The Periodic Table of Endangered Elements: Visualizing the Chemical Elements That Could Vanish Before You Know It

The Peri­od­ic Table of Ele­ments lists the 118 chem­i­cal ele­ments that make up every­thing in our world. Some you’re famil­iar with—Hydrogen, Oxy­gen, Nitro­gen, etc. Oth­ers maybe less so—Vanadium, Ger­ma­ni­um, and Yttri­um.

Accord­ing to the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety, 44 of those 118 ele­ments might dis­ap­pear by cen­tu­ry’s end. Enter the Peri­od­ic Table of Endan­gered Ele­ments (shown above). The most endan­gered ones, high­light­ed in red, are Zinc, Gal­li­um, Ger­ma­ni­um, Arsenic (is this a good or very bad thing?), Sil­ver, Indi­um, Tel­luri­um, and Hafni­um. Made avail­able under a Cre­ative Com­mons license, the Peri­od­ic Table of Endan­gered Ele­ments can be viewed in a larg­er for­mat here.

The orig­i­nal image (top of the page), cre­at­ed in 2015, was updat­ed by EuChemS in 2023 (above). The updat­ed table fea­tures the cur­rent-day avail­abil­i­ty of all 90 ele­ments, rather than just the endan­gered 44 ele­ments, adds an axis for sus­tain­abil­i­ty, and flags ele­ments used in smart­phone pro­duc­tion.

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