Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

they did know that in a single working day those trucks would shift rocks equivalent to the weight of the Empire State Building.

For a standard gold bar (400 troy ounces) they would have to dig about 5,000 tonnes of earth. That’s nearly the same weight as ten fully laden Airbus A380 super-jumbos, the world’s largest passenger planes—for one bar of gold.

I would learn that while it might once have taken about 0.3 tonnes of ore, extracted via more traditional mining methods, to obtain enough gold for a typical wedding ring, these days it might take between 4 and 20 tonnes of rock.

The economist John Maynard Keynes once called gold a “barbarous relic.” His point was that while it might look pretty on a necklace or inside a sarcophagus it doesn’t really do all that much.

If this is what it takes to extract a metal we could mostly live without, then what does it take to extract those materials we really need?

Without concrete, copper and fibre optics there would be no data centres, no electricity, no internet. The world, dare I say, would not end if Twitter or Instagram suddenly ceased to exist; if we suddenly ran out of steel or natural gas, however, that would be a very different story.

It is all very well knowing the price of something, but price is not the same thing as importance.

Consider something as simple as a grain of sand. There is no element in the earth’s crust, save for oxygen, which is more commonplace than sand’s main ingredient—silicon.

There are a couple of straightforward lessons here. The first is how little we understand about how everyday products are actually made. The second is that, given all this complexity, no single human being could carry out, or for that matter direct, these numerous processes.

In 2019, the latest year of data at the time of writing, we mined, dug and blasted more materials from the earth’s surface than the sum total of everything we extracted from the dawn of humanity all the way through

to 1950. Consider that for a moment.

In a single year we extracted more resources than humankind did in the vast majority of its history—from the earliest days of mining to the in...

For every tonne of fossil fuels, we exploit 6 tonnes of other materials—mostly sand and stone, but also metals, salts and chemicals.

National Statistics in the UK have begun in recent years to put together what are known as material flow analyses—measuring the substances we are extracting from the earth, consuming and then recycling or discarding.

Given how much sand and rock we still blast from the planet, we are still firmly embedded in the Stone Age.