This social media post is a little shocking: tin oxide at 1/5th the cost! I assume it is cheaper there because South American consumers are much closer to the tin-production and industrial-chemical supply chain. In North America, a potter is often buying a specialty imported ceramic material that has passed from the mine to the smelter/refinery, then the chemical manufacturer, then the importer, then the ceramic-material wholesaler, then the pottery supplier who repackages it into small sizes, documents it with an SDS and carries it on slow-moving inventory. Those services are legitimate costs, but they can dwarf the actual processing cost of converting tin into tin oxide. That being said, other materials share similar costs, why are they so much less expensive?

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Industrial spodumene is found in massive quantities across major mining regions like Australia, Africa, and North America. Yet if this 1.5kg rock was pure spodumene, it could be ground and sold for $45 (prices at ceramic suppliers in UK, US and Australia are about $31-35/kg in June 2026). The actual mining commodity price is US$2,100/tonne, pricing this rock at $3. That means finely ground ceramic spodumene is currently selling for 10+ times the mine/concentrate price. The battery industry is responsible; it has effectively repriced a ceramic feldspathic mineral as "lithium ore"!
What about lithium carbonate? Albemarle reported an average industrial price of US$19.53/kg in Q2 2026. So potters currently pay only up to 8 times that! Yet, the processing is formidable: The ore must be crushed and beneficiated, then subjected to a high-temperature calcination that converts alpha spodumene to the more reactive beta form, followed by acid roasting, leaching, neutralization, impurity removal and further conversion.
Fortunately, in ceramics, a kiln doesn't care what the source of Li2O is; there are advantages to sourcing it from spodumene and from the carbonate.
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