Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

by Ed Conway

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.

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.

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.

Silica sands, which is to say sands with more than 95 per cent silica, have plenty of uses. We need them to help filter our water and to make foundry moulds into which you can pour molten metals. Without silica sands the rail system would grind to a halt, or rather it would fail to grind to a halt, since these sands are used in modern trains’ braking systems.

‘glass famine’ – a chastening example of what happens when one country gains a near monopoly on a particular industry, forged from grains of sand.

with enough effort and support it is quite possible to rejuvenate a country’s industries. But while expertise can be learned, it cannot magic up the raw materials you need to make things.

such as aviation or deforestation, the production of cement generates more CO2 than those two sectors combined. Cement production accounts for a staggering 7–8 per cent of all carbon emissions.

China spends more money on importing computer chips these days than it does importing oil. Indeed, according to Chris Miller, the author of a history of silicon chips, China’s semiconductor import costs as of 2017 were greater than Saudi Arabia’s total revenue from oil exports, or for that matter the entire global trade in aircraft. ‘No product,’ he says, ‘is more central to international trade than semiconductors.’8

In Britain these chemicals and drugs firms are still located next to salt: some atop the slab of halite in Cheshire, others in Teesside where we used to extract salt. It is not for nothing that American chemicals giant Dow is headquartered in Michigan, above those deep rock-salt formations that sit beneath Detroit. As the trucks come and go with chemicals and pharmaceuticals, they are essentially retracing the same ancient salt routes as our ancestors.

If what defines humans is our ability to collaborate and wield tools then iron and steel are part of what makes us human. And if sand is the fabric for much of the world and salt is the magic ingredient that helps us transform our world, then iron is what enables us to do things, whether that is going places, building things, making products or, for that matter, killing each other. Iron and steel are the common thread.

Iron was not the first metal we learned to smelt (as you’ll see in the following section) but these days it is the archetypal one, accounting for roughly 95 per cent of all the metal we produce and use. Indeed, it’s so fundamental to our lives that it is just as good a measure of living standards as GDP.2

China has produced more steel in the past decade than the United States has since the beginning of the twentieth century.

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.

Once upon a time the UK produced more steel than any other country. This was where modern blast furnaces and steel manufacture began. Today, China produces more steel every two years than the UK’s entire steel output since the industrial revolution.

Copper is the great, unseen substrate that supports the modern world as we know it. Without it, we are quite literally left in the dark. If steel provides the skeleton of our world and concrete its flesh then copper is civilisation’s nervous system, the circuitry and cables we never see but couldn’t function without.

Chuquicamata copper mine. It is a monumental hole gouged out of the mountainscape of the Atacama Desert. Longer and wider than New York’s Central Park, it is so deep that if you dropped the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, into it, the whole thing, lightning rod and all, would be completely swallowed by this fissure.

which can produce comfortably more copper each year (in Chuqui’s case twice as much) as the amount of gold produced by every mine on the planet since the beginning of time.

Grasberg. It is possibly the most breathtaking mine in the world since it looks like a movie villain’s lair wreathed in clouds, with a massive hole scooped out of the top of the mountains. The wealth of the ores here is stupendous: it has the world’s largest known reserve of gold and the second-largest reserve of copper.

Roman Empire the price of a tonne of pure copper was equivalent to roughly 40 years of the average wage. Forty years of work for a tonne of copper. By 1800 this had fallen to 6 years a tonne. In the following 200 years it dropped to just 0.06 years per tonne.

On the basis of one estimate, if we are to satisfy that demand in the coming decades we may have to build another three mines like Chuqui every year.

The end products can be roughly divided into six categories: there is gasoline for cars; diesel for trucks, trains and other heavy transport; petrochemicals, which go into lots of things including plastics; kerosene to fuel jets; waxes and lubricating oils; and asphalt, which covers our roads.

But there is no safe amount of lead, however microscopic. This substance can accumulate over time in the brain, the bones and the lungs of anyone exposed to it. Lead impairment means whole generations of people who inhaled these fumes have lower IQs than would otherwise have been the case.

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.

Today, polyethylene has become comfortably the most widely used plastic in the world. Every six seconds we make enough of it in Europe to wrap the Eiffel Tower from head to toe.

the manufacture of paper bags and straws can create considerably more carbon emissions than their plastic counterparts. A plastic straw can be reused multiple times whereas a paper straw is unlikely to make it through more than a few sucks – as any parent of a young child will testify.

All of which makes Ras Tanura a very important place, and also a very vulnerable one. Directly opposite, on the other side of the Persian Gulf, is Iran, one of Saudi’s greatest enemies. This site is within range of countless Iranian missiles, which could level the port within a matter of minutes.

At the time of writing, nowhere else came close to the North Field, making it the single most important energy source on earth.

This single place provides around 4 per cent of global energy – comfortably more than every solar panel and wind turbine in the world combined.

Chile once again is that in much the same way as there is nowhere else on the planet with quite so much copper, there is also nowhere else on the planet where we can lay our hands on quite so much lithium. The Salar de Atacama is the single biggest source of lithium anywhere.

end-of-life recycling rate – the proportion of scrap that goes on to be reused – is somewhere between 70 per cent and 90 per cent. For aluminium the rate is 42–70 per cent; for cobalt 68 per cent; for copper 43–53 per cent. For lithium it is less than 1 per cent.5

Back in 1960 a megabyte of memory storage on a computer would have cost a staggering $5.2 million (individual memory chips were far smaller than a megabyte so no one was really paying millions per chip, in case you were wondering). By 1990 the cost per megabyte had fallen to $46. By 2016 the cost per megabyte was well under a cent.2

The battery in a Tesla Model S cost around $12,000 in 2022; in the early 1990s the same battery capacity would have cost nearly a million dollars.

A century ago it took 230 hours of human labour to produce a tonne of copper; today it takes about 18.