Lost Materials #1: Malachite

For all our fears about running out of certain substances, the list of materials humankind has actually exhausted is surprisingly small - or at least, I think so. So I'm trying to draw up that list.

Back when I was writing Material World, a question I often wondered about - and never really satisfactorily answered - was whether there were any materials humankind had entirely exhausted.

After all, we’re forever panicking about running short of stuff like cobalt and copper and gold, raising the question: did we ever actually deplete a particular material altogether? Are there any genuinely lost materials?

To which the answer is… actually, I’m not entirely sure.

Photo by carole smile on Unsplash

There are certainly far fewer than you might have thought, in part because the minute something becomes very scarce we humans are pretty good at coming up with alternatives (think the Haber Bosch process, which allowed us to stop mining so much mineral nitrogen and get it from the air instead) or finding more of it (think of copper and how we’ve become ever better at finding new supplies and eking metal out of lower grade rocks).

And since the earth’s crust is deeper and richer than you might think, it’s probably nigh on impossible to completely exhaust the supplies of any particular material.

But in practice, I suspected there must nonetheless be a few materials - mineral and organic - where we have, to all extents and purposes, run out of decent supplies.

And since I couldn’t find a catalogue of this stuff elsewhere, I figured I’d try and build one up myself. So this is the first in a series of posts about “lost materials”.

I’ve got at least two more lined up, but I suspect there must be many more such materials. So if you can think of any obscure material or substance which is no longer available in decent supplies (and, ideally, for which no equal substitute exists) please leave a comment or message me here or on your favourite social network and I’ll look into it and perhaps even write something about it.

But without further ado, here’s our first “lost material”.

Malachite

You’ve almost certainly seen malachite before. It’s there on the base of the World Cup trophy - that deep green substance which could almost be mistaken for emerald. But malachite is not a gemstone; it’s actually a kind of crystalline copper ore you tend to find in, well, copper mines.

The green, in this case, is oxidised copper. But when it forms as malachite it has a kind of translucent form which makes it rather beguiling and beautiful.

It is not for nothing that malachite was used to dress the columns and fireplace in one of the finest rooms in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg (the, yes, Malachite Room) or that the ancient Mayans used it for their most precious creations.

But in the Victorian period and early 20th century malachite became so prized and so fashionable that nearly every available resource was plundered. Large slabs were mined (those that weren’t refined into copper, that is). The mined malachite was turned into glorious green candlesticks and dining room surfaces in the most lavish households. Perhaps you have some of it yourself.

Anyway, the word on the street is that large new chunks of malachite are now very hard to come by. According to those who spend their time looking out for these things, “no-one’s seen a new piece large enough to carve something out of in decades, certainly not to make a tabletop. So, nowadays it’s made out of crushed bits sintered together.” So says Tim Worstall, a long-time doyen of obscure metals and substances.

The irony of course, is that these days copper is so prized that were you to come across a decent chunk of malachite you might be tempted to sell it off to be refined into that metal, which as MW readers will know is essential for the green energy transition. But no - don’t do that. Because this green crystal is probably even more valuable in its natural form than as a “green metal”.

For thousands of years, priests and shamans said malachite was endowed with special powers. The ancient Egyptians believed it was one of the great stones of the underworld; in medieval Spain it was seen as a protection from evil spirits. But in the end this crystal proved just too pretty to resist but also too scarce to depend on.

It’s quite possible there are still significant malachite resources left in Russia or the DRC. It’s possible we find more in future. But for the time being, there’s just not that much of this stuff available anymore - certainly not enough to turn into large kitchen work surfaces like certain varieties of marble.

Anyway, any further thoughts on this or other “lost minerals” gratefully received. Another installment in this series coming from me soon (there’s a clue as to the mineral’s identity in the previous paragraph)…