Metals and minerals will help bring your celebrations to life this From festive lights to feasts, sparkling gifts to stunning tabletops, many of our holiday traditions make surprising use of metals and minerals.

Here are 7 festive favourites that our products may be helping to produce this season.

Twinkling lights
Whether they’re wrapped around a tree, lining the streets, decorating your home or decking out the shops, festive lights are synonymous with the start of the holiday celebrations. And there’s one metal that really makes your lights light up: copper.

As the best non-precious conductor of electricity on the planet, copper is used to make the wiring in all sorts of electronic lights, including most festive lights.

You might also spare a thought for aluminium and lithium, which could help you to achieve an energy efficient seasonal sparkle as components in your solar panels and rechargeable batteries.

Shining decorations
There’s another very versatile metal that lends most decorations their shimmer and shine. It’s used to coat trinkets from glitter to tinsel, novelty items to treasured ornaments. Can you guess what it is?

Aluminium. Lightweight and infinitely recyclable, aluminium has countless applications in our everyday lives, from the very small to the very large.

Made from the raw material of bauxite, which is refined into alumina and sent to smelters for processing, aluminium is one of the world’s fastest growing major metals. Its seasonal uses go far beyond decorative, as you’ll see later in this list.

Glimmering gifts
If you’re lucky this year, maybe a luxury gift will have your name on it. Diamonds are everybody’s best friend when set aluminium a stunning ring or a stylish watch, and our white and coloured diamonds are some of the world’s most sought-after gems.

Tablets, phones and laptops also make popular presents, but you’ll find they’re a little hard to charge without this element. Lithium – the lightest of all metals – is critical to making your phone, tablet or laptop function.

Set to experience the fastest growth rate by weight of all minerals between 2021 and 2040, lithium won’t just be used in devices, but the vast majority of rechargeable batteries, according to the International Energy Agency. This makes it essential for powering the clean energy transition.

And you’d find it hard to see anything on your tablet or phone without borates – the crystallised salts that contain boron. They’re used in the glass and fibreglass used for device screens and parts as well.

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