me is, you know, we’ve been mining for thousands of years.

It’s one of the first things that that humankind first footprints that we have on this on this planet.

It feels like it’s the first time that across the world most miners have been thinking about this stuff, you know, the last few decades, which does feel like a kind of that’s a genuinely new thing.

In order to get to net zero, we have to do more mining than we’ve ever done before.

Probably even with the greatest scientific minds, there’s probably going to be something that only later further down the road we discover, which is some impact that we’ve had.

And to be humble about that, is hopefully that’s a new thing.

And I I’m quite hopeful about that.

Yeah.

Let’s get back to your earbuds.

Yeah.

The these as I suppose a symbol of our use of materials in in in this kind of big energy and material flow currently these atoms are in the form of your earbuds.

Yes.

Um how sustainable do we think that particular object is?

So there’s obviously a fair bit of plastic in this casing. There’s a bit of a bit of metal in there. Um but mostly there’ll be the rare earths I imagine in the speaker the driver or whatever you want to call it. 

They say it’s important for batteries.

I actually don’t know if they use that much in batteries.

But the one bit of rare earth which as I understand it most people do encounter on a day-to-day basis is in their earbuds because I think part of the reason that you can fit them into something so small is because of because of rare earth.

Yeah. 

Yeah.

The reason is that contains a very very powerful magnet and these magnets were invented relatively recently and you may have noticed things like your vacuum cleaners have stroke shrunken in size because of those magnets.

It’s very tangible.

It’s very tangible kind of.

So that’s why everything’s got smaller.

And then of course you’ve got your batteries in there and the batteries have shrunk as well.

And that’s because of lithium.

And of course lithium when you look at all of the elements in the periodic table, it’s the one other than hydrogen that packs the most punch.

Um and you can make a rechargeable battery out of out of lithium.

And then of course to make the lithium battery, you need electrodes.

Um so one’s graphite and the other one it can be you know a cobalt oxide or nickel cobalt manganese oxide those sorts of materials and they’re stuck on electrodes which are made out of aluminium and copper and uh you know to make the electrical circuit all in this tiny little all in a tiny little thing and there’s a little bit of copper probably your magnet is a little disc and it’s got a copper coil around it and then it’s all encased in plastic and the interesting thing is like you talk about the scale of things.

You know, when you look at the hierarchy of materials that we use, there’s 30 billion tons of concrete requiring the, you know, the 30 to 50 billion tons of sand and aggregate.

Then you get uh wood and steel are the two next big biggest at around two billion tons each a year.

And then it’s plastics at 460 million tons a year.

So that’s oil mostly, isn’t it?

Yeah.

And that’s oil.

So the plastic is actually one of the biggest material consumers that we have.

I guess a lot of this is plastic kind of by weight.

I do find it amazing that the fact that these things they’re not as easily kind of repairable.

I notice already these I think like a couple of years old and the battery life isn’t so good.

So I’m quite conscious that that that’s degrading.

So that presumably there’s some question marks.

I guess it’s the sustainability thing is it like me as a consumer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it’s your ability to reuse, repair, and then recycle it.

With a lot of sort of the e-waste that that we have now, which is probably one of our biggest sources of waste, is actually the ability for all of our e-waste to be dismantled and then all the different components to be recycled is really hard.

So, again, you know, that’s where I think there would be huge advantages and innovation.

So, you know, laptops, these things actually when they do come to the end of their life, can you just literally pick out the different components and then recycle the rare earths, the lithium batteries?

How can you do that?

But right now, you can’t actually dismantle.

It’s so hard.

And it is literally the just the dismantling.

It doesn’t sound that sophisticated, but that it is that.

Exactly.

And it’s industrial design.

And if you design the product for its end of life ability to be recycled in its component, you probably wouldn’t end up with a design like that.

I heard actually talking to Apple part of their challenge. So they’ve got quite a lot of machines that are there to disassemble their phones and stuff and they were saying one of the challenges that people are not giving them in isn’t enough. And so and I often kind of come to this that that oh hang on the problem here is kind of me the consumer.

A lot of the businesses are kind of trying, you know, their hardest and there are still big question marks over sustainability for many businesses, but the buck often stops with the consumer who, yeah, sticks their stuff in a drawer or chucks it away, even worse.

Yeah, I guess the point is like that’s really good for kind of simple things but electronics have come up so much on this podcast and it always comes down to, you know, if you imagine all the different atoms and how blended they are in the semiconductors and in the alloys, it always comes back to how do we, we talked about this with Mark Manini in his episode, how do we actually like pull these things apart and then hope to make it a circular material.

Yeah.

Nigel, what are the barriers there?

There’s certainly the collection point that Ed mentioned, but I think on the the recycling side, I mean, we’ve mentioned before with electronics, right?

But your headphones, they’re connecting with a phone and the phone contains more than 90 different elements.

So, we’ve made these things incredibly complicated and to separate everything back out is we actually don’t have really have the technologies to do it.

So I think if we design things better to make them more recycled from the go that would certainly help but I still think always we’re going to have this sort of challenge of that when you recycle things you tend to accumulate impurities.

Um we see this in steel recycling for example where you tend to accumulate copper and aluminium we tend to accumulate um iron and silicon although tech technologically we know ways to separate them out they’re very very very expensively expensive so right

is that the issue is an exp I always wondered about that that copper thing with iron it’s just it is doable but it’s just too expensive yeah yeah but I you know I but I think this is where the you know the innovation has to happen and I think there are some really exciting things that are starting to happen where People are thinking about how you can design uh kind of a new alloy of aluminium or of steel and start producing fewer alloy types but then make them actually more tolerant to recycling.

Less is more.

Mhm.

Yeah,

[Music] definitely.

Yeah.

Cuz I think traditionally in material science people start conceptualizing a material like well what’s the need? What’s the requirement? What are the properties that I need?

And very rarely is end of use, end of life part of that equation. The same principle actually applies to as I saying about with the closure of our minds.

And so Rio Tinto is really forward thinking in in how it’s actually thinking about the end state after mining at the very beginning.

And so there’s been some great examples of where uh actually in Western Australia in the Arnold minds where they’re thinking okay we’re starting with the view in mind that actually we’re guests on these traditional owner lands.

How are we thinking about what’s important to the communities?

They’re the custodians of the land and how are working with them that once it’s finished will have the smallest impact from a footprint perspective.

And those are all the considerations that you know we’re having to think about sort of end of state design upfront which to your point Ed is not something that extractive companies were thinking about probably 20 30 years ago.

There’s things that we can do in the mining and the extraction of the materials that we need.

But equally as well, we need to think about the use during manufacturing, the design during manufacturing and postconsumer bringing that back into our business and uh recovering the valuable metals there.

I think that’s another evolution or change is how from the mining company’s perspective, not only are you looking after your sustainability considerations inside your mine and your operations, there’s also an expectation about your I’ll say duty of care, but it’s a sort of product stewardship piece to what Nigel was saying up and down your value chain.

So you’ll see that especially in the decarbonization space with scope 3 emissions and scope 3 emissions are effectively the emissions of our customers or the transportation of our products to our customers as well.

So we’re having to declare additional emissions to what we’re using from electricity perspective but also from our own use of diesel but then also what is the transportation emissions of our product from the fence to the customer.

Um, so again, I think you’re seeing these considerations and I think this is a good thing that you’re having to not just think about your own little piece of the puzzle, but actually what this is forcing us to do is to you have to work in partnership with your suppliers, your vendors, but also with your customers.

And I was really curious rereading the introduction to your book before having this conversation. 

You mentioned that you found it very therapeutic writing and I was really interested in that word. Can you reflect?

Yeah.

Tell us a bit more about that. Why is it therapeutic to kind of take this big picture?

I think there’s something primal about this because if you think about what were our ancestors, what were people doing back in the Neolithic era?

They were they were getting rocks and stones out of the ground. They were fashioning them into tools and they were using those tools to improve their standard of living. That was part of the human story. It was part of what made us what we are today. And that was happening thousands tens of thousands of years ago. Today we’re still getting rocks out of the ground. We’re turning them into tools. These days the tools are silicon chips and you know other bits and pieces and rare earths and so on and so forth, neodymium magnets. But we get rocks out of the ground, we turn them into tools and we use those tools to improve our standard of living.

And part of I think the issue that that I had before when I talk about this idea of living in an ethereal world thinking that everything is just about ideas and it’s that’s all that matters.

Genuinely I think it is part of who we are as a species is to know that and to be aware that we leave a footprint. You know that in the Neolithic era we were leaving a footprint as well getting rocks out of the ground. We’re doing it now at a much greater scale than ever before with a population across the world that is greater than ever before. We just need to remember that.

And so I did I found it kind of therapeutic and also as a result of understanding what the compromises are and the reality is of getting something out of the ground and just being open to that and honest about that.

I found kind of felt more grounded but also I felt like I respected the stuff I buy a little bit more.

I think there’s something profound about it which I didn’t expect to feel when I started off on on that process.

Definitely.

It’s much better to face up to that and to be honest and also to be honest about the footprint and all of these different things rather than pretending it’s not happening which I think I think we as a society have been pretending for a bit too long about this stuff just it just turns up you order it turns up you use it you throw it away that’s not a functional relationship with both the planet and our history as a species absolutely so because we’re all here and we’ve got these different expertise in the room um with the focus on the earbuds and three of the materials that you wrote about in your book and the three that Rio mine.

I would really love to dig a bit deeper into those three and get an idea of what they are, why they are the way they are and how their sustainability is going to look in the future.

So, first let’s take a look at copper.

We’ve mentioned the copper coils in the earbuds already.

Um listeners will have heard us talk about copper on the podcast before as well.

We know it’s a crucial element of our electronic world in particular. Um but Ed, talk to us about the economics of copper. Why is it such a a crucial component?

It’s one of the first things that we kind of learned how to mine.

Um, of course, I think about the kind of the Bronze Age. You’ve been doing it for thousands of years, but it’s had very many different kind of renditions. I mean, today, none of this is possible without copper. You know, we need copper to generate power. We need copper to transmit power. We need copper more than ever before in things like trans transformers and inverters and all of these amazing machines. Thing for me about copper is because it’s mostly not visible. I mean, it’s even less visible than most many other materials out there. You see steel on a building a lot of the time. You don’t see all that much copper.

True.

We can we can forget about how much it is part of the foundation of our lives, but nothing, you know, think about a world without power.

Yeah.

We’re done for. And we need staggering amounts of copper if we’re going to fulfill a lot of the plans that everyone has to electrify the world because obviously part of the logic of let zero is electrifying a lot of processes that were previously done in combustion.

So we need crazy amounts of copper in the future and and that’s for me was one of the striking things going to a copper mine standing on the lip of this copper mine.

The one I was at was called Chukamata which is we devised with Bing and Canyon as being the biggest hole in the world. It’s massive.

It’s like it is staring into it and looking down at those trucks that Nigel was talking about is it’s like looking in the Grand Canyon and yet we dug that and we need multiple more of these mines.

Yeah.

You know, every year if we’re going to fulfill the promises we’ve made.

So, so copper is for me it’s the bedrock and actually lithium is incredibly important.

Um but copper is still more old-fashioned as it is.

At the heart of the energy transition.

So, how’s that going to go then?

Rio guys, tell us are we going to be able to get so much copper as we need?

Even if we were to recycle the copper that is already in the system, it’s still not going to be enough to help us electrify and decarbonise the world.

So, how do we bring on these new mines?

It takes a long time to develop a mine. It’s not you sort of especially a copper mine.

I say copper likes to hang out in all sorts of places that is usually high up a mountain or somewhere in a jungle somewhere that’s not very accessible. It’s really about how are you thinking of accessing this copper in ways that maybe we haven’t done historically.

So is it still acceptable to dig a really big open pit mine for copper or should we go underground and use different technologies?

And so at Rio Tinto we have a um a mine in in Mongolia called Oyu Tolgoi and they’ve really been looking at how are they minimising their footprint on the surface but also underground as well.

How are they thinking about their processing that they’re doing or your Togo is doing a lot around water.

So they have about 80% of their water is recycled.

Yeah, I think Froydis has you know touched on a very very important point is um that recycling is not enough.

I think if you think about the context of the energy transition and the forecast for the amount of copper that we’re going to need in the future over the next sort of 25 years we’re going to have to produce 700 million tons of copper and to put that in context that’s more copper than we’ve produced in the whole of human history.

It’s crazy.

So in other words we would have to eat ourselves rip all of the copper out of the wall you know and recycle all of that and then we’d have enough.

So what it means is you know copper is already one of the most intensely recycled materials on earth.

Yeah.

And one of the great challenges in the copper world is to bring on a new mine particularly an underground mine can take you about 18 years.

Oh wow.

So yeah.

Yeah.

That’s quick and we have to be we’re supposed to be fully decarbonizing the world by 2050.

So we need to move with speed. So we have a a technology called Newton that we’re piloting at the moment where we can take those sort of deep rocks um that normally you can’t leech where we can with the support of bacteria we can actually um leech um copper out of the or body. So these are the sorts of innovations that can start to help. 

Can we actually go back and mine copper out of our tailings as well is another thing that we’re thinking about too.

Um because you know the challenge with the energy transition is we need to move with speed.

Yeah.

So actually going back to resources that we already have in our hands in in our waste is possibly a way in which we could accelerate the delivery of the copper that we need.

And of course one of the other things you haven’t mentioned is aluminium.

Oh yeah.

All the overhead cables are aluminium.

So we have those two challenges.

Moving on to iron.

How did your impression of iron compare to the world of copper?

So, we were talking earlier about that kind of primal thing about humankind and its relationship with the planet and getting stuff out and turning it into tools.

I think iron’s like the ultimate example of that.

It’s like the ultimate kind of alloy metal that we use for making stuff and for building stuff and for everything else for getting us from A to B.

In terms of Rails, there’s something particularly I don’t know if I use the word emotional, but there’s something if you’ve been to a blast furnace and seen it being tapped and seeing the kind of sparks and all and this molten metal flying out, which is kind of hotter than lava.

Yeah.

Understanding that humankind is capable of managing that process and making it happen.

It’s like, you know, you it’s kind of inside the volcano.

There’s something very very um kind of I think affecting about that.

Yeah.

So, so but also knowing that the main product of this blast furnace is actually not iron, but it’s carbon.

Yeah.

How does that affect Rio, Nigel? What what’s the kind of the Rio position on where iron is going and what’s going to happen?

Well, it is one of the core materials of society. Um, you know, it’s why we produce it and why we supply that to the industry. I think um it’s also one of you know steel making itself as a major emitter of carbon dioxide.

So it contributes to climate change. So um what we’re always thinking about and we work with our customers is looking at how we can decarbonise the production of steel. I think that’s probably one of the greatest areas of focus for us.

Um, and uh, it’s replacing the carbon source, the fossil fuel source that reduces the iron oxide into iron.

And, and we always have to remember that steel is actually an iron carbon alloy.

So, we need we need a little bit of carbon still to produce the steel.

Yeah.

Listeners that don’t know the world of mining might be surprised to we’ve been talking about blast furnaces.

That’s one method of extracting a metal from an ore, but extracting lithium is a totally different process even though it’s still a metal.

Froydis, can you take us through how lithium gets extracted and what’s the sustainability concerns there?

The production of lithium has been around for ages and so it’s very much about sort of evaporation. So think about I don’t know sea water you leave it it evaporates and you get the salt crystals. That’s similar approach with lithium. And then I guess in the areas where we really have the sort of rich lithium resources in places like the Atakama desert which is really high altitude in Chile it’s a desert so there is very little water there. So the idea that you could sort of put these big sort of ponds out there and evaporate you need to be very very considerate. We’re looking at how can we think about different technologies for this, not just using the sun um and the old techniques, but what can we be looking at now? And as Nigel says, there’s all sorts of innovation happening. It’s called direct lithium extraction. And that’s almost like that sort of precision processing.

Okay.

Yeah.

How can we be much more sort of specific in the extraction whether it’s through membrane, whether it’s through just selection, other um solutions that we can put it in.

So those are some of the new areas that we’re looking at doing.

But again, for me, that’s really exciting because lithium is such an important element that actually without these innovations, would we still be able to continue those processes? I’m not sure we would.

Yeah.

But we certainly wouldn’t be able to decarbonise and electrify so much without lithium, right? Without the batteries.

Ed, was there anything about lithium that surprised you when you learned where it comes from and you saw those salt flats?

I was definitely surprised about that fact that when you look at these, so they’re enormous, these ponds, these evaporation ponds, the Phoenetians were getting their salt just through evaporation.

And the fact that we are the production of one of the world’s most advanced, you know, metals that goes into all of our batteries, the most advanced technology of the day, into drones, into smartphones, into, you know, these AirPods and things.

The fact that that comes from a process that goes back thousands of years ultimately because it’s aping that I found that I found that again, you know, it’s profound because it just it roots us, but in many ways we’re just kind of running over some of the same roads and learning some of the same lessons that our ancestors did, but the scale of it, it’s very hard not to kind of to go out to the to the desert and see these vast ponds which are well, you know, they’re visible from space And I can understand talking to a number of people kind of indigenous people from uh from the area who felt that their culture was being trampled on when these things when these ponds were being made there and they even though many of them benefit from it because the the mining companies are bringing in extra income to the area they still feel unsettled by it.

And I think that’s an important thing and finding a way of communicating and ensuring that both the standard of living that we all kind of depend on is able to be there without necessarily trampling over other people’s rights.

That’s something that I think we’re going to have to continue wrestling with in the coming years.

Yeah.

It used to be with mining projects, the trade-off with communities used to be job and taxes. That deal has evolved so radically. It’s much more about really how the custodians of those resources see their future.

So again, we might just see like you say, oh, it’s just sand or water, but for them, this is a deeply cultural sort of visceral thing that actually by mining companies taking it away has a profound effect on their culture.

So again, Rio’s approach is much more about how we’re really understanding those contexts.

How are we really bringing in their thinking into what we’re thinking about and how we’re understanding the world.

So now that you’re kind of bridging these two worlds of of your world of economics and having or your ethereal world as you described it and the material world when I started writing it this stuff was still it wasn’t exactly fashionable in the course of kind of writing it but also in just in the last couple of years this stuff has come or gone onto the front pages in a way that it wasn’t before.

What I have been struck by is you know policy makers are listening to this stuff. They’re paying more attention to this than they ever have done before. And I think that makes sense because we’re in a world that in some senses is more scary. Geopolitics feeds into this, but in some senses, you know, we we’re

pushing towards these transitions. It all keeps coming back to the material world, and to an extent I’m kind of surprised by it.

I mean, you know, I didn’t expect for this stuff to be so much at the in the headlines, but uh I think it’s all to the good.

Well, that brings us to the end of our conversation today.

Um, I’ve really loved um bringing our two worlds together, being invited into your world, Ed, and understanding the bigger picture as well as the smaller picture of just, you know, in one object, we’ve been able to explore so many different areas and particularly thinking about going into the future, a world without earbuds would be unimaginable.

I’ve been left with a lot of hope.

I think that um that we’ll be able to solve some of these issues and get those materials into circularity and out of the ground as and when we need to.

So, thank you so much to my guests today, journalist Ed Conway, Rio Tinto’s chief scientist Nigel Steward, and Froydis Cameron-Johansson, Rio Tinto’s global head of health, safety, environment, and security.

Thank you all so much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And that’s all for this series of things you can’t live without. But remember, you can listen to more episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much for listening to this series. Until next time.

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