Editorial If you don’t compete, you die

The mining industry should probably sit up and take notice.

Some months ago, at an Ontario Mining Association meeting in Toronto, the chairman of the Science Council of Canada, Dr Stuart Smith, roundly berated the industry for what he perceived as a foot-dragging attitude towards research. He was especially critical of the industry for its failure to develop new products involving metals to help fight the increasing competitive challenges it faces in the marketplace from substitute materials.

His attitude now appears to have hardened even further, to the point where he now predicts dire consequences for the industry within the next decade or so, if it continues its indifference to research and product development.

In Banff, Alta., last week, Dr Smith in fact declared that world demand for our mineral wealth will fall dramatically by the mid-1990s, unless the industry finds a way to compete with substitute materials such as plastics.

And, while at the OMA meeting he indicated that the Canadian mining industry could take some comfort and assurance for its future from its technological excellence compared with other countries, this time around the comfort he offered was definitely cold. Demand for metals will level off and begin dropping by the end of this decade, he warned, and mining companies could be forced right out of business if somehow they don’t manage to research new products for existing metals, new kinds of metals for new alloys, and so on.

No question the threat is there. Already, for instance, in automobiles, metal substitutes are making substantial inroads. A report prepared for the Science Council says that about the end of this century some 40 per cent of a car’s total weight will be non-metal. Today, it’s about 10 per cent. An example: in the early ’70s, the average car used close to four pounds of nickel. Today, that’s down to about one pound, according to the Nickel Development Institute, which points out however, that the car market is a relatively small part of the over-all nickel market. It is though, a definite indicator of the trend.

Dr Smith may be something of an alarmist, but the threat is real. The industry had better not lose sight of it.