Rethinking China's strategic mineral policy on indium: implication for the flat screens and photovoltaic industries

Abstract

AbstractIndium is an indispensable component of many products, especially the liquid crystal displays (LCD) flat screens (FS) and thin film photovoltaic (PV) cells. China is the world's largest producer of primary indium and products containing indium. Despite this, there has been relatively little examination of the scarcity and strategic mineral policy for indium. Using a material flow analysis approach, a dynamic model has been built to quantify the indium flows, availability, and scarcity in China. The results show that China has transitioned from primarily exporting indium to primarily consuming indium. Forecasting until the year 2020, the domestic demand is led by LCD televisions and monitors (74%), followed by laptops (8%), and PV cells (5%). Accumulated use of indium in production from 2011 to 2020 could reach 7800 t, that is close to China's estimated 2008 reserves and represents three‐fourths of the world's current total reserves. Despite this, end of life (EoL) recycling is forecasted to be too insignificant to influence the indium market supply in the short term. Therefore, by the year around 2020, China could face a serious shortage of both primary production and EoL‐recovered indium to meet the production demand. From a long‐term perspective, the world's development and installation of thin‐film PV modules could be significantly threatened because indium demand within PV modules could grow rapidly over the coming decades. A promising solution to prevent an indium shortage in China is to promote the urban mining of indium from the EoL FS and PV industries. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.