New research

China currently produces around 80 percent of the world's supply of raw rare earths. But the domestic industry is plagued by illegal mining and production, lack of innovation and environmental violations.

A tectonic shift could be in the making for the whole rare earth industry worldwide.

A study published earlier this month in the journal Physical Review Letters by researchers from three universities - the University of Michigan in the United States, together with France's Lorraine and the UK's Cambridge universities - found that more common elements could be combined to make electronically useful materials that could replace some rare earths at much lower cost in the future.

A report about the study for newatlas.com by Michael Irving on July 5, noted efforts by some companies, such as Honda and Samsung, to recycle rare earth materials and deal with "the ever-growing e-waste problem". The researchers lauded such initiatives but suggested that "it would be easier to just use cheaper alternatives" for some applications.

Their study found that combining elements from neighboring groups in the Periodic Table could create compounds with properties similar to rare earth metals for lighting and solar panels. Researchers were able to produce the compounds in a thin-film form by layering more common elements "with atomic precision", Irving wrote.

He quoted Roy Clarke, one of the study's authors, as saying: "It's not viable for technology to rely on something that's likely to run out on a scale of 10 to 20 years."

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