Mobile devices now outnumber people. There are approximately 18 billion of them out there and 7 billion of us. The tech-company Apple alone sells about 250 million smartphones annually, just to get an idea of the scale of this phenomenon.

All of these things have flat panel displays. Think about PCs, TVs, fast food kiosks, automobile touchscreens, info screens (at airports, ballparks, etc.), ATMs, grocery store scanner displays, medical imaging, and so on until your head explodes.

Flat panels are everywhere. It’s how we see the world these days. These things didn’t always exist. And the technology changes rapidly. People like to “upgrade” and a lot of the stuff manufactured one year gets tossed into a third-world trash heap a year or two later. That’s a lot of brainpower and highly-refined natural resources turned into trash by marketing whims.

Flat panel displays use a lot of novel materials and one of those is indium tin oxide or ITO. The bulk of the world’s indium goes in to making ITO for optical thin films which include things like liquid crystal displays (LCDs). There are many types of flat panels, LCDs are the most common.

Indium is a by-product of zinc smelting. World demand is approaching 1000 metric tons annually. In North America, Teck Resources in British Columbia is the leading supplier.