i think there is obviously the recovery, the post pandemic growth story, people getting back to work, but there s also been the much brighter awareness of environmental factors that i think have resulted from the pandemic. and these metals are hugely important for the green transition. just to be clear, for the uninitiated, these metals are used in batteries and solar panels and wind turbines. absolutely right. to take some examples, copper, an electric car needs five times more copper for the interna combustion engine. wind turbines, you ve got to coat them with zinc to deal with corrosion effects and these are big pieces of kit as we know. aluminium, needed for lightweighting to reduce fuel consumption, so all of these base metals that we trade on the london metal exchange are vital
the electric car industry. that is an industry that has doubled in size in the last year alone. much of this turbulence is a direct reaction to the war, as russia is a major global supplier of many of these raw materials, producing nearly half of the world s palladium, a metal used in catalytic converters and in cars and fuel cells. and, over 10% of the global nickel supply, that is a metal in high demand for its ability to increase battery efficiency. in fact, the price of nickel went so crazy at one point in march, spiking at almost 250%, causing the world s top metal exchange to suspend trading for the first time in 37 years. these political shifts and high prices are driving a boom in the supply industry, which in most part means mining, but it is also focusing minds on where the supplies come from, with china currently the dominant world player. triggering president biden s to call on a cold war era statute, the defence production act,
absolutely. now, obviously there are technological solutions, particularly around recycling, for example, where we can build more of a circular economy. the nice thing about metals is they are infinitely recyclable and so we can do more in that respect, but will that fully address demand increases? probably not. so on this group of metals for the green revolution, what can you do or what are you doing to make sure that the mining of the metals that you trade in are not causing more harm than good? that s a really important point because if we look at the metals production cycle, there are a number of points where you can see, for example, human rights abuses and cobalt is a great example. cobalt is absolutely vital for the batteries in electric vehicles, but a lot of it comes from jurisdictions where there might not be the same oversight on human rights and nobody wants to have human rights abuses built into their car battery.
Perhaps just as fascinating as the electric cars is the company s founder and the genuinely earnest ideal among employees to make the world a better place.