In ‘Material World,’ Elements Are Life’s Currency

I bet you didn’t know that Spruce Pine, a small town about two hours’ drive northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, is critical to the global semiconductor industry. It’s home to the only known mines in the world that consistently produce quartz pure enough to be made into crucibles for melting the polysilicon that becomes computer chips.

Almost as tricky to find is niobium, a rare-earth metal that helps make hard steel for jet engines, bridges and skyscrapers, and which mostly comes from a single mine in Brazil. Then there’s “low-background” steel, used for highly sensitive instruments like Geiger counters and medical equipment. This has been almost impossible to produce from scratch since the first atomic bombs left traces of nuclear contamination in the atmosphere. It’s mostly harvested — legally or otherwise — from ships sunk before 1945.

These are among some of the fabulously esoteric facts from Ed Conway’s Material World, published this month by WH Allen, which explores the histories and many modern uses of six key substances: sand, salt, iron, oil, copper and lithium. I have always felt the urge to pull things apart and see how they work but have spent a career in one intangible industry (media) writing about another (finance). Like many, I have little familiarity with or appreciation for the world’s base materials and how they are turned into all the things that we see and use and rely upon to live. Vanishingly few people comprehend the full end-to-end journey that makes sand into semiconductors, for example.

Conway, whose day job is economics editor for Sky News, felt the same and set out to fix that. His book deconstructs the modern world for us to see inside — from vast industrial processes to the highly sophisticated machinery and chemistry that we carry around every day in miniaturized packages. As we fret and argue about how to tackle climate change, economic development and geopolitical tensions, this book is a timely reminder of our reliance on physical stuff, and it offers a challenging, practical perspective on these debates.

Conway’s book guides us from the crudest processes, such as exploding thousands of metric tons of copper-rich rock in a giant hole in the ground in Chile that was once a mountain, through the chemistry and functions of oil refineries or the history of nitrates for fertilizer. He opens up the complexities of battery production and gets inside the photolithograph machines that print billions of transistors, each smaller than a virus, onto silicon wafers. This latter job is so fine that conventional lasers are too blunt for the task: The machines have to create their own extreme ultraviolet light by smashing laser blasts into tiny droplets of molten tin.

Much of the material world has become more obscure to people in the West because the heaviest and dirtiest work is outsourced to the East. It also has been disappearing in the economic data we use to manage society, as we have become ever more efficient at extracting and refining resources. In 1810, Americans spent roughly the same share of national income on iron nails as they do today on computers — a good part of that is due to miniscule cost of steel nails now.

Conway delivers endless enlightening statistics and comparisons. Take the production of copper: During the Roman Empire, the price of a ton of pure metal was equivalent to 40 years of the average wage. In the West, by 1800, it was about six years of wages per ton. Now it’s just a little over three weeks.

His numbers sometimes reveal the gaps in economic development. The amount of steel embedded in the environment and tools of the developed world is equivalent to 15 tons per person; in China, it’s roughly seven tons, and in sub-Saharan Africa, it’s less than a ton. To improve the health and wealth of developing nations requires hospitals, homes and many other things, the creation of which might increase the world’s existing stock of steel by nearly four times the amount ever produced in history so far.

That startling fact is one of many openings into the challenge humanity faces in reducing our impact on the world and its climate. Building all the windmills, solar panels, dams and batteries we need for renewable energy will require immense amounts of cement, steel, copper, fiberglass, silicon and lithium, mostly extracted from the earth somewhere and produced using fossil fuels.

This is no easy task: The world won’t have enough lithium to meet projected needs as soon as 2030 despite being optimistic about planned mine openings, Conway claims. Meanwhile, politics is moving against extractive industries in places such as Chile after decades of environmental and health damage from copper mining and concerns about the impact of sucking billions of gallons of lithium-rich brine from beneath the country’s vast salt lakes.

The book often touches on climate change and the environment, but without taking up the cause for one side or another. Conway mainly wants to show how industry and energy work and the difficulties of doing them otherwise. There‘s a lot, though, to inform debates about development and climate justice. The developed world can focus on making electricity and cars greener, but for everyone else there’s a huge volume of modern environment to build, which entails more, not less, emissions. The West also relies on a lot of these emissions now and to come: For example, China is the world’s leading refiner of copper and lithium extracted from rock (rather than South American brine). I would have liked the book to look harder at the balance of emissions from countries like China that ultimately end up delivering products and cleaner energy to the West.

The material world is finite and humanity’s impact is ever increasing, but Conway ends the book optimistically. Our ingenuity has continually uncovered new solutions and better, cleaner ways of doing things: The fossil fuels and plastics that so trouble us today all helped solve earlier environmental stresses such as the slaughter of whales or deforestation. Even if we’re using vast resources to go green, Conway says now we’re building reusable tools from carbon rather than just burning it.

There’s hopefulness on geopolitics as well. The metals we need for a more sustainable world could easily become the source for the next big set of tensions after oil and gas. Yet the book’s central theme is just how interlinked the planet has become in the long chains that turn base materials into the magic of modernity. The US can’t live without the copper and lithium refined mostly in China, which also completely dominates modern battery production for cars, phones and much else. China, meanwhile, still can’t produce silicon pure enough to make computer chips, and even if it could, it doesn’t have the technology to print them.

These interdependencies run deep, like all the pipework and cables hidden beneath our feet and in the walls. They tie people and economies together in age when politics seems to be pulling them apart. In the end, our mutual needs might help maintain stability and cooperation.