Although some municipal incinerators were intended to provide elec-trical energy as well as reduce the volume of waste, hazardous waste incineration is intended primarily to reduce the w
Trang 1incinerators have been used for energy production,
although not on a large scale
Household Waste and “Trash-to-Energy”
Programs
The large volume of household waste is becoming an
increasing problem for many localities in the United
States Landfill space is at a premium in some areas,
and incineration offers a means of reducing the waste
stream through the destruction of organic material
Open burning is prohibited by the Clean Air Act as
well as by many municipal ordinances However,
in-cineration in grate-type furnaces or kilns can reduce
toxic releases to the air, and well-designed facilities
can capture the ash for landfilling This approach
in-volves extensive sorting so that primarily organic
ma-terial will be incinerated
Because waste incineration requires high
tempera-tures, a possibility exists for the generation of electrical
energy as a by-product of the process In the late 1970’s
and early 1980’s, “trash-to-energy” processes appeared
to have a promising future in several U.S metropolitan
areas Several local governments intended to use in-cinerators to generate electrical energy, either on their own or in tandem with an electric utility How-ever, a number of factors hampered the adoption of this approach There were significant costs involved
in sorting waste, and there was public reluctance to ac-cept waste incineration Landfill fees proved to be cheaper than incineration, and low-cost electric power continued to be available from other sources Char-lotte, North Carolina, for example, adopted a trash-to-energy program in the 1980’s but abandoned it in the early 1990’s as energy costs remained low and the costs of operating the incineration facility continued
to increase According to the Environmental Protec-tion Agency, by the end of 2008, the United States had nearly five hundred landfill-gas-to-energy sites
Hazardous Waste Incineration Thermal methods have been a commercial success
in dealing with many types of hazardous industrial wastes as well as in cleaning contaminated Superfund sites The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act
A garbage incinerator in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, belches smoke into the atmosphere (AFP/Getty Images)
Trang 2regulates the incineration of both liquid and solid
hazardous wastes in the United States Although some
municipal incinerators were intended to provide
elec-trical energy as well as reduce the volume of waste,
hazardous waste incineration is intended primarily to
reduce the waste stream In only a few cases is energy
generation a product of the process, and they usually
involve specialized thermal methods such as firing
ce-ment kilns with certain types of liquid hazardous
waste
Liquid injection incinerators are the most
com-mon type of thermal method for dealing with
hazard-ous waste As the name implies, this method deals
al-most exclusively with pumpable liquid wastes The
waste material is injected into the burner or
combus-tion zone of an incinerator through atomizing
noz-zles When waste with a low heating value, such as
aqueous-organic material, is being incinerated,
sec-ondary burners must be used These incinerators
op-erate at temperature levels from 1,000° to 1,700°
Cel-sius Residence time for the combustion products
ranges from milliseconds to 2.5 seconds Liquid
injec-tion incinerators are carefully regulated as to the type
of waste they can burn, the release of gaseous
prod-ucts, and the disposition of the ash
Three major types of solid waste incinerators exist:
grate-type incinerators, hearth-type incinerators, and
fluidized bed incinerators Grate-type incinerators are
generally not suitable for hazardous waste
incinera-tion because the high temperatures necessary for the
decomposition of many hazardous compounds can
destroy the grates There are several types of
hearth-type incinerators; the most common are rotary kilns,
controlled-air (two-chamber fixed hearth) systems,
and multiple-hearth incinerators The nonslagging
type of rotary kiln, often used in the United States,
does not require close monitoring, but it also does not
have the feed flexibility that a slagging system does
Both types are viable and produce significant energy
that can be used to burn additional waste
Multiple-hearth systems were originally designed to handle
sewage sludge, but they have been adapted to other
circumstances Fluidized bed technology utilizes a
sand or alumina bed sitting on a porous surface
An air flow from below with a carefully controlled
velocity places the bed of sand in suspension Some
rotary kilns and fluidized bed systems are portable
and have been used to incinerate contaminated soil
at Superfund sites and soil contaminated by
under-ground fuel tanks
Issues of Concern
In the United States, there is a high level of suspicion regarding thermal methods for handling waste mate-rials This suspicion applies particularly to hazardous waste incinerators, but municipal incinerators are of-ten opposed as well The public’s worries about safety have helped to curtail the adoption of municipal trash-to-energy facilities in the United States They have also led to citizen protests regarding local haz-ardous waste incinerators Yet the incineration of liq-uid and solid hazardous organic materials can reduce substantially the amount of hazardous material that needs to be landfilled Before trash-to-energy incin-erators can become fully viable, citizen opposition needs to be reduced, and the costs of operation need
to be controlled Hazardous waste incineration does produce highly toxic ash that requires careful han-dling, often in specially designed landfills It is thus not a panacea for curtailing the use of natural re-sources; rather, it is simply a means of reducing the volume of waste
John M Theilmann
Further Reading
Blumberg, Louis, and Robert Gottlieb War on Waste:
Can America Win Its Battle with Garbage?
Washing-ton, D.C.: Island Press, 1989
Cheremisinoff, Nicholas P “Incineration of
Munici-pal Sludge.” In Handbook of Solid Waste Management
and Waste Minimization Technologies Boston:
Butter-worth-Heinemann, 2003
Gandy, Matthew Recycling and the Politics of Urban
Waste New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994.
Hester, R E., and R M Harrison, eds Waste
Incinera-tion and the Environment Cambridge, England:
Royal Society of Chemistry, 1994
LaGrega, Michael D., Phillip L Buckingham, and
Jeffrey C Evans Hazardous Waste Management 2d
ed Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2001
National Research Council Waste Incineration and
Pub-lic Health Washington, D.C.: National Academy
Press, 2000
Neal, Homer A., and J R Schubel Solid Waste
Manage-ment and the EnvironManage-ment: The Mounting Garbage and Trash Crisis Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1987
Santoleri, Joseph J., Joseph Reynolds, and Louis
The-odore Introduction to Hazardous Waste Incineration.
New York: John Wiley, 2000
Tammemagi, Hans The Waste Crisis: Landfills,
Trang 3Incinera-tors, and the Search for a Sustainable Future New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999
Web Site
U.S Environmental Protection Agency
Wastes—Hazardous Waste—Treatment and
Disposal—Combustion
http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/hazard/tsd/td/
combustion.htm
See also: Air pollution and air pollution control;
Landfills; Solid waste management; Superfund
legis-lation and cleanup activities; Waste management and
sewage disposal
India
Categories: Countries; government and resources
As of 2009, India was the world’s twelfth largest
econ-omy based on currency exchange rates and the fourth
largest based on purchasing power parity India’s
global trade rose by 72 percent from 2004 to 2007
In-dia has been a source of cheap natural resources for
much of the past 250 years, but it may be transitioning
into a supplier of finished goods and technology
ser-vices as technology industries outpace agriculture and
raw materials in the gross domestic product (GDP).
The Country
Located between 7.5° and 36° north latitude and 65°
to 97.5° east longitude, India borders the regions
of Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and
Myanmar (Burma), with Sri Lanka, Afghanistan,
China’s Xinjiang Province, and Tajikistan in close
proximity India includes the Andaman-Nicobar
Is-lands in the Bay of Bengal and the Lakshadweep
archipelago in the Arabian Sea With a warm, humid
climate and plentiful rivers, this region has seen
con-tinuous human habitation for more than ten
thou-sand years and is home to a very diverse population of
more than one billion people Himalayan peaks in the
northern part of the country rise well above 8,000
me-ters and slope down to the fertile northern
Indus-Ganga-Brahmaputra plain The Deccan plateau in
south-central India is bordered by the Eastern and
Western Ghats mountain ranges along the respective
coasts, the Vindhya-Satpuras to the north, and the
Nilgiris in the South Key resources in addition to ones already listed include aluminum, titanium, pe-troleum, natural gas, diamonds, limestone, and small reserves of uranium Agriculture and dairy farming employ more than 60 percent of the workforce
Sunshine India receives an average of three hundred days of an-nual sunshine, giving a theoretical solar power recep-tion of 5 quadrillion kilowatt-hours per year Dense population in most of India means that a good per-centage of incident solar power can be captured at the point of use The western Thar Desert and the dry Deccan plateau of central India are suited to large so-lar plants India plans to use soso-lar power to eliminate more than 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year by 2020
Coastal Resources India has a total of more than 7,000 kilometers of coastline, including the Andaman-Nicobar and Lakshadweep Islands Fishing and salt extraction em-ploy more than six million people The backwaters of Kerala on the southwest coast and the river deltas in the Rann of Kachchh and the Sunderbans in Bengal are unique ecosystems, enabling special rice crops and fishing These resources sustain a large seafood industry that also specializes in prawns and shrimp India produces 9.4 million metric tons of coconuts a year, putting the country in third place behind the Philippines and Indonesia Coconut and other palm-based industries are major employers in the coastal states
Hydroelectric Potential The Deccan plateau is relatively dry, while the coasts and northern plains receive heavy rains from the southwest monsoon (June to August) and the north-east monsoon (November to December), and the northern plains receive Himalayan snowmelt through spring and summer In 2007, nearly 25 percent of In-dian electricity came from hydroelectric projects, and India ranked fifth in the world in hydroelectric poten-tial Viable potential is estimated at 84 gigawatts at 60 percent load factor, corresponding to 149 gigawatts installed capacity This is distributed as follows: the Indus basin in the northwest, 34 gigawatts; the Brahmaputra basin in the northeast, 66 gigawatts; the Ganga basin in the north, 21 gigawatts; the Central In-dian River system, 4 gigawatts; the west-flowing rivers
Trang 4India: Resources at a Glance
Official name: Republic of India Government: Federal republic Capital city: New Delhi Area: 1,269,312 mi2; 3,287,263 km2
Population (2009 est.): 1,166,079,217 Languages: English, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil,
Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit
Monetary unit: Indian rupee (INR)
Economic summary:
GDP composition by sector (2008 est.): agriculture, 17.6%; industry, 29%; services, 53.4%
Natural resources: coal (fourth largest reserves in the world), iron ore, manganese, mica, bauxite, titanium ore,
chromite, natural gas, diamonds, petroleum, limestone, arable land, hydropower potential, thorium
Land use (2005): arable land, 48.83%; permanent crops, 2.8%; other, 48.37%
Industries: textiles, chemicals, food processing, steel, transportation equipment, cement, mining, petroleum,
machinery, software
Agricultural products: rice, wheat, oilseed, cotton, jute, tea, sugarcane, potatoes, onions, dairy products, sheep,
goats, poultry, fish
Exports (2008 est.): $176.4 billion
Commodities exported: petroleum products, textile goods, gems and jewelry, engineering goods, chemicals, leather
manufactures
Imports (2008 est.): $305.5 billion
Commodities imported: crude oil, machinery, gems, fertilizer, chemicals
Labor force (2008 est.): 523.5 million
Labor force by occupation (2003): agriculture, 60%; industry, 12%; services, 28%
Energy resources:
Electricity production (2007 est.): 665.3 billion kWh
Electricity consumption (2006 est.): 517.2 billion kWh
Electricity exports (2006 est.): 378 million kWh
Electricity imports (2006 est.): 3.189 billion kWh
Natural gas production (2007 est.): 31.7 billion m3
Natural gas consumption (2007 est.): 41.7 billion m3
Natural gas exports (2007 est.): 0 m3
Natural gas imports (2007 est.): 10 billion m3
Natural gas proved reserves ( Jan 2008 est.): 1.075 trillion m3
Oil production (2007 est.): 880,500 bbl/day Oil imports (2005 est.): 2.159 million bbl/day Oil proved reserves ( Jan 2008 est.): 5.7 billion bbl Source: Data from The World Factbook 2009 Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2009.
Notes: Data are the most recent tracked by the CIA Values are given in U.S dollars Abbreviations: bbl/day = barrels per day;
GDP = gross domestic product; km 2 = square kilometers; kWh = kilowatt-hours; m 3 = cubic meters; mi 2 = square miles.
New Delhi
India
Pakis
tan
China
Myanmar
Nepal Bhutan
Sri Lanka
Bangladesh
Arabian
Sea
I n d i a n O c e a n
Trang 5of southern India, 9 gigawatts; and the east-flowing
rivers of southern India, 15 gigawatts
Major hydroelectric projects are the Damodar
Proj-ect, serving Jharkhand and West Bengal; Bhakra
Nangal Dam on the Sutlej River, serving Punjab,
Haryana, and Rajasthan; Hirakud Dam on the
Ma-hanadi River in Orissa; on the Kosi River in Bihar;
on the Chambal River, serving Madhya Pradesh and
Rajasthan; Thungabhadra Dam, serving Karnataka
and Andhra Pradesh; Nagarjuna Sagar Dam on the
Krishna River in Andhra Pradesh; Narmada Dam,
serving Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Rajasthan;
Indira Gandhi Canal, connecting the Beas and Sutlej
rivers and serving Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan;
Krishnaraja Sagar Dam in Karnataka; and Idukki Dam
in Kerala Another 7 gigawatts are viable from
micro-hydel plants, suitable for distributed generation in
ar-eas that are hard to reach for the main power grid, with some estimates of up to 15 gigawatts Of the total, less than 20 percent had been exploited by 2009 Large dam projects encounter extreme political op-position in India, stemming from public concern over the displacement of the generally poor people in the fertile catchment areas and the potential for earth-quakes in a seismically active region
Arable Land and Agriculture The northern Gangetic Plain, spanning Uttar Pra-desh, Haryana, and Punjab, and the eastern and west-ern coastal strips of India have rich alluvial soil suit-able for cultivation The large Maharashtra-Gujarat region has black soil, suitable for cultivation of cotton and other crops that do not demand as much water as rice Tropical rain forests and deciduous forests occur
in the coastal and northeastern regions and
in the Andaman-Nicobar Islands Temperate forests and grasslands are found in the foot-hills of the Himalayas between 1,000 and 3,000 meters, rising to alpine and tundra re-gions above 3,600 meters Terraced cultiva-tion is practiced extensively in the moun-tains
As of 2009, India was second in the world
in agricultural output In 2007, the share of agriculture in the Indian GDP was less than
17 percent, having fallen from its 30 percent share in the mid-1990’s However, the indus-try still employed more than 60 percent of the total Indian workforce India is the world’s leading producer of coconuts, tea, black pep-per, turmeric, ginger, and cashew nuts With the world’s largest number (more than 280 million) of cattle, it is also the leading pro-ducer of dairy milk, though per-unit produc-tivity is low India is the second largest pro-ducer of wheat, rice, sugar, peanuts (called
“groundnuts” in India), and freshwater fish and the third largest producer of tobacco In-dia produces 10 percent of the world’s fruit, led by bananas and kiwifruit
Farms are generally fragmented, averag-ing less than 20,000 square meters There-fore, farming depends heavily on human la-bor Exceptions are the larger wheat fields in the Punjab, where modern machinery en-ables efficiencies of scale Tea, coffee, and rubber are major products from plantations
India’s economy is dependent on the country’s agriculture industry In this
photo, a woman sorts dried corn (AFP/Getty Images)
Trang 6in the hilly regions of Assam, West Bengal, and Tamil
Nadu/Kerala/Karnataka
Since ancient times, the growing of crops in India
was tied to the monsoon rains and northern snowmelt
flooding cycles, with limited establishment of
artifi-cial irrigation Indian crop cycles are classified into
three seasonal names: kharif (or monsoon) crops,
sowed in June and harvested in November, which
in-clude rice, maize, cotton, millets, jute, sugarcane, and
groundnut; rabi (or winter) crops, sowed in
Novem-ber and harvested in March, which include wheat,
to-bacco, mustard, pulses, and linseed; and zaid (or hot
season) crops, sowed in March and harvested in June,
which include fruits and vegetables Although an
ex-tensive network of dams and canals has been
estab-lished for flood control, irrigation, drinking water,
and hydroelectric power since Indian independence
in 1947, irrigation reaches less than 55 percent of the
agricultural land; therefore the dependence on
mon-soon timing and intensity remains strong Wells are
used in most microfarms, and these again depend on
the groundwater table through the year Rainwater
harvesting was practiced in some regions in ancient
times and has been reestablished in the twenty-first
century through home building codes and public
ed-ucation, with mandated rooftop collection on new
homes and drilling of groundwater replenishment
holes to compensate for tube wells While these
activi-ties alleviate the monsoon dependence, the
mon-soons are such massive water deliverers that even a
de-lay of a few days and variations in intensity still have
large effects on national crop yield
Given fragmented farms and a distributed
market-ing system dependent on cattle-drawn carts and
un-paved roads to deliver produce, agricultural output
grew more slowly than population in the
impover-ished colonial and postcolonial years, and India was
known as a nation in which monsoon failures resulted
in mass famine in several parts In the 1960’s, modern
agricultural practices were adopted through
national-level planning High-yielding strains of rice and wheat
from American and Indian agricultural research were
introduced in the larger farms of north and east
In-dia Japanese intensive cultivation techniques suitable
for microfarms were adopted in other parts From the
1950’s to 1990, food grain output rose from 46.07
mil-lion metric tons to 159.6 milmil-lion metric tons, a 246
percent increase, outpacing the 175 percent
popula-tion growth By 2000, India was a net exporter of food
Wheat production rose by a factor of eight in forty
years, and rice grew by more than 350 percent In the twenty-first century, there is rising concern that agri-cultural output is not increasing fast enough to meet demand, as rising urban wealth and population accel-erate demand
Textile Fibers Textiles from natural fibers have been one of In-dia’s largest industries for both the domestic market and exports for many centuries The black soil of the Deccan plateau is suited to cotton cultivation The silk industry employs more than 6 million people
in Andhra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Jammu and Kash-mir, Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and West Bengal Silk output is almost 16,000 metric tons per year and is tied into a village industry and urban marketing system that achieves superlative levels of artistry, craftsmanship, and quality, highly attuned to changing fashions and customer preferences
Coal India has the world’s fourth largest coal reserves (197 billion metric tons, or 7 percent of the world total), of
Textiles, such as those produced from silk, the material in use above, are a key component of India’s industrial economy (AFP/Getty
Images)
Trang 7which 102 billion are believed to be recoverable, but
produces the third largest amount Production is 403
million metric tons per year Open-cast methods are
used to mine the 64 billion metric tons located within
a depth of 300 meters Coal generates 67 percent
of India’s total primary energy consumption
Non-coking coal constitutes 85 percent of reserves, and
coking coal the rest High ash content of 15 to 45
per-cent means low calorific value for Indian coal Coal
deposits are spread over the states of Chhattisgarh,
Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Assam, and
Meghalaya Lignite (60 percent carbon) resources are
present in Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan, Gujarat,
and Tamil Nadu
Iron Ore
Iron-ore deposits of 22 billion metric tons, amounting
to 20 percent of the world total, are estimated to be
in India These are found in the states of Orissa,
Jharkhand, Andhra, Karnataka, West Bengal, Bihar,
and Madhya Pradesh and in two locations each in
Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu India produced
nearly 47 million metric tons of finished steels and 4.4
million metric tons of pig iron in 2008, putting the
country in seventh place among steel-producing
na-tions However, roughly two-thirds of iron ore is used
for export, primarily to China, South Korea, and
Japan This is a controversial issue in India as domestic
demand and the Indian steel industry expand
Thorium
The black sands of southern Kerala beaches contain
large deposits of thorium, which is a low-grade
nu-clear fuel This deposit has been known since
Ger-many tried to ship out large quantities of black sand
for its nuclear weapon program prior to World War II
India is estimated to have the world’s third largest
re-serves of thorium With the civilian nuclear deal with
the United States and Nuclear Suppliers Group,
ura-nium imports are projected to enable India to
irradi-ate the thorium and set up a “third-stage thorium
cy-cle” in which thorium becomes a primary energy
source for electric power reactors, making India
self-sufficient in nuclear energy and eliminating the need
for uranium imports Because thorium is much more
abundant than uranium worldwide, the Indian
tho-rium reactor approach is watched with great interest
as a possible breakthrough technology for nuclear
power
Oil and Natural Gas
As of 2007, India had 5.6 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, second to China in the Asia-Pacific region New resources have been identified in the Bay of Ben-gal and in the Rajasthan desert Production in 2007 was 810,000 to 850,000 barrels per day Thus, more than 70 percent of oil demand must be met by im-ports, mainly from the Middle East Petroleum depen-dence has had a primary destructive effect on Indian economic growth, with “oil shocks” in the 1970’s and 1980’s draining foreign exchange revenues and forc-ing steep loss of value of the Indian rupee by as much
as 90 percent between 1972 and 2000
Domestic production of natural gas is 52 billion cu-bic meters per year, a sudden growth in production from 30,000 cubic meters per year because of new fields in the Krishna-Godavari basin According to the
Oil and Gas Journal, India had 1 trillion cubic meters of
confirmed natural gas reserves as of 2007
Other Resources India contributes 60 percent of the world supply of mica, used as a nonconductor in electrical switchgear manufacturing Major mica-producing regions are Jharkhand, Bihar, Andhra, and Rajasthan Bauxite and other aluminum-ore reserves are estimated at more than 2 billion metric tons, out of a global esti-mate of 75 billion metric tons India produced more than 700,000 metric tons of aluminum (spelled as alu-minium in India) in 2001 India is known to have more than 16 percent of the world’s ilmenite reserves, but production of titanium is very low The cata-strophic tsunami of December, 2004, exposed sub-stantial offshore deposits along the Tamil Nadu coast Sitting on approximately 20 percent of the world’s re-sources, India is the world’s fifth largest producer of manganese Deposits are found in Karnataka, Maha-rashtra, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu
Medicinal herbs are a major natural resource for India Empirical experience over thousands of years has been codified through the ayurveda medicinal knowledge base As modern diagnostics open up ge-netic engineering and nanoscience, the importance
of these various natural resources is beginning to be understood
Finally, the fauna of India serve as natural attrac-tions to a growing tourism industry, complementing geographic attractions such as the Himalayas, the Sunderbans river delta, the Nilgiri and Kerala
Trang 8tains, and the ocean beaches Several unique animal
species, including the Indian elephant, lion, tiger,
rhi-noceros, peacock, pheasant, and black deer, are found
in the forests and animal sanctuaries of India
Narayanan M Komerath and Padma P Komerath
Further Reading
Abdul Kalam, A P J., with Y S Rajan India 2020: A
Vi-sion for the New Millennium New York: Viking, 1998.
Ali, N Natural Resource Management and Sustainable
De-velopment in North-East India New Delhi: Mittal,
2007
Mukhopahdyay, Durgadas “Indigenous Knowledge
and Sustainable Natural Resource Management in
the Indian Desert.” In The Future of Drylands:
Inter-national Scientific Conference on Desertification and
Dryland Research, edited by Cathy Lee and Thomas
Schaaf Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer,
2008
Parikh, Kirit S Natural Resource Accounting: A
Frame-work for India Mumbai: Indira Gandhi Institute of
Development Research, 1993
Pearce, Fred When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—The
De-fining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century Boston:
Bea-con Press, 2006
Rao, R Rama India and the Atom New Delhi: Allied,
1982
Sachs, Jeffrey D The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities
for Our Time New York: Penguin, 2005.
Singh, Amrik The Green Revolution: A Symposium New
Delhi: Harman, 1990
Sur, A K Natural Resources of India Vadodara:
Pad-maja, 1947
Varma, C V J., and B L Jatana A Century of Hydro
Power Development in India New Delhi: Central
Board of Irrigation and Power, 1997
See also: Agricultural products; Agriculture
indus-tr y; Aluminum; Coal; Hydroenergy; Iron; Mica;
Textiles and fabrics; Thorium
Indium
Category: Mineral and other nonliving resources
Where Found
Indium is widely distributed in the Earth’s crust in
small amounts It is fairly rare and is about as common
as silver Indium is never found as a free metal but only
in combination with other elements It is found as a trace component in many minerals, particularly in ores of zinc, copper, lead, and tin The richest concen-trations of indium are found in Colorado, Argentina, the United Kingdom, and Canada
Primary Uses Indium is used for a variety of purposes in the elec-tronics industry, including liquid-crystal displays and transistors It is also used in batteries, solders, coatings for glass, sealants, and alloys that melt at low tempera-tures
Technical Definition Indium (abbreviated In), atomic number 49, belongs
to Group IIIA of the periodic table of the elements and resembles aluminum in its chemical and physical properties It has two naturally occurring isotopes and
an average atomic weight of 114.82 Pure indium is a soft, white metal Its density is 7.31 grams per cubic centimeter; it has a melting point of 156.61° Celsius and a boiling point of 2,080° Celsius
Description, Distribution, and Forms Indium, a fairly uncommon element, occurs in the Earth’s crust with an average concentration of about one part in ten million It is most commonly found in ores that are rich in zinc, particularly those which con-tain sphalerite (zinc sulfide) It is also found in ores of copper, lead, and tin
History Indium was discovered in 1863 by Ferdinand Reich and Hieronymous Theodor Richter It was not pro-duced in large amounts until 1940 Its first major in-dustrial use was in the production of automobile and aircraft engine bearings, where it added strength, hardness, resistance to corrosion, and ability to retain
a coating of oil In the 1960’s, it was first used in tran-sistors
Obtaining Indium Indium is usually obtained as a by-product of zinc pro-duction A variety of methods exist for obtaining in-dium from the residue left over after most of the zinc
is removed from the ore One method involves treat-ing the residue with dilute sulfuric acid to dissolve the remaining zinc The undissolved material left behind
is then treated with stronger acid to dissolve the
Trang 9in-dium The indium is treated with zinc oxide to obtain
indium hydroxide or with sodium sulfite or sodium
bisulfite to obtain indium sulfite Pure indium metal
is then obtained by subjecting these compounds to
electrolysis
Uses of Indium
Indium is often combined with other metals such as
bismuth, cadmium, lead, and tin to form alloys with a
low melting point; production of indium tin oxide was
the most common end use worldwide as of 2008
These alloys are used in fuses and heat-detecting
sprinkler systems It has also been mixed with lead to
form solders that remain flexible over a wide range of
temperatures Molten indium has the unusual
prop-erty of clinging to glass and other smooth surfaces
and is often used to form seals and coatings
High-purity indium is used in combination with
germa-nium to form transistors The electronics industry
also uses indium in liquid-crystal displays, infrared
de-tectors, and solar cells
Rose Secrest
Web Sites Natural Resources Canada Canadian Minerals Yearbook: Indium http://www.nrcan-rncan.gc.ca/mms-smm/busi-indu/cmy-amc/content/2005/31.pdf U.S Geological Survey
Minerals Information: Indium Statistics and Information
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/
commodity/indium/
See also: Alloys; Aluminum; Metals and metallurgy; Zinc
Indonesia
Categories: Countries; government and resources
Analysis of Indonesia’s natural resource potential is complicated by several factors After Indonesia’s long heritage as a Dutch colony (and a source for cheap raw materials), its more attractive resources gradually took
on global importance Both massive supplies of rare hardwoods and important mineral deposits have made the country a key, but extremely vulnerable, partici-pant in the global economy Although all sections of the archipelago have some form of economically attractive resources, development is inevitably confronted with two obstacles: the high cost of necessary infrastructural improvements and the high cost of shipping over long distances to markets beyond Southeast or East Asia.
The Country Indonesia is an archipelago of more than seventeen thousand islands, extending from the southeastern boundaries of the Indian Ocean in an arc leading to the South China Sea Most of these islands are small and economically insignificant In such cases local populations depend on mainly subsistence agricul-ture and animal husbandry The country’s main is-lands, especially Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi (formerly Celebes), and Kalimantan (formerly Borneo), are characterized by volcanic peaks, generally rugged ter-rain broken by stretches of arable land, and extensive tropical forests Each of the main islands possesses one or more major maritime ports linking it to the rest of the archipelago and to international
Coatings 65%
Solders & alloys
15%
Electrical components &
semiconductors
10%
Research
& other 10%
Source:
Historical Statistics for Mineral and Material Commodities in the United States
U.S Geological Survey, 2005, indium statistics, in
T D Kelly and G R Matos, comps.,
, U.S Geological Survey Data Series 140 Available
online at http://pubs.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/.
U.S End Uses of Indium
Trang 10Indonesia: Resources at a Glance
Official name: Republic
of Indonesia
Government: Republic Capital city: Jakarta Area: 735,412 mi2; 1,904,569 km2
Population (2009 est.):
240,271,522
Language: Bahasa
Indonesia
Monetary unit:
Indonesian rupiah (IDR)
Economic summary:
GDP composition by sector (2008 est.): agriculture, 14.4%; industry, 48.1%; services, 37.5%
Natural resources: petroleum, tin, natural gas, nickel, timber, bauxite, copper, fertile soils, coal, gold, silver, gypsum Land use (2005): arable land, 11.03%; permanent crops, 7.04%; other, 81.93%
Industries: petroleum and natural gas, textiles, apparel, footwear, mining, cement, chemical fertilizers, plywood,
rubber, food, tourism
Agricultural products: rice, cassava (tapioca), peanuts, rubber, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, copra, poultry, beef, pork,
eggs
Exports (2008 est.): $139.3 billion
Commodities exported: oil and gas, electrical appliances, plywood, textiles, rubber
Imports (2008 est.): $116 billion
Commodities imported: machinery and equipment, chemicals, fuels, foodstuffs
Labor force (2008 est.): 112 million
Labor force by occupation (2006 est.): agriculture, 42.1%; industry, 18.6%; services, 39.3%
Energy resources:
Electricity production (2007 est.): 142.4 billion kWh
Electricity consumption (2007 est.): 121.2 billion kWh
Electricity exports (2007 est.): 0 kWh
Electricity imports (2007 est.): 0 kWh
Natural gas production (2007 est.): 56 billion m3
Natural gas consumption (2007 est.): 23.4 billion m3
Natural gas exports (2007 est.): 32.6 billion m3
Natural gas imports (2007 est.): 0 m3
Natural gas proved reserves ( Jan 2008 est.): 2.659 trillion m3
Oil production (2008 est.): 977,000 bbl/day Oil imports (2008 est.): 672,000 bbl/day Oil proved reserves ( Jan 2008 est.): 3.8 billion bbl Source: Data from The World Factbook 2009 Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2009.
Notes: Data are the most recent tracked by the CIA Values are given in U.S dollars Abbreviations: bbl/day = barrels per day;
GDP = gross domestic product; km 2 = square kilometers; kWh = kilowatt-hours; m 3 = cubic meters; mi 2 = square miles.
Jakarta
Thailand Malaysia
Papua New Guinea
Brunei
Singapore
Philippines
Indonesia
Australia
I n d i a n O c e a n
P a c i f i c O c e a n