دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی انعطاف پذیری در زنجیره تامین تانتالیوم - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

Tantalum, considered one of the critical elements by many countries, is a widely used metal in industries such as electronics, aerospace and automotive. The tantalum market has experienced several disruptions and subsequent price swings in the past, implying problems with its supply chain resilience and stability. In this study, we trace the entire value chain of the tantalum industry from mining to the intermediate and the downstream industries. Our interest is to see how dependent the tantalum supply chain is on specific countries and regions, how exposed primary production is to disruptions, and what mechanism counteracts disruption. This study assesses the tantalum supply chain from a resilience perspective rather than an investigation of any specific disruption in the system. We analyze several resilience-promoting mechanisms such as: (a) diversity of supply, (b) material substitution, (c) recycling and (d) stockpiling. We evaluate each of these mechanisms, and find that even though diversity of supply and stockpiling mechanisms have been decreasing for years, the tantalum supply chain has been flexible in its response to disruption. We find a much larger supply from unaccounted artisanal and small mining sources than expected based on official statistics, and estimate the unaccounted production in Africa, which shows an almost 250 percent increase from around 600 tons in 2004 to more than 2000 tons in 2014.. Besides flexible primary production from small-scale mining, we identfy rapid material substitution and increasing availability of waste and scrap as the main reasons behind the observed supply chain resilience.

5. Conclusion

This study highlights the huge data gap that exists between accounted production and the final consumption of tantalum. Our results reveal that Africa today provides more than 80 percent of primary world tantalum supply. We estimated a volume of more than 2000 tons in 2014, an increase of 250 percent from 2004 and 2014. The supply of smuggled tantalum from conflict regions has proven to be remarkably resilient in the face of legislative action such as the Dodd-Frank act. As was previously noted by Sprecher et al. (2017) regarding the illegal trade of rare earth elements, resilience is not necessarily a positive attribute, and has long term implications for the sustainability of the overall tantalum supply chain.

Our findings are summarized as follows. Although the ASM supply from Africa makes the system flexible, the domination of the ASM dependent spot market in tantalum sector is a constraint on system resilience as it negatively influences prices, and forms an overarching feedback loop. Declining metal prices cause lower profits for companies, which leads to lower investments in new primary production and reduced recycling. As a result of companies complying to certified tantalum, we find significant and increasing levels of recycling of industrial waste and scrap, as well as limited recycling of EOL products. Increasing use of recycled material illustrates how recycling contributes to the overall resilience of the tantalum supply chain, through switching between alternative sources of supply.