Preface: Why and How

The story of humanity – evolution of our species, the prehistoric shift from foraging to permanent agriculture, rise and fall of antique, medieval and early modern civilizations, economic advances of the past two centuries, mechanization of agriculture, diversification and automation of industrial protection, enormous increases in energy consumption, diffusion of new communication and information networks and impressive gains in quality of life – would not have been possible without an expanding and increasingly intricate and complex use of materials. Human ingenuity has turned materials first into simple clothes, tools, weapons and shelters, later into more elaborate dwellings, religious and funerary structures, pure and alloyed metals, and in recent generations into a still increasing variety of designs, machines and extensive industrial and transportation infrastructures, megacities, even as silicon, doped with small amounts of other elements, has been turned into substrate for solid‐state devices that have enabled the new electronic world.

This material progress has not been a linear advance but it consisted of two unequal periods. First was very slow rise that extended from prehistory to the beginnings of rapid economic modernization, that is until the 18th century in most of Europe, until the 19th century in the US, Canada and Japan, and until the latter half of the 20th century in most of Asia. An overwhelming majority of people lived in those pre‐modern societies with only limited quantities of simple possession that they made themselves or that were produced by artisanal labor as unique pieces or in small batches – while the products made in larger quantities, be they metal objects, fired bricks and tiles or drinking glasses, were too expensive to be widely owned.

The principal reason for this limited mastery of materials was the energy constraint: for millennia our abilities to extract, process and transport biomaterials and minerals were limited by the capacities of animate prime movers (human and animal muscles) aided by simple mechanical devices and by only slowly improving capabilities of the three ancient mechanical prime movers, sails, water wheels and wind mills. Only the conversion of chemical energy in fossil fuels to inexpensive and universally deployable kinetic energy of mechanical prime movers (first by external combustion of coal to power steam engines, later by internal combustion of liquids and gases to energize gasoline and Diesel engines and, later still, gas turbines) brought a fundamental change and ushered in the second, rapidly ascending, phase of material consumption, an era further accelerated by generation of electricity and by the rise of commercial chemical syntheses producing an enormous variety of compounds ranging from fertilizers to plastics and drugs.

As a result, the world has become divided between the affluent minority that commands massive material flows and embodies them in long‐lasting structures as well as in durable and ephemeral consumer products – and the low‐income majority whose material possessions amount to a small fraction of material stocks and flows in the rich world. Now the list of products that most of the Americans claim they cannot live without includes cars, home air conditioning, microwave ovens, dishwashers, garburators, clothes dryers, home computers and mobile phones (Taylor et al. 2006; Langlois 2020) – and they have forgotten how recent many of these possessions are because 60 years ago many of them were rare or nonexistent. In 1960 fewer than 20% of all US households had dishwasher, clothes dryer or air conditioning, first color TVs had just appeared, and (before the first microprocessors were made in 1971) there were no personal computers, mobile phones and other portable electronic devices – and also no SUVs (they began their rise to market dominance only during the late 1980s).

In contrast, those have‐nots in low‐income countries who are lucky to have their own home often live in a poorly‐built small earthen brick or wooden structure with as little inside as a bed, a few benches and cooking pots and some worn clothes. Those readers who have no concrete image of this great material divide should look at Peter Menzel’s Material World: A Global Family Portrait where families from 30 nations were photographed in front of their dwellings amidst all of their household possessions (Menzel 1995). The book was published nearly three decades ago, and during the intervening time hundreds of millions of people (mostly in Asia) have been lifted from the deepest poverty to a more dignified existence, but its message still resonates. The latest World Banka data show that by the early 2020s large shares of national populations in Asia (about 20% in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan) and Africa (40% in Nigeria, 60% in Congo) still live below poverty line, beyond the reach of adequate material consumption (World Bank 2022a).

And this private material contrast has its public counterpart in the gap between extensive and expensive infrastructures of the rich world (transportation networks, functioning cities, agricultures producing large food surpluses, largely automated manufacturing) and their inadequate and failing counterparts in poor countries. These contrasts make it obvious that a further substantial material mobilization and transformation will be needed just to narrow the gap between these two worlds. And an even larger demand for old and new materials will arise from the unfolding energy transition.

The world’s primary energy supply remains dominated by fossil fuels (they provided 86% of all primary energy in 2000 and still 83% in 2020) and a new (as yet uncertain) pattern will emerge during the coming decades, consisting of a mixture of electricity generated without carbon combustion (mostly by wind turbines, photovoltaic cells and nuclear reactors), biofuels and (much more importantly) fuels produced by using non‐carbon electricity (for electrolysis to make hydrogen used directly for combustion or in fuel cells and in ammonia synthesis) or (less likely) by syntheses relying on carbon from captured CO2.

And new energy converters necessarily accompanying this transition – ranging from electric vehicles and other means of transportation relying on batteries to heat pumps and new ways of energy uses by industries (with electricity displacing direct fuel combustion – will create further substantial material needs, including much higher demand for cobalt, copper, lithium and nickel as well as new substantial demand for steel, aluminum and cement needed for requisite infrastructures (ranging from new high voltage lines to water electrolysis, and from massive wind turbine foundations to new hydrogen pipelines).

This new demand surge will only intensify a truly global extent of environmental pollution and degradation resulting from extraction, processing and use of materials and it will involve some unprecedented challenges. As for the extraction, even the last intact domain, deep ocean floor, will see considerable amount of activity before 2050 and at the opposite end of the chain we will have to come up with new, effective ways of recycling and disposal of hundreds of thousands of massive plastic blades (some are now longer than 100 m), millions of PV panels and hundreds of millions of discarded vehicular batteries. In the absence of such measures our use of indispensable materials would pose even more worrisome threats on scales ranging from local degradation and contamination to concerns about the integrity of the biosphere.

These impacts also raise the questions of analytical boundaries: their reasoned choice is inevitable because including every conceivable material flow would be impractical and because there is no universally accepted definition of what should be included in any fairly comprehensive appraisal of modern material use. This lack of standardization is further complicated by the fact that some analyses have taken the maximalist (total resource flow) approach and have included every conceivable input and waste stream, including waste flows (sometimes called hidden flows) associated with the extraction of minerals and with crop production as well as oxygen required for combustion and the resulting gaseous emissions and wastes released into waters or materials dissipated on land.

In contrast, other studies have restricted their accounts to much more reliably quantifiable direct uses of organic and inorganic material inputs that are required by national economies. I will follow the latter approach, as I will focus in some detail on key materials consumed by modern economies, an approach easily justified by their magnitude or their irreplaceable properties. Their huge material claims lead us to ask a number of fundamental questions. How much further will the affluent world push its already often excessive material consumption? To what extent is it possible to divorce economic growth and improvements in average standard of living from increased material consumption – in other words, how far we can push relative dematerialization?

This reduction in the use of materials is most often expressed per unit of product (standard soft drink aluminum can gets lighter) or per unit of economic output (less copper or steel is needed per unit of GDP), and it has been a common phenomenon that has been well documented in sectors ranging from construction to transportation and with products ranging from small consumer items to large high‐bypass jet engines. Ultimately, relative dematerialization runs into fundamental physical limits: a...