Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

For those crucibles in which Shin-Etsu melts the hyper-pure silicon before pulling it into that perfect boule and slicing it into wafers are all made—every single one of them—out of a very particular type of quartz, one you can only get in a single place in the world. It is rare, unheard of almost, for a single site to control the global supply of a crucial material. Yet if you want to get high-purity quartz—the kind you need to make those crucibles without which you can’t make silicon wafers—it has to come from Spruce Pine, a small town on the Blue Ridge escarpment in North Carolina. For a long time, this mine—and by extension the entire global supply of high-purity quartz—was operated by a single company, a secretive Belgian business called Sibelco.