If exotic elements are of interest then scandium has to be of high interest. Light, strong and rustproof, it would make an excellent alternative for anything where steel is normally used. If it wasn’t so damn rare, that is. And rare in a technical sense. There’s plenty of it all around. There’s some in your backyard and in the broccoli stuck between your teeth. The problem is that it’s never conveniently concentrated in a spot that you can go and shovel it out of the ground. So, at present, most scandium that comes to market comes by way of rare earth mining where it’s a minority byproduct. China being far and away the largest producer of the rare earth elements means they’re also number one in delivering scandium. A total of a few tons, maybe up to ten or so, is sold in metallic form this way every year. To this paltry amount you might add scandium oxide which accounts for another dozen tons or two but all in all this is still a remarkably scarce commodity. If this figure is still meaningless to you, for comparison the annual production of silver is over 25,000 tons annually. So a metal that’s a thousand times rarer but only ten times the cost? Yeah, not a bad deal!