Industrial minerals in the age of global economy

 

Authors: Kužvart M

Published in: Bulletin of Geosciences, volume 75, issue 1; pages: 49 - 52;

Keywords: Industrial minerals, global economy,

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Abstract

Motto: There are 3500 known minerals, 60 of them are used in industry as minerals or their combinations i. e. rocks, forming 100 industrial - nonmetallic - mineral commodities. Hight - tech communication, low transport charges and trade without frontiers created global economy.
Industrial minerals and rocks (nonmetallics) represent more than half of mineral raw materials utilized by our technical civilization. Some of them are typical for the age of globalization, for production of silicon semiconductors and optical fibres, cermets, whiskers, refrasil, ceramic superconductive materials, special ceramics etc. Protection of the environment depends to a great deal on nonmetallics = bentonite, zeolite, carbonate rocks, perlite a.o. For the storage or radioactive waste montmorillonite, illite, palygorskite a.o. are important. Agriculture, metalurgy, ceramics, paper production a.o. branches are also utilizing industrial minerals. It is proposed to cope with unemployment due to high productivity of labour typical for the age of globalization by taxing speculative exchanche profits and profits of mining and quarrying of minerals by expatriate companies.