Availability of the Platinum Metals: A Survey of Productive Resources in Relation to Industrial Uses

Increasing industrial uses of platinum and its associated metals – palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium and osmium – have occasionally given rise to doubts as to the future availability of adequate supplies. This has sometimes discouraged research workers from considering the advantages of these metals in their search for new routes or for new products in the chemical and allied industries. This paper, presented at the Symposium on the Platinum Group Metals organised by the American Chemical Society during its meeting in New York in September, outlines the very substantial productive resources now associated with these metals and relates them to the trends in their applications in industry.