One of the most hard, but necessary, metal materials we need is Nickel. Nickel is a wonderful material but it is difficult to find and to mine. It is also found in some of the most remote places of the world, also making it difficult to mine. The largest deposits are located in Canada’s least accessible places (of which there are many) and so the cost and effort employed is quite large. There are others like Russia that also has remote places and Australia in it’s outback. Why do we go to so much trouble to recover it?
The answer is partly to do with the chemical process of Electroless Nickel Coating like that provided by https://www.poeton.co.uk/advanced-treatments/apticote-400-electroless-nickel/. This is done to help protect various components in a variety of devices that we own. The most famous of these is your mobile phone. There are some parts of the phone that need to conduct a small electrical charge and let it pass through so that they can function properly.
The reason why we use Nickel so much and are prepared to invest so much resources to recover it, is that it is excellent at repelling moisture and not rusting like other metals do. Nickel doesn’t tarnish easily or become discoloured like other metals so it does not suffer a loss in the connectivity that other metals do.
