China hopes to tighten the environmental standards for Rare Earth Element (REE) miners. This will naturally increase the price of exports of the REEs. The news is causing concern to Japan and the U.S. who are the largest importers of the minerals. China currently supplies 95% of global REEs.
The general manager of China's largest rare earths company Baotou Steel Rare-Earth (Group) Hi-tech Co Ltd., Zhang Zhong said that the new regulation will increase the cost of production and may raise the price of Chinese rare earth exports.
Such a price raise will affect high tech industry all over the world making electronics more expensive. Typical items which will get affected would be cell phones, iPods, batteries, solar energy panels and missiles.
Japan is already accusing China of blocking rare earth exports. There has also been considerable speculation of China cutting down on exports as its domestic need of REEs will be increasing beyond its production levels in the next few years.
Many of the industrialized countries had stopped mining REES as China was providing them so cheap, but now projects are being revived all over the world. In fact the U.S. is even considering mining REEs on the moon.
Providing a lunar look-see is Carle Pieters, an NLSI team member and leading planetary scientist in the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown University in Providence, R.I. "Yes, we know there are local concentrations of REE on the moon," Pieters said, referring to rare earth elements by their acronym REE. "We also know from the returned samples that we have not sampled these REE concentrations directly, but can readily detect them along a mixing line with many of the samples we do have."