This metal is more valuable than gold

this tiny piece of metal is almost twice as valuable as gold it's palladium a rare metal which has seen a spike in popularity and price nationwide and in the process has created a new class of car thief thieves are still on the lookout for those catalytic converters in vehicles as soaring demand creates a palladium crunch the race is on to find a new alternative before the auto industry really ends up in a bind so like this right here it'd probably be worth 50 right now just the dust itself just the dust itself it's really kind of crazy when you look at it the most expensive dust i've ever touched palladium was first discovered by william williston in 1803 and belongs to a group of metals known as platinum group elements or pges these elements are known for their high melting points resistance to corrosion and most notably their great catalytic properties when we want to control chemical reactions a lot of times the problem is they're they're too slow so a catalyst is remarkable at accelerating reactions paul danhauer is a professor of chemical engineering at the university of minnesota he walked us through the basics of heterogeneous catalysis or how a metal palladium can speed up the reaction of a gas we can actually take molecules and stick them to a surface when they stick on the surface they can rearrange very quickly and then once they rearrange they come back off that surface that enables that rearrangement of molecules is called a catalyst so it helps the reaction speed up but it's not actually used in the reaction as a react endurance product palladium has been used in cars since stricter emission standards were first introduced in 1975. it's built into a device called a catalytic converter which tackles a bunch of toxic emissions all at once so out of your engine when you when it's operating you have three things coming out that we don't want unburned fuel is one problem another one is carbon monoxide from fuel that hasn't been fully burned and then the third one is when it takes in air the nitrogen in the air will actually oxidize also and make nox which if it comes out of your car will make acid rain so when these gases pass through the honeycomb structure inside a catalytic converter the nanoparticles of palladium and other pges inside work to burn up or break down the toxic gases into less harmful ones catalytic converters have led to a significant drop in carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide emissions since their adoption in the 1970s and the more palladium they use the more effective they are with more manufacturers trying to reduce their impact on the environment and with stricter emissions regulations coming online in places like europe and china the demand and cost of palladium is skyrocketing and there just isn't enough to go around the u.s only mines around 14 000 kilograms of palladium each year but uses over 90 000 kilograms annually and with only two major suppliers of palladium in the world russia and south africa there's a real bottleneck in getting the metal to where is needed most that hunger for palladium has created some new wrinkles in the market some aboveboard and some less so with these catalytic converters exposed to the public so easily where someone can slide underneath and cut them with a portable sawzall it's going to be a problem tom buschel owns rockaway recycling a scrap yard in new jersey he buys hundreds of catalytic converters every single day from scrappers around the country and eventually sends them off to be refined for their precious metals this guy sent the whole muffler so we got south carolina california tennessee wisconsin florida each catalytic converter could contain between two and three grams of palladium each tom is one of many recyclers who account for over 85 000 kilograms of palladium recycled in the u.s each year nearly all of which comes from scrap catalytic converters like these it's the kind of business that grows when an industry is looking for every last available scrap of a precious metal my risk has only increased over time yeah because all of these cats used to be worth 150 200 bucks each and now they're worth triple he's got a knack for looking at any catalytic converter and quickly estimating its value based on its make model and condition this is off of a this is off of a these are often so those are both down there yep okay this is a i mean this is a 900 cap wow now we're bleeping the car manufacturers names because there's one thing we have to talk about and that's catalytic converter theft as the price of the precious metals inside the converters continues to rise so does the rate at which they're stolen in just the past three years alone monthly catalytic converter thefts in the u.s have increased dramatically from more than 108 thefts per month in 2018 to over 1200 a month in 2020. how do you address that here in your recycling process we've dealt with a lot of authorities we helped them catch a lot of people that were stealing them because as a certified recycling establishment we're taking driver's licenses from everyone and if someone doesn't want to give it to us then we're not going to buy their material the price of palladium is the driver of this whole story i mean this is the most palladium my producer said we could afford for this video which really makes you wonder why we're relying on such a scarce material for important everyday tasks we don't really have a choice right now but that might change the replacement of precious metal is an active area of research so we say we want to use earth abundant materials or things where we have so much of it that the cost is incredibly low not only in catalytic converters but lots of other applications where precious metals are important it's a very big challenge another approach is to use materials like palladium more efficiently increasing their surface area by doling them out atom by atom that's the ultimate minimum amount of metal you could use in these and it's a very simple principle if you have a particle of material the smaller you make it the more external surface area you have per amount of that material and so you can make these incredibly incredibly small particles you get the most bang for your puck but engineering palladium at the atomic scale also comes with its own fresh challenges a single atom is much less stable than a cluster and that's much less stable than a bulk metal so a lot of research is going into how we get a single atom of palladium or rhodium or platinum to stay in place and keep its functionality over a long period of time it's a very exciting area of research now there's still a ways to go before this technology is ready for any practical application but a world full of zero emissions electric vehicles is still a ways off too so for now if you own a gas-powered car keep an eye on your catalytic converter and don't get caught up in the palladium crime wave so you guys are never going to believe this but between the time that we shot this video and posted it the catalytic converter on my dad's truck was stolen from the lot in which he was getting work done the thief hit four cars his was one of them so the threat is real

Channel: Verge Science

Views: 727,117

Keywords: catalytic converter, gold, catalytic converters, scrapping catalytic converters, smelting catalytic converters, palladium, palladium recovery, smelting palladium, precious metals, theft, car theft, stolen car, gold price forecast, gold price today, gold price, climate change, precious metals investing, science, facts, science experiments, experiment, nasa news, nasa, physics, biology, chemistry, universe, education, space, spacex, mars, elon musk, verge science, the verge

Id: UPXzbyY9nL0

Length: 6min 59sec (419 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Correct-Selection-65]

When did that happen? I used it for decades in dental restorations. And it definitely wasn’t more valuable than gold.