This Is the Most Expensive Material in the World

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 15, 9:30AM EDT

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This Is the Most Expensive Material in the World — © sanches812 / Getty Images

The cost of different materials is determined by several factors, including supply and demand, mining costs, raw materials costs, how rare or abundant a material is, purity of the material and engineering costs (whether it is a complex material to produce).

Some of the most expensive materials are naturally occurring, while others, such as two-dimensional materials, have been developed in laboratories and are on the cutting edge of scientific progress.

On a daily basis, we interact with hundreds or thousands of materials that range in complexity from the water we drink to the OLED screens on our smartphones. The development of new materials can be linked to nearly every major advance in human history, and breakthroughs made by material scientists have profoundly affected our society and daily lives, from transportation to how we receive information.

To pick the most expensive material, 24/7 Wall St. used various scientific journals, the Defense Logistics Agency’s list of strategic materials and the USGS’s Mineral Commodities Summary 2019. Prices were estimated from various suppliers’ websites.
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The most expensive material in the world is terbium. It typically comes in the form of terbium oxide, which has an average import cost of $461 per kg. A one-inch-square sheet of 1 mm-thick terbium foil can cost almost $500. Terbium is an essential component in some commercially available LED lighting fixtures. It has additional applications in high-strength permanent magnets and lasers.

Here is what Live Science has to say about terbium:

Atomic Number: 65 Atomic Symbol: Tb Atomic Weight: 158.92535

Melting Point: 2,473 F (1,356 C) Boiling Point: 5,846 F (3,230 C)

Word origin: Terbium was named for the village of Ytterby, Sweden (as was yttrium, erbium and ytterbium).

Discovery: Swedish chemist Carl Gustaf Mosander separated the mineral gadolinite into three materials, which he called yttria, erbia and terbia, in 1843. From two of these substances, he discovered erbium and terbium.

Click here to see all the most expensive materials on earth.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.