The europium, samarium, lanthanum, are nothing more than the names of some of the 17 minerals that are part of the rare earth (inside the rare metals group or minor metals group) and are represented as the chemical elements in the periodic table. Materials disseminated by the unusual names are a bit 'anywhere in the earth's crust, which involves extraction techniques are not very different from traditional ones, but with a high rate of pollution from waste, even radioactive.

Without these 17 rare items you can not produce any of it now creates the industry's most advanced. Neodymium, for example, is the essential element for the production of batteries and electric motors of hybrid cars or, for computer hardware for mobile phones and cameras. Neodymium oxide in the military is an "ingredient" necessary for operating the magnets in the wings of the directional precision missiles. Yttrium with europium are produced instead the fiber optic light bulbs and "green"; scandium is the raw material from stage lighting, while the Prometio need for medical equipment of last generation.

Deng Xiaoping in the early '90s had proclaimed that "China Rare Earth is what the oil and the Middle East.", and currently none of the big multinationals, Philips, Siemens, Nokia by Toyota, to Hewlett Packard to Apple, up to Sony and Canon, can produce their most valuable assets without sourcing from China. Estimates are that 12% of the deposits in the United States, 18% in the former Soviet Union, smaller quantities are scattered in many other countries and, according to estimates, between 37% and 58% reside in China. We also find a lot of mines in Afghanistan, but the costs of extraction of rare earths is very expensive and not competitive with that of China that sells all over the world at a pretty low price. But since 2009 China has dramatically decreased the export of rare earth, saying that it must preserve it for environmental reasons and for its own needs.

In 2011, China has already announced a further reduction in exports. The news worries the high-tech industries, in particular Japan, to which Beijing has even blocked the export in September, during a dispute over sovereignty over a group of islands. Now Tokyo plans to create a recycling of rare earths, as well as to search for their replacements.United States, Australia and other producers had stopped mining because they do not profitable in the face to cheap Chinese production. But now it has resumed the search and extraction of these minerals, though it will take time to achieve adequate production. It shows every intention of Beijing to leverage its market power in this field to force the rest of the world to accept their conditions: they involve not only a net transfer of capital, but also work and above all by trade secrets' West to the People's Republic. China, in recent months, has made tremendous efforts in building a strategic reserve of rare earths. No known details of the storage site, but according to reports from Chinese state agencies, and the declarations of state enterprises and state media reports it would appear that the complex was built in the region of Inner Mongolia. With a storage capacity of rare earth, which amounts to more than the total exported from China last year (39,813 tons), the reserve could have the ability to affect the entire global market, already largely dominated by China, which controls more than 90% of global production of rare earths.

Rare earths are: Scandium, Yttrium, Lanthanum, Cerium, Praseodymium, Neodymium, Promethium, Samarium, Europium, Gadolinium, Terbium, Dysprosium, Holmium, Erbium, Thulium, Ytterbium, Lutetium.

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