The metals of Christmas

This Christmas may bring you gold, beryllium and gallium. Metals merchant Anthony Lipmann gives you the hard facts Steel yourself for Xmas

How metallic will your Christmas be? As a metals merchant, I can tell you.

I’m assuming the five gold rings my true love intends to give me this Christmas are 22 carat (91.6675 per cent gold) with five grams of content. The balance is nickel for hardening. So the metal value of my true love’s purchase this year will be around £200 per ring (with gold at around £1,300 per troy ounce).

It sounds cheap, doesn’t it? But, of course, that’s not what she’ll be paying. Although a ring is little more than a metal tube, thinly sliced and shaped, it’ll likely set her back £5,000, proving the real craftsmanship is in the selling and buying!

This will be demonstrated if you happen to fall out of love with your true love in 2022 and try to flog it back. The likelihood is your friendly local jeweller will tell you it’s just scrap. For that is where 50 per cent of the gold in my true love’s ring most likely came from – perhaps the recycled solder point in a piece of high-end electronics or a Russian’s old tooth. If the atoms originated direct from a mine, they’re probably from China, Russia or Australia.

Christmas Day has other metallic riches in store. On waking, I reach for the light switch. It’s made of beryllium copper, containing 1.5 per cent toxic beryllium. The toxicity is rendered harmless by the copper alloy in which it’s contained. The springy metal allows my switch to perform its task reliably a million times before deformation. Without it, Christmas Day would be once again candlelit. Beryllium, mined in Utah, costs about £370 per kilo; copper, from Chile, is £6.70 per kilo.

I glance at my smartphone. ‘Oh dear, only three hours before Uncle Eddy is due!’ I hope he managed to recharge the NMC battery in his e-vehicle for the 250-mile journey. NMC stands for: nickel, taking up a third of the battery; manganese, another third; cobalt, the final third. Cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo costs £44 per kg; manganese from China £3.70 per kg.

At least, I happen to know, he is using wind as his power source: the 200-foot-long fan blades on wind turbines turn a huge, neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnet to create current. With luck, the rare-earth elements of neodymium with a dash of dysprosium might come from magnets recycled in Europe. Otherwise, the neodymium (£90 per kg), dysprosium (£410 per kg), boron (£3 per kg) and iron (£0.15 per kg) all come from China.

Christmas lunch would not be the same without the best cutlery. I lay out the knives, forks and spoons, with a quick glance at the backs. Some are etched with the numbers 18/8. That means a standard stainless steel (18 per cent chrome and 8 per cent nickel, with a balance of iron). But Uncle Joe is coming too and he’s a metallurgist, so I need to make sure I give him the 18/12 (12 per cent nickel). A finer stainless steel, it’s less likely to tarnish or show the slight rust you sometimes see when you take the cutlery out of the dishwasher.

The nickel has travelled a long way to the table – most probably from Norilsk in Russia, once a gulag. Far above the Arctic Circle, it’s the world’s largest nickel mine. Nickel costs around £13.5 per kg;

chrome £6 per kg. If the cutlery is Sheffield-made, 80 per cent might be from recycled stainless steel. In a previous life, it might have been part of a washing-machine drum or sink top. Or it might be stainless steel from an old car body containing 4 per cent titanium. In this case, there may be just a soupçon of Russian Komsomoletsclass nuclear submarine inside. When the Russians chopped up their submarine hulls to pay the military’s bills in the 1990s, thousands of tons of prime titanium alloy were processed in Sheffield. Titanium, £4 per kg from China or Russia, is added as ferro titanium to stainless steel.

After a fine Christmas lunch, it’s time to turn on the flat-screen TV to watch the Queen. Her picture is crystal clear. That’s thanks to the gallium crystal compounds of nitrides, arsenides and phosphides, stimulated by a current conducted invisibly along indium tin oxide pathways, etched on the screen’s surface, which display her image pixel by pixel. Gallium is £400 per kg; indium is £200 per kg. They are both from China.

Soon we bid our tearful farewells. It’s been wonderful to see the older children back from their jobs in America. As I wave goodbye, I am comforted by the thought that the 3 per cent of rhenium (£1,000 per kg, from Chile) in the high-pressure, single-crystal-turbine nickel alloys at the core of the RollsRoyce Trent 1000 engines powering their Dreamliner will have no trouble withstanding the 1,700°C temperature of the hot gas. And so a happy, metallic Christmas to one and all!