Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

But the main thing I was struck by as I observed each stage in this process was just how far we will go these days to secure a tiny shred of shiny metal.

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.

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

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.

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

That meteor 29 million years ago had turned the sand into a kind of glass—Libyan desert glass.

Some sands are prized for their value, some for their beauty, some for the shape of their grains, others for their purity.

Sand, you see, is the most ancient and the most modern substance of all. It was our transformation of silicon into beads and cups and jewellery that marked the beginning of the era of Homo faber—man the manufacturer.

Humans, in other words, are a considerably bigger geological force than nature itself, and have been, according to the data, ever since 1955. Or—another way of looking at it—by 2020 the total weight of human-made products, from iron to concrete and everything else besides, was greater than the total weight of every natural living thing on the planet.

Despite the fact that we only began mass producing this mixture of sand, aggregates and cement just over a century ago, there are now more than 80 tonnes of concrete on this planet for every person alive—around 650 gigatonnes in total. To put that slightly meaningless number into perspective, it is considerably more than the combined weight of every single living thing on the planet: every cow, every tree, every human, plant, animal, bacterium and single-celled organism. Each year we produce enough concrete around the world to cover the entire landmass of England.[20]

Cement production accounts for a staggering 7–8 per cent of all carbon emissions.

So vast is our appetite for it that concrete use alone accounts for around a tenth of the world’s industrial water use.

China spends more money on importing computer chips these days than it does importing oil.

When politicians talk lazily about re-shoring, it often betrays a deep ignorance of what is happening out there in the Material World.

The Romans were among the first culture to provide formal salt rations to their soldiers—each one received an allowance, which is where the word “salary” comes from, though it might better be thought of as a form of health insurance than cash, since they were also paid in money. When we talk about someone “earning their salt” or being “worth his salt,” we are following an old Roman tradition.

So dominant was the British brand that for a while no one would accept any other type of salt. When salt was discovered at Onondaga Lake in Syracuse, New York, local producers soon renamed the settlement where it was being made (a village called “Little Ireland”) Liverpool so they could sell this American product as Liverpool Salt.

The availability of cheap soaps and sanitary items arguably helped increase life expectancy more than any other innovation over the past couple of centuries. And at the very heart of this revolution was salt.

That the Cheshire salt which once provided Gandhi with the cause for his iconic satyagraha is now being produced by an Indian company is one of those ironies little appreciated outside the Material World.

The chemicals revolution is perhaps the most-overlooked aspect of the industrial revolution, yet the development of chemical products arguably changed more lives than, for instance, the mass production of steel.

In much the same way as the world’s chemicals industry is, often quite literally, built atop halite, tomorrow’s green energy industry will cluster around salt deposits. In salt we trust.

Not everything in the world is made of steel, but nearly everything in the world is made with machines made of steel.

The more food we can produce per hour of labour, the fewer people have to work in fields and the more people can go off and pursue other jobs. Much of what you might call modern life, in other words, depended on incremental improvements in agriculture over the years.

The world’s twin goals of decarbonisation and development are heading for a collision.

But Azovstal’s size meant it also churned out all sorts of unexpected by-products. The six blast furnaces produced so much slag—a molten waste product rich in silica and calcium—that it was used widely around Mariupol as a kind of cement; that same unconventional cement that might now hold the clue to making concrete without emitting carbon.

Each year we empty staggering quantities of coal—more than a billion tonnes, which works out at comfortably more than the combined weight of every human being on the planet—into the thousand or so blast furnaces operating around the world. The iron that comes out the other end may not have much carbon embedded in it, but its production entails the creation of enormous quantities of CO2—around 7–8 per cent of the global total. No other source of greenhouse gases is quite so concentrated into such a small number of sites.

The red, glowing liquid was poured into the convertor—a pear-shaped crucible—alongside 60 tonnes of scrap steel; everything from baked bean cans to car parts. The fact that “new” steel is actually part-recycled is another of those little-understood paradoxes about this sector, which looks exceedingly dirty and wasteful from the outside but turns out to have one of the highest recycling rates anywhere.

Steel, you see, is not so different from silicon after all. Here is another material forged in fire and clouds of carbon, whose story is not just about medieval furnaces and molten metal, but about precision, about the ability of humankind to manipulate materials with care and dexterity.

Today, China produces more steel every two years than the UK’s entire steel output since the industrial revolution.

Perhaps what makes the destruction of the Juukan caves most disturbing is that we are all, one way or another, complicit. Cheap iron ore from Australia is part of the reason China has been able to carry on producing cheap goods for the rest of the world. That cheap iron ore has become the steel from which China has built the factories and machinery where our smartphones are made, where batteries are assembled, where the toys for our children are manufactured.

One calculation from 1886 found that a typical North Carolina housewife ended up carrying a cumulative total of 36 tonnes of water 148 miles in a single year.

These tangled webs of copper are the workhorses of modern life, for they are where the vast majority of the world’s power is generated. In every conventional power station, wind turbine, geothermal plant or hydroelectric dam, copper is key.[8]

The genius of AC was that it could send high voltages along very thin wires, which meant, first and foremost, that the world would not run out of copper and, second, that you no longer had to locate your power station right inside your neighbourhood.

Most of the world’s copper plates and bars and wires are a cocktail of atoms from all over the world: a bit from Chile, a bit from Australia, some from Indonesia, some from the Democratic Republic of Congo, some recycled from copper mined long ago somewhere else altogether.

Between 1900 and today, the quantity of stone one needed to move and process to produce a single tonne of copper rose from 50 tonnes to 800 tonnes.

Perhaps you can see the challenge we are facing: if we are to fulfil the various promises made in recent years to get to net zero we will need staggering amounts of this metal. Reducing our carbon footprint will mean increasing our copper footprint.

The vast majority of this happens out of sight but for a sense of what we’re talking about, note that Iceland, land of volcanoes and lava and geysers, is one of the few terrestrial parts of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

That an American firm is having to lean on the UK for access to the international seabed is not without reason: the U.S. never signed up to the relevant UN convention, thus debarring it from access to the ISA. However, given how much of the seabed falls within 200 nautical miles

Crude oil is, alongside its sister fuel natural gas, the greatest energy force of the past century. If steel is the skeleton of the modern world and copper its veins, then oil is the food that sustains us.

As is often the case, the pursuit for wealth preceded the pursuit for understanding, and only gradually did geologists begin to glean how oil formed and where it could be found.

From Richard Nixon onwards, president after president preached about the need for “energy independence,” before going cap in hand to Saudi Arabia, much as Biden was now doing.

When people talk of oil they mostly talk of where it comes out of the earth or where its products are burned but precious little consideration is given to these in-between places.

But what Germany lacked in natural resources it more than made up for with its scientists, the most disciplined and ingenious in the world, capable of turning coal into pretty much everything.

On the other side of the battle line, Erwin Rommel wrote: The bravest men can do nothing without guns, the guns nothing without plenty of ammunition, and neither guns nor ammunition are of much use in mobile warfare unless there are vehicles with sufficient petrol to haul them around.

The vast majority of hydrocarbons still end up in the tanks of vehicles, and most natural gas is used to generate power and heat. Yet the remaining 10 per cent—the by-product of refining oil and gas—plays a disproportionate role in our lives.

With the world’s population projected to surpass 10 billion later in this century, we will have to produce more food in the next four decades than all farmers have in the past 8,000 years.

Only a small fraction—barely more than 2 per cent—of the world’s annual natural gas output is used to make fertilisers, but these are incomparably important molecules.

The Hula Hoop craze of the sixties and seventies was, it turns out, created from a by-product of the plastic–industrial complex.[11]

There is a certain empirical logic that secures lithium’s place as one of the six key members of the Material World. This is a magical metal: alongside hydrogen and helium it was one of the three primordial elements created in the Big Bang, making it one of the oldest pieces of matter in the universe.

In much the same way as we talk today about petrostates like Saudi or Russia, the battery age is giving birth to a new breed of electrostates: countries like Chile, Argentina, Australia and, of course, China, which will dominate the extraction and refining of these materials.

The point here is that in much the same way as Apple doesn’t make its own computers or indeed its own silicon chips, something similar applies in the case of electric vehicles (EVs). The batteries that go inside most EVs—whether they carry Tesla, Ford, GM or VW badges—are in fact invariably made by a handful of other companies, which fly far beneath the radar.