Geochemical constraints on sustainable development: Can an advanced global economy achieve long-term stability?

The eighty-one stable chemical elements are examined individually with respect to (i) recent annual demand and (ii) worst case long-term availability in a distant future in which they must be extracted from the background sources of air, seawater, and ordinary rock. It is shown that, if a conventional use scenario is envisioned, the supplies of ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, tellurium, rhenium, osmium, iridium, platinum, gold, and especially phosphorus will be questionable while the supplies of copper, zinc, molybdenum, silver, cadmium, tin, antimony, tungsten, mercury, lead, and bismuth will be inadequate. It is therefore concluded that, in the long run, only the promotion of massive recycling and substitution technologies will suffice to maintain the global industrial society now developing.