How Lead Weighs in through Science and Tech
Lead is a soft metal as well as the 82nd periodic element. We use this soft, gray, and weighty metal in electronics, vehicles, and even batteries. It occurs naturally alongside deposits of zinc, silver, and copper.
Knowledge of lead’s uses helps in many jobs which produce and need its scrap, knowing or unknowingly. Being aware of the modern applications of lead gives professionals like you insight into which industries demand it and when. Helping you either make more money or save money by buying off-season.
To prepare you to find and use this scrap, this post deals with how we currently use it in modern science, tech, and design.
Lead & Transportation
Lead is naturally reactive and toxic. It is also a metal that is both soft and easily manipulated. For these reasons, it is in most batteries.
Acid batteries are essential to most cars and trucks. Since vehicles like these need a strong and soft metal to create a chemical reaction and power output, it is a common choice for many battery types.
Lead & Defense
Naturally, it’s a strong and soft metal. For this reason, it withstands high heat and great impacts without changing its shape or shattering.
This metal, therefore, continues to be a useful material for the creation of bullets, especially when there is a need to keep them cheap. So, you can find it in buckshot and bullets. Metal-made bullets and shots recycle easily, making the industry of hunting, recreation, and defense a heavy user of this metal.
Lead & Technology
Since it is easy to manipulate, this metal helps create electronics and other electrical devices as a soldering option. Recently, however, bismuth replaces it. Still, it’s an obvious and legacy choice for the installation of powerlines, roofing, and even sculptures.
Lead & Medicine
Remarkably, this metal absorbs radiation. Still, no other application makes itself so obvious as that of medicine. Helping to shield patients from harmful x-rays, metal-infused vests and garments protect. While, in molten form, it also cools certain nuclear reactors.
Despite that this metal is toxic, it continues to serve our needs for both everyday and niche application like in transportation, defense, recreation, technology, and medicine. It is used for starting engines, powering electronics, and blocking radiation—even in our nuclear reactors.
Learn more about finding this metal and its properties: EPA.gov
