Review: Material World

 Material World is a book about mining and extraction. As opposed to the "ethereal world" we live in, these are the materials that build the phones, run the fiber optic cables, and obviously the gas in the cars many people drive. The 6 materials mentioned in the title are sand (silica, glass, concrete), salt (including other forms of chlorides), iron (steel), copper, oil, and lithium.

The book points out that given our emphasis on moving bits and bytes, you might think that we've become less dependent on mining and extraction. You couldn't be more wrong:

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 industrial revolution, world wars and all. Nor was 2019 a one-off. In fact, you could have said precisely the same thing about every year since 2012. And far from diminishing, our appetite for raw materials continues to grow, up by 2.8 per cent in 2019, with not a single category of mineral extraction, from sand and metals to oil and coal, falling. (kindle loc 953)

The scale of the most recent growth is breath-taking. For instance:

 In the time it takes you to read this page, more than 120,000 wheelbarrows’ worth of concrete will have been poured in China. In the three years between 2018 and 2020, China poured more concrete than the U.S. had in its entire existence, from 1865, when it opened its first plant producing Portland cement—that variety patented by Joseph Aspdin—via the construction of the Hoover Dam, the U.S. highway system, Manhattan and everything else through to the present day. (kindle loc 1167)

 I enjoyed the virtual visits to mine (including the salt mines that I've actually visited) as well as the section on steel. Here again, China plays a commanding role:

Tellingly, the site where these German buildings were relocated—Shagang’s flagship location on the Yangtze, just north of Shanghai—is now the world’s single biggest steelworks. Its 13 blast furnaces (to put this number into context, the most in any steelworks in America currently is four) turn out more than double the entire steel output of ThyssenKrupp, one of the great names in the industry. China has produced more steel in the past decade than the United States has since the beginning of the twentieth century. China’s ascent to the pinnacle of steel production is much the same as its story elsewhere in the Material World: near-total dominance. Shagang’s site is a city of steel—a production facility of a size unlike anything previously constructed elsewhere in the world (kindle loc 2881)

 The exploration of lithium is probably the least developed in the book. Nevertheless, it still taught me stuff I didn't know:

while most other carmakers have opted for big hulking square battery packs in their cars, most of Tesla’s cars still run on a tray of thousands of tiny laptop batteries—many of them made here in Gigafactory Nevada’s “dry room.” It is so named because the air is kept free of the moisture that could damage the fragile chemical compounds on the electrodes. Workers wear head-to-toe hazmat suits to prevent any stray speck of dust or microscopic droplets that could cause a battery to malfunction. The more cells you are turning out, the more likely you are to produce some dud ones, and since one dud battery will at best diminish an electric car’s range and at worst cause it to spontaneously combust, consistency and reliability are phenomenally important. Panasonic is even prouder of its record of never having to issue any major battery recalls than it is of the sheer number of cells it churns out on a daily basis. The way this manifests itself here on the factory floor in Nevada is in an almost obsessional level of discipline and fastidiousness. Stand in the Panasonic end of the gigafactory and it feels a little like you have been teleported to a high-tech Japanese plant, or for that matter a semiconductor fab in Taiwan. But much as a Taiwanese fab could not function without the silicon in its wafers, the clean, sterile environment of the battery assembly line is simply a waypoint in the journey of lithium from under the ground and into your life. The strange thing is that at the very other side of the factory, in the Tesla end, where the Panasonic cells are assembled into the battery packs that will sit at the bottom of people’s cars, the vibe is very different: more chaotic and messy, with batteries and packs lying around all over the place. Since the two ends of the factory are run by separate companies with wildly different histories and philosophies, the defining feature of this enormous building is actually something you can’t see from the outside: a solid wall that runs through the middle of it, keeping the two companies hermetically detached. Robot trolleys pass across from Panasonic territory to Tesla territory carrying trays of batteries, but no humans are allowed to cross this internal border. (kindle loc 5652)

The scale of all this extraction, refining, and production is nothing short of breath taking and well worth your time to read this book. Recommended.