Raw material

Why the church in Africa is poor, and why African nations are poor.

African nations are living in Genesis chapter one, dealing only with raw materials, only with provisions that God provided.

Western nations has moved on to Genesis chapter two where they are dealing with productive resources, finished products.

And to tr-transfer resource from provision to production, it needs a human being to finish creation.

God commanded man to create finished products.

That's why he made us co-creators.

He only created raw materials.

He didn't give us finished products.

Clays, as you know, are not chemically or mineralogically uniform materials.

Changes in body composition or in the characteristics of an individual raw material can alter, can change, can modify the rheological response of the slip, and consequently, the relative effectiveness of a given deflocculation system.

Common rheological additives can behave also differently depending on the clay being processed, of course.

The selection of a dispersant should therefore be considered together with the characterization of the body in which it will be used.

In practice, a product that provides a good operating point for one formulation is not necessarily the most suitable solution for another.

The same applies when an apparently unchanged formulations shows variations associated with different batches of raw materials.

In this situation, a dispersant can help bring the slip back towards the required rheological conditions.

However, before simply increasing the dosage, it is useful to, uh, we could say, identify which parameters has actually changed.

So 31.9 billion isn't the cost of mining conflict in Peru, it's the cost the researchers could identify and substantiate across those 28 cases.

Welcome back to the Responsible Raw Materials Podcast, where we explore the people, ideas, and actions shaping a more responsible future for our natural resources.

For this episode, I'm joined by Doron Tadmor, who has recently completed his PhD looking at how multinational companies deal with stakeholder and political risk, with a particular focus on mining and indigenous peoples.

Doron comes at this from a really interesting perspective.

A company moving into an area inherits that context, whether they created it or not.

So perhaps understanding social history should be every bit as important due diligence as understanding the geology, infrastructure, or economics of a potential project.

And all of this becomes increasingly significant as we look at where raw materials needed over the coming decades are going to come from.

Doron points out that many critical mineral projects overlap with indigenous lands.

You can't change one part of a complex system without affecting something else.

And that becomes particularly interesting when we think about the future of construction and the raw materials that are required by the industry.

Many people within the industry want to decarbonize.

They want more automation.

They want to use AI, robotics, and data, and want to build buildings that are more efficient, adaptable, and perhaps increasingly capable of running themselves.

But every one of those changes has consequences.

More machines may mean fewer people on construction sites, but potentially whilst this could result in a safer construction site, it also places greater demand on the raw materials needed to make those machines.

Electrification can reduce the use of diesel but creates different material demands elsewhere.