Practically synonymous with all things high-tech, silicon enables our modern life. Without it we would still be in the Industrial Age. Fortunately, the world has plenty of it. Beaches are essentially rusted silicon that when cleaned up turns to glass and, when de-oxidized, looks like this bar. While there is no shortage of the stuff, the amount of processing it takes to purify it to the levels necessary for turning it into microchips is so costly - and demand is so strong - that the we’re left with a perennial bottleneck that keeps prices far above what the abundance of the raw material suggests.