As a geologist and academic, Arjan Dijkstra is interested in the materials that we use in everyday items. He wants to find out why we use them and where they are coming from. If something wasn’t grown (like wood or cotton) then it was ultimately mined somewhere on our planet, found by a geologist. Arjan specialises in the special raw materials that we need for wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars, in other words, the stuff we need for the Green Energy Transition. In his TEDx talk he will try to make you see your smartphone through a geologist’s eye: not just as a cool gadget, but also as a treasure trove of hard-won rare materials. Including super-elements like neodymium and lithium. Materials too often end up in landfill when we get a new phone, even though we desperately need them for the Energy Transition. It’s therefore important that we engage with the circular economy to secure the supply of critical raw materials for future generations. The full video of the mobile phone in the blender experiment can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhuWmcDT05Q Arjan Dijkstra is an assistant professor at the faculty of Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, The Netherlands. From 2010 till 2019 he was a lecturer at the University of Plymouth, following from previous research posts in Switzerland, Australia, UK and The Netherlands. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
The elements of the energy transition | Arjan Dijkstra | TEDxTwenteU