Elemental Business: Phosphorus
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 11 July 2014
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the first of Elementary Business - a new series of programmes about the chemical elements - Justin Rowlatt asks whether phosphorus poses the biggest looming crisis that you have never heard of. Since 1945, the world's population has tripled. Yet the fact that we've still managed to feed all those mouths is in no small part thanks to phosphates. We mine them, turn them into fertiliser, and then spread them onto our fields, whence they are ultimately washed away into the ocean. Justin speaks to chemist Andrea Sella to find out just why phosphorus is so vital to sustaining life, and modern agriculture. He also hears from Jeremy Grantham, a voice from the world of high finance, who warns that pretty soon Morocco may find itself with the dubious honour of a near-monopoly of the world's remaining phosphate supplies. And Justin travels to the lowly town of Slough, near London, to take a look at one new way of staving off the dreaded day when the world eventually runs out of the stuff.
(Photo: The Thames Valley sewage treatment facility at Slough, which can extract phosphorus)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a BBC podcast. You can get all our podcasts and our terms of use at BBCworldservis.com slash podcasts. |
| 0:10.9 | Hello, I'm Justin Rowlatt. Welcome to Business Daily. Today is the first in our elemental new series, looking at the |
| 0:23.4 | world economy from the perspective of the chemical elements that are the building blocks for everything |
| 0:28.5 | in the entire universe. And to spark things off, we look at one of the more explosive members of the |
| 0:34.3 | periodic table, phosphorus. Let me just blow a little air into the tube. |
| 0:39.3 | Oh! |
| 0:40.3 | Without phosphorus, the world could not feed itself, |
| 0:44.3 | but supplies are growing short and are concentrated in one country. |
| 0:48.3 | Morocco has the most impressive quasi-monopoly in the history of man. |
| 0:53.3 | It makes oil look unimportant in comparison. |
| 0:56.9 | But as I've discovered, there are ways of recovering the phosphorus we already have. |
| 1:02.3 | It's just rather an unpleasant process. |
| 1:04.9 | Find out why, in Business Daily, from the BBC. |
| 1:09.5 | So forget about trade flows and financial markets, company results and economic indicators, |
| 1:15.6 | because today Business Daily begins a series that takes a new perspective on the world economy. |
| 1:20.8 | All those numbers are really just looking at the ripples on the surface of the water. |
| 1:25.3 | The real economy is like everything else in the universe, based on the |
| 1:29.0 | interaction between the chemical elements. So we thought, why not look at the world economy from the |
| 1:34.2 | elements up? We dusted down our periodic tables and decided to start with phosphorus, a much more |
| 1:41.2 | important element than you might think. as I discovered in the lab of |
| 1:45.5 | Andrea Seller, a chemistry professor at University College London. |
| 1:50.5 | Phosphorus, from its very name, it's called the Bringer of Light. It's something that ignites |
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