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Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization
How much further should the affluent world push its material consumption? Does relative dematerialization lead to absolute decline in demand for materials? These and many other questions are discussed and answered in Making the Modern Materials and Dematerialization. Over the course of time, the modern world has become dependent on unprecedented flows of materials. Now even the most efficient production processes and the highest practical rates of recycling may not be enough to result in dematerialization rates that would be high enough to negate the rising demand for materials generated by continuing population growth and rising standards of living. This book explores the costs of this dependence and the potential for substantial dematerialization of modern economies. Making the Modern Materials and Dematerialization considers the principal materials used throughout history, from wood and stone, through to metals, alloys, plastics and silicon, describing their extraction and production as well as their dominant applications. The evolving productivities of material extraction, processing, synthesis, finishing and distribution, and the energy costs and environmental impact of rising material consumption are examined in detail. The book concludes with an outlook for the future, discussing the prospects for dematerialization and potential constrains on materials. This interdisciplinary text provides useful perspectives for readers with backgrounds including resource economics, environmental studies, energy analysis, mineral geology, industrial organization, manufacturing and material science.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
About the author
Vaclav Smil
67 books3,886 followersVaclav Smil Ph.D. (Geography, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences of Pennsylvania State University, 1971; RNDr., Charles University, Prague, 1965), is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2010 was named by Foreign Policy as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews
January 20, 2014
This book gave support to my general approach of not giving up on books. The first half or so is extremely tedious, discussing in great numerical detail world output and consumption of a full range of materials: concrete, wood, steel, plastics, zinc, etc etc etc. I usually read during my commute, and it was often pretty difficult not to fall asleep on the evening commute home while reading the book.
However, the second half was much more interesting. The author discusses trends in "dematerialization" from a variety of perspectives. Are we on a path toward using less material throughput, or less per person, or less per dollar of GDP, etc? This is a surprisingly nuanced topic, and a number of things stuck in my mind. The big take-away is that while there has been some relative dematerialization (say, per dollar of GDP), it is nowhere near enough to reduce the absolute quantity of materials consumed, and won't be any time in the foreseeable future. (On the other hand, the author is generally fairly sanguine about the ongoing availability of resources.)
One interesting piece was the discussion of recycling. The author emphasized that centralization and recycling efficiency go hand-in-hand. The most efficient recycling happens, for example, on the floor of a steel plant, where shavings can be immediately re-circled through the process. At the other end of the spectrum, recycling of household wastes is not very cost-effective, because of the amount of effort that it takes to get things collected, sorted, and sent where they need to be. In this respect at least, "small is beautiful" doesn't really hold from an environmental perspective. (Another interesting tidbit was that the Japanese system of paper recycling is so complete and effective that it is very close to the theoretical maximum.)
A second interesting item was on the relative material-intensity of various economies. It is very easy, especially for a left-wing person, to read the relative numbers as a morality play, with low-intensity Japan and Europe as the heroes and high-intensity North America and China as the villains. But Smil takes pains to outline the ways in which such comparisons can be misleading. In general, it has much more to do with supply than with demand. For example, Canada has a relatively materials-intensive economy, but this is largely due to the fact that it has abundant hydroelectric power. This is about the cheapest form of power, so many energy-hungry industries--which also happen to be materials-intensive industries--end up locating there.
A final interesting item was the role of so-called laws, or more like empirical regularities, of materials usage. The big takeaway for me was the extent to which these things are "true until they're not." The most familiar one is Moore's Law, which addresses the rate of increase of the density of transistors on a computer chip. But another one discussed in the book has to do with the relative de-carbonization of fuel. Fuel generally consists of hydrocarbons, i.e. molecules including the elements C and H. As we know, the release of C from combustion is bad for the environment. Over time, there has been a trend toward more H-rich hydrocarbons, which generally burn cleaner--away from wood and coal, toward crude oil, toward natural gas. For decades, this regularity had appeared so clearly that in 1985 someone wrote a book prognosticating about the future of fuels, arguing that by around now, we would be completely on natural gas, and by later in the century, we would be on a pure hydrogen economy (I guess using pure H2 synthesized by electrolysis using renewables). As it turned out, the trend just broke away from its historical line, and while we are still trending toward a higher H:C ratio, it's just not as fast as the historical pattern.
The last thing I'll say is that I think the author missed a huge opportunity with this book. As I said, the first half or so is quite dry and boring. But I think it could have been really cool if it were almost all graphs, with just a little explanatory text. This would have gotten the information across in a much clearer and more easily absorbed way, than the pages of text citing figures. I was so surprised by the lack of graphs that I double-checked the "look inside" feature on Amazon for the paper version (I read it as an e-book), but it looks like the physical book doesn't have graphs either.
However, the second half was much more interesting. The author discusses trends in "dematerialization" from a variety of perspectives. Are we on a path toward using less material throughput, or less per person, or less per dollar of GDP, etc? This is a surprisingly nuanced topic, and a number of things stuck in my mind. The big take-away is that while there has been some relative dematerialization (say, per dollar of GDP), it is nowhere near enough to reduce the absolute quantity of materials consumed, and won't be any time in the foreseeable future. (On the other hand, the author is generally fairly sanguine about the ongoing availability of resources.)
One interesting piece was the discussion of recycling. The author emphasized that centralization and recycling efficiency go hand-in-hand. The most efficient recycling happens, for example, on the floor of a steel plant, where shavings can be immediately re-circled through the process. At the other end of the spectrum, recycling of household wastes is not very cost-effective, because of the amount of effort that it takes to get things collected, sorted, and sent where they need to be. In this respect at least, "small is beautiful" doesn't really hold from an environmental perspective. (Another interesting tidbit was that the Japanese system of paper recycling is so complete and effective that it is very close to the theoretical maximum.)
A second interesting item was on the relative material-intensity of various economies. It is very easy, especially for a left-wing person, to read the relative numbers as a morality play, with low-intensity Japan and Europe as the heroes and high-intensity North America and China as the villains. But Smil takes pains to outline the ways in which such comparisons can be misleading. In general, it has much more to do with supply than with demand. For example, Canada has a relatively materials-intensive economy, but this is largely due to the fact that it has abundant hydroelectric power. This is about the cheapest form of power, so many energy-hungry industries--which also happen to be materials-intensive industries--end up locating there.
A final interesting item was the role of so-called laws, or more like empirical regularities, of materials usage. The big takeaway for me was the extent to which these things are "true until they're not." The most familiar one is Moore's Law, which addresses the rate of increase of the density of transistors on a computer chip. But another one discussed in the book has to do with the relative de-carbonization of fuel. Fuel generally consists of hydrocarbons, i.e. molecules including the elements C and H. As we know, the release of C from combustion is bad for the environment. Over time, there has been a trend toward more H-rich hydrocarbons, which generally burn cleaner--away from wood and coal, toward crude oil, toward natural gas. For decades, this regularity had appeared so clearly that in 1985 someone wrote a book prognosticating about the future of fuels, arguing that by around now, we would be completely on natural gas, and by later in the century, we would be on a pure hydrogen economy (I guess using pure H2 synthesized by electrolysis using renewables). As it turned out, the trend just broke away from its historical line, and while we are still trending toward a higher H:C ratio, it's just not as fast as the historical pattern.
The last thing I'll say is that I think the author missed a huge opportunity with this book. As I said, the first half or so is quite dry and boring. But I think it could have been really cool if it were almost all graphs, with just a little explanatory text. This would have gotten the information across in a much clearer and more easily absorbed way, than the pages of text citing figures. I was so surprised by the lack of graphs that I double-checked the "look inside" feature on Amazon for the paper version (I read it as an e-book), but it looks like the physical book doesn't have graphs either.
February 5, 2017
I have got to give myself permission to stop reading and throw away books I've started reading, a la Tyler Cowen ( here and there)
Massive wall of numbers, concealing a few fun facts within. Evidently the author does not believe that graphical presentation of his data and numbers (charts, graphs, TIMELINES?) would get his message across in a far more readable way.
Enclosed below are the fun facts I picked out:
________
The 20th century's population growth could not have been supported without the Haber Bosch process (perhaps the most consequential technical innovation of that century) to produce ammonia for nitrogenous fertilisers.
Arguably it is the setting of the systems boundaries, rather than coping with the inherent complexity and heterogeneity of these accounts, that is the greatest challenge in constructing national and global summaries of total material flows.
Paper manufacturing is about as energy intensive as steel.
Consumption of cement in the US totalled 4.56Gt during the entire 20th century, while China used more cement (4.9Gt) in new construction in just three years between 2008 and 2010.
China is also a prominent importer of materials for recycling. (waste paper, scrap steel)
James Watt's famous steam engine had the same order of magnitude of weight/power ratio as the two most important animate prime movers: hard-working men and draft horses. (600g/W)
There's is a distinction between reserves (known economically accessible pools of materials) and resources (estimated total mass of materials in Earth's crust)
Designing with disassembly in mind would go a long way in increasing recycling rates (vish hoho)
Without exaggeration, material acquisition in modern societies can be seen as a common form of the addictive behaviour that is usually associated with alcohol, smoking and gambling.
During the process it has become closely intertwined with perception of class ranking and social status, it has offered opportunities for vicarious living, it has promoted individual and inter-generational aspirations, it has become a tool of desire, passion and gratification, and it has brought the rewards of personal indulgence. Because of this, it is no exaggeration to see a fundamentally mundane act of shopping as an expression of self identity pursued to negate the rootlessness, rolelessness and bureaucratic rationalities of a modern society that traps its subjects and delimits their freedoms. (Latimer,2001).
Massive wall of numbers, concealing a few fun facts within. Evidently the author does not believe that graphical presentation of his data and numbers (charts, graphs, TIMELINES?) would get his message across in a far more readable way.
Enclosed below are the fun facts I picked out:
________
The 20th century's population growth could not have been supported without the Haber Bosch process (perhaps the most consequential technical innovation of that century) to produce ammonia for nitrogenous fertilisers.
Arguably it is the setting of the systems boundaries, rather than coping with the inherent complexity and heterogeneity of these accounts, that is the greatest challenge in constructing national and global summaries of total material flows.
Paper manufacturing is about as energy intensive as steel.
Consumption of cement in the US totalled 4.56Gt during the entire 20th century, while China used more cement (4.9Gt) in new construction in just three years between 2008 and 2010.
China is also a prominent importer of materials for recycling. (waste paper, scrap steel)
James Watt's famous steam engine had the same order of magnitude of weight/power ratio as the two most important animate prime movers: hard-working men and draft horses. (600g/W)
There's is a distinction between reserves (known economically accessible pools of materials) and resources (estimated total mass of materials in Earth's crust)
Designing with disassembly in mind would go a long way in increasing recycling rates (vish hoho)
Without exaggeration, material acquisition in modern societies can be seen as a common form of the addictive behaviour that is usually associated with alcohol, smoking and gambling.
During the process it has become closely intertwined with perception of class ranking and social status, it has offered opportunities for vicarious living, it has promoted individual and inter-generational aspirations, it has become a tool of desire, passion and gratification, and it has brought the rewards of personal indulgence. Because of this, it is no exaggeration to see a fundamentally mundane act of shopping as an expression of self identity pursued to negate the rootlessness, rolelessness and bureaucratic rationalities of a modern society that traps its subjects and delimits their freedoms. (Latimer,2001).
April 8, 2017
A short but quantitatively dense account of the material impact of human civilization, filled with astounding orders-of-magnitude observations about how much more stuff of all sorts we consume and transform now than even a couple of hundred years ago, along with rather mindboggling assessments of what it will mean if we try to bring the 5+ billion people around the world still living in relative poverty up to the levels of consumption enjoyed by the middle and upper class of the global industrial core. The core intellectual question the book revolves around is whether the process of "dematerialization" can proceed more rapidly than the rate at which new people are brought into the high-consumptive fold. Smil is largely dismissive of the prospect for cultural dematerialiation -- he sees no evidence that people ever want to consume less, only that human material desires are infinitely expansionary -- and so focuses entirely on the prospects for becoming more efficient about the way we produce, deploy, and recycle materials. While he sees much scope for improvement in these arenas, he is ultimately pessimistic.
December 27, 2021
Summary: It's so hard to pull together all of this info into a cogent consolidated book. I don't agree with everything and also, his argument is so poorly organized I can't give it 5 stars.
p. 10 - He cites Peter Menzel's Material World: Global Family portrait, 1995. This is cited to talk about the produces folks can't live without at the relative age. I'm thinking CPI, but context is the ever increasing divide btwn have and have not.
p. 21 - He talks about all the data that is not collected or completely understood. "In simple quantitative mass terms, the global use of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and rare gases such as argon or xenon constitutes only a minor item, but in qualitative terms their use is indispensable in industries ranging from steelmaking (basic oxygen furnaces are now the principal means of producing the metal) to synthesis of ammonia (using nitrogen separated from air and hydrogen liberated from methane) and efficient lighting)
p. 27 Silicon is the other mineral that is massively assimilated by marine microorganisms; above all diatoms, silicoflagellates, and radiolarians. They use SiOH4 to create their elaborate opal structures.
p. 98 he talks about the rise of AL as the second most important metal in modernization and the way in which lighter materials were key.
p. 103 - He talks about PVC, PP, and PE. Lightweight, takes a bit more energy than a lot of people think.
p. 123 - Talks about recycling and uses Iphone as an example to illustrate all tha tis pulled out. He's talking about this idea of Material flow and how to think of it incorp recycle.
p. 126 - After 3 pages of all the issues with really charging a concept of material flows he says: "Consequently, there can be no single accurate total as the search for the clobgal totals will always be determined by assumptions, and even if everyone boyd agrees on common boundaries, the basic results will be largely predictable." Then he talks about economic realities (urbanization, industrialization, etc). But he simply states it and doesn't go further down that vein. We go back t estimates. Bummer.
So a lot of the stuff on metals predates this last huge push on tech change and what it's done to various metal demand.
p. 141, China produces a lot of plastic.
p. 142, they talk about China importing US waste. It think this might be dated.
p. 150 they talk about the energy intensities and how that has impacted economic stuff. They also talk about how AL is a lot more energy intensive
p. 152 They talk about energy intensity of plastic. I get frustrated b/c a simple chart on what type of plastic, the lifespan and a comparable product might be good if there is really any kind of cogent point here. Alternatively maybe do something as relates to the price of oil and how much it makes sense from a life span prospective in such a context.
The whole section in this chapter talking about Life Cycle (LCA) of a product is a lot of words with limited conclusions. disappointing. I would have liked for him to formatted this differently, i.e. this is where we have the LCA, this is where we don't. Because I think he's trying to point out the point that is most interesting. The LCA can be used both to determine which materials are best (long life) and which materials are best (low energy cost, etc). The next section in recycle and later he tals about what matters most, but damned, it's very difficult to understand where he's going and how to format. I feel like this is a thread that could have been in the intro to help him better org.
Again, the subsequent section 4.3. He's got great recycle detail, but it's so disorg into no-point. I've never seen a writer work so hard to make no-point. But I think his point is that the issue is both one of what will it save us in needing to mine further to what does it cost us, all the embedded costs. To what do we actually have infra for. But instead of just org that way, and linking it to the previous section, it's just not.
Chapter 4 is a chapter on his idea of Dematerialization, but again, it has that weirdly organized structure that is indicative of this book. So painful, for such an interesting point.
p. 193 - The engine weights didn't know that.
p. 200 - "The conclusion is clear: relative dematerialization of the internal combustion engine and the use of lighter elements and compounds in vehicle construction has only slowed down the rate of overall material consumption claimed by making and operating vehicles. By the year 2010 (after adjusting for population growth) the combination of expanded ownership of heavier cars, light trucks and SUVs operating with inexcusably poor typical efficiency and driven longer distances had increased the average per capita mass of American vehicles more than 30-fold compared to 1920.
HIs point is that we haven't made better cars. He doesn't go so far to say that we haven't thought through transportation correctly. With Covid, this point falls on def ears. It's too bad b/c his original thesis of the book has to do with population density and other elements that I have always found a fascinating cognitive dissonance.
p. 213 - "Declining specific use of energy - be it per unit of extracted raw material or finished product - has been one of the key markers of modernization. Ok, so here is where you really get a sense for his point and the way in which it is both right but really up for debate. Is it the decrease of energy or is it b/c innovation drives down costs in general? Or is he trying to say that driving down energy cost is the key to it all. The difference has to do with what the nation would do vs. what the individual would do. But he doesn't go there. In other words, he goes straight to the inventions. Vs a better argument would have been a lot more on what each country did to shore up its energy sources. There is some discussion on that, but it's not organized the right way to be adequately powerful.
p. 236 "does not believe that peak phosphorus is a pressing issue, or that phosphate rock depletion is imminent" this comes from 2013. At least I now understand what sent this material into a bear market. I think he underestimated the deal here. Mining vs actually having is totally different. It's strange that he isn't thinking in those terms, b/c the molybdenum section does read like this.
p. 245 The whole section no plastic is great. Interesting Dow Chemical the maker of plastic typically talks about two following points, one that could help, one that could hurt the argument.
a) The plastic coating on paper has made it no good for recycling
b) shopping bags are less dense and so you can make more quantity for the volume created vs the paper bags.
He does in this section talk about how incredibly energy intensive paper products are, which debunks some of the silliness of appreciating the paper vs plastic argument. Really the answer is neither.
p. 257: "Recycling should aim at maximum practicable rates and by far the most important universal step in that direction would not require exceptional arrangements or ruinous investment. Products should be designed with disassembly and recycling in mind, a task that has been made much easier by modern CAD.... I think if he'd organized around both sides of this, it would have been a better chapter. He goes really hard on recycling and where we're at, and he does limited on the other side of it. As a result, the chapter reads unbalanced.
p. 257 - "Stahl writes about the service economy 'where success is measured in wealth (stock) and its usage value' not as in today's arrangement where success depends on throughput and its exchange in value."
This whole section is a paradigm shift that likely needs a lot more work. The idea that you are not using (consuming) but people are getting wealthier is intriguing from what it means you'd invest in. And it's under developed as an idea presented here at the very end if you're trying to land on this point.
p. 10 - He cites Peter Menzel's Material World: Global Family portrait, 1995. This is cited to talk about the produces folks can't live without at the relative age. I'm thinking CPI, but context is the ever increasing divide btwn have and have not.
p. 21 - He talks about all the data that is not collected or completely understood. "In simple quantitative mass terms, the global use of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and rare gases such as argon or xenon constitutes only a minor item, but in qualitative terms their use is indispensable in industries ranging from steelmaking (basic oxygen furnaces are now the principal means of producing the metal) to synthesis of ammonia (using nitrogen separated from air and hydrogen liberated from methane) and efficient lighting)
p. 27 Silicon is the other mineral that is massively assimilated by marine microorganisms; above all diatoms, silicoflagellates, and radiolarians. They use SiOH4 to create their elaborate opal structures.
p. 98 he talks about the rise of AL as the second most important metal in modernization and the way in which lighter materials were key.
p. 103 - He talks about PVC, PP, and PE. Lightweight, takes a bit more energy than a lot of people think.
p. 123 - Talks about recycling and uses Iphone as an example to illustrate all tha tis pulled out. He's talking about this idea of Material flow and how to think of it incorp recycle.
p. 126 - After 3 pages of all the issues with really charging a concept of material flows he says: "Consequently, there can be no single accurate total as the search for the clobgal totals will always be determined by assumptions, and even if everyone boyd agrees on common boundaries, the basic results will be largely predictable." Then he talks about economic realities (urbanization, industrialization, etc). But he simply states it and doesn't go further down that vein. We go back t estimates. Bummer.
So a lot of the stuff on metals predates this last huge push on tech change and what it's done to various metal demand.
p. 141, China produces a lot of plastic.
p. 142, they talk about China importing US waste. It think this might be dated.
p. 150 they talk about the energy intensities and how that has impacted economic stuff. They also talk about how AL is a lot more energy intensive
p. 152 They talk about energy intensity of plastic. I get frustrated b/c a simple chart on what type of plastic, the lifespan and a comparable product might be good if there is really any kind of cogent point here. Alternatively maybe do something as relates to the price of oil and how much it makes sense from a life span prospective in such a context.
The whole section in this chapter talking about Life Cycle (LCA) of a product is a lot of words with limited conclusions. disappointing. I would have liked for him to formatted this differently, i.e. this is where we have the LCA, this is where we don't. Because I think he's trying to point out the point that is most interesting. The LCA can be used both to determine which materials are best (long life) and which materials are best (low energy cost, etc). The next section in recycle and later he tals about what matters most, but damned, it's very difficult to understand where he's going and how to format. I feel like this is a thread that could have been in the intro to help him better org.
Again, the subsequent section 4.3. He's got great recycle detail, but it's so disorg into no-point. I've never seen a writer work so hard to make no-point. But I think his point is that the issue is both one of what will it save us in needing to mine further to what does it cost us, all the embedded costs. To what do we actually have infra for. But instead of just org that way, and linking it to the previous section, it's just not.
Chapter 4 is a chapter on his idea of Dematerialization, but again, it has that weirdly organized structure that is indicative of this book. So painful, for such an interesting point.
p. 193 - The engine weights didn't know that.
p. 200 - "The conclusion is clear: relative dematerialization of the internal combustion engine and the use of lighter elements and compounds in vehicle construction has only slowed down the rate of overall material consumption claimed by making and operating vehicles. By the year 2010 (after adjusting for population growth) the combination of expanded ownership of heavier cars, light trucks and SUVs operating with inexcusably poor typical efficiency and driven longer distances had increased the average per capita mass of American vehicles more than 30-fold compared to 1920.
HIs point is that we haven't made better cars. He doesn't go so far to say that we haven't thought through transportation correctly. With Covid, this point falls on def ears. It's too bad b/c his original thesis of the book has to do with population density and other elements that I have always found a fascinating cognitive dissonance.
p. 213 - "Declining specific use of energy - be it per unit of extracted raw material or finished product - has been one of the key markers of modernization. Ok, so here is where you really get a sense for his point and the way in which it is both right but really up for debate. Is it the decrease of energy or is it b/c innovation drives down costs in general? Or is he trying to say that driving down energy cost is the key to it all. The difference has to do with what the nation would do vs. what the individual would do. But he doesn't go there. In other words, he goes straight to the inventions. Vs a better argument would have been a lot more on what each country did to shore up its energy sources. There is some discussion on that, but it's not organized the right way to be adequately powerful.
p. 236 "does not believe that peak phosphorus is a pressing issue, or that phosphate rock depletion is imminent" this comes from 2013. At least I now understand what sent this material into a bear market. I think he underestimated the deal here. Mining vs actually having is totally different. It's strange that he isn't thinking in those terms, b/c the molybdenum section does read like this.
p. 245 The whole section no plastic is great. Interesting Dow Chemical the maker of plastic typically talks about two following points, one that could help, one that could hurt the argument.
a) The plastic coating on paper has made it no good for recycling
b) shopping bags are less dense and so you can make more quantity for the volume created vs the paper bags.
He does in this section talk about how incredibly energy intensive paper products are, which debunks some of the silliness of appreciating the paper vs plastic argument. Really the answer is neither.
p. 257: "Recycling should aim at maximum practicable rates and by far the most important universal step in that direction would not require exceptional arrangements or ruinous investment. Products should be designed with disassembly and recycling in mind, a task that has been made much easier by modern CAD.... I think if he'd organized around both sides of this, it would have been a better chapter. He goes really hard on recycling and where we're at, and he does limited on the other side of it. As a result, the chapter reads unbalanced.
p. 257 - "Stahl writes about the service economy 'where success is measured in wealth (stock) and its usage value' not as in today's arrangement where success depends on throughput and its exchange in value."
This whole section is a paradigm shift that likely needs a lot more work. The idea that you are not using (consuming) but people are getting wealthier is intriguing from what it means you'd invest in. And it's under developed as an idea presented here at the very end if you're trying to land on this point.
November 4, 2016
4-star content in 1-star form. It tells that Smil is well researched and experienced on the topics, but no human can go through 4 numbers and remember even their magnitudes five minutes later, and that repeats on every page, with no charts, and generally the structure doesn't tell a good story either. He writes like we knew what he knows. As a result we are left with only a shallow sense of the scale of material production and recent trend of relative (not absolute) dematerialization. Inaccessible.
February 10, 2015
Tons of statistics brilliantly compiled and discussed. The information/page rate is out of normal. You end up entertaining yourself learning how civilization has been using materials. Amusing that this book is a good example of efficient use of words/numbers.
April 14, 2022
I learned from the book new perspectives to understand our modern world. As often with Smil’s book, he has a unique way to pack information densely, that I often found it best to directly quote him as examples below, at the obvious risks of spoiler, and making this review more like notes!.
1. It moved beyond the human-centric view, and compared other species’ use of natural resources against those of humans.
2. The book contains simple cause-and-effect stories on materials or technologies, I am not an expert on any of these to be useful in evaluating the cited literature, but I could testify that simplified cause-and-effect mechanisms are very cognitively alluring.
I did not think of building with bricks as a response to long-distance artillery.
Or how cities got changed from steel technology –
I noticed people obsessing with statistics of the tallest skyscraper, yet it never occurred to me have a causal story distilling it to one (steel) technology. In reality there are probably many factors constraining or contributing to the skyscraper development beyond the steel technology (zoning? cost? Construction method?), chalking it all up to steel technology is probably an over-simplified narrative – but it could be riveting in a story about ‘materials’.
3. Smil’s took a detailed exampled approach to explain things, that helped the uninitiated me to understand why certain things are valued so much.
After explaining why steel is big deal, as a material:
The book then exalts technologies such as steel manufacturing as a big deal, contributing to railroad construction. It helped me to understand so that’s why people are so excited with railroad. I’ve heard of people touting a country's total length of rails for years, but never register why rail length is so important, or the obsession. Smil laid out the materials required for rail, the construction (stone, quarry, etc) required -- rail would be impossible if we miss any technology -- and connected the dots to understand why these materials are the marks of modernization.
It's sobering to reflect economics training become so abstract, full of theories, and lacked the ground level understanding of how various components are connected together. I am sorry for not finding input-output analysis exciting previously, but Smil’s book strangely made this sub-field more interesting.
4. There are things way under my radar to register:
Plastics, training did not no prepare me to think through the details of how lego, wraps, bottles … all started from PE.
Industrial gases, apparently these are critical for industrial consumption.
Taking these facts separately I would not understand why do I need to know urea contains 45%N versus ammonium nitrate (35% N), or special equipment (hollow steel knives) to apply gas to crops (?!). But Smil connects these dots together under ‘Fertilizers’ and those somehow become interesting.
On the Life Cycle Assessment – Smil put it best:
On dematerialization (don’t get too optimistic about it):
5. Re-thinking of measuring economic growth
Gripes:
1. If you find it effortful trying to make an intuitive sense of all the numbers, units and measurements, in just the few quotes here, you are alone.
Interestingly, Smil himself acknowledged such towards the end
My gripe is less about the numbers (the decimal system scale is natural to most people K, M, B… for thousands, millions, billions), more taxing is to keep track and making a sense of the different physical units far from daily existence (how to understand the energy usage of MJ, or an energy intensity measurement of xyz MJ/KG?)
1. It moved beyond the human-centric view, and compared other species’ use of natural resources against those of humans.
“…the annual use of materials by these tiny heterotrophs would be of the same order of magnitude as our civilization's global extraction of metallic ores…”
“Carbonates are also bioprecipitated by reptiles and birds to build their eggs , and by snails to form their shells.”
2. The book contains simple cause-and-effect stories on materials or technologies, I am not an expert on any of these to be useful in evaluating the cited literature, but I could testify that simplified cause-and-effect mechanisms are very cognitively alluring.
“…Environment made yet another, strategic, difference. As Adshead (1997) has pointed out , a key reason for China's ( and more generally East Asia's ) choice of ephemeral wooden housing , in contrast to Europe's preference for sturdy construction using stone and bricks , was the high frequency of destructive earthquakes; …. The other reasons were the Chinese preference for low initial capital outlay and high cost of maintenance, the reverse of the European approach. Historical realities also mattered, with medieval and Renaissance Europe admiring and emulating many examples of monumental Roman stone structures.”
“…in parts of Europe, stone gave way to brickwork in the new, and more material - intensive, types of fortresses that emerged in response to the greater capability of long - distance artillery.”
I did not think of building with bricks as a response to long-distance artillery.
Or how cities got changed from steel technology –
“long I-beams riveted from smaller pieces… made skyscrapers possible by doing away with thick load - bearing walls.”
I noticed people obsessing with statistics of the tallest skyscraper, yet it never occurred to me have a causal story distilling it to one (steel) technology. In reality there are probably many factors constraining or contributing to the skyscraper development beyond the steel technology (zoning? cost? Construction method?), chalking it all up to steel technology is probably an over-simplified narrative – but it could be riveting in a story about ‘materials’.
3. Smil’s took a detailed exampled approach to explain things, that helped the uninitiated me to understand why certain things are valued so much.
After explaining why steel is big deal, as a material:
“… steel is the strongest and the hardest of all common metals: its typical tensile strength is roughly seven times that of Al and nearly four times that of Cu, and its hardness is four times that of Al and eight times that of Cu. Steel's impact resistance can be more than six times that of cast iron (130 vs . less than 20 J)…”
The book then exalts technologies such as steel manufacturing as a big deal, contributing to railroad construction. It helped me to understand so that’s why people are so excited with railroad. I’ve heard of people touting a country's total length of rails for years, but never register why rail length is so important, or the obsession. Smil laid out the materials required for rail, the construction (stone, quarry, etc) required -- rail would be impossible if we miss any technology -- and connected the dots to understand why these materials are the marks of modernization.
It's sobering to reflect economics training become so abstract, full of theories, and lacked the ground level understanding of how various components are connected together. I am sorry for not finding input-output analysis exciting previously, but Smil’s book strangely made this sub-field more interesting.
4. There are things way under my radar to register:
Plastics, training did not no prepare me to think through the details of how lego, wraps, bottles … all started from PE.
Industrial gases, apparently these are critical for industrial consumption.
Taking these facts separately I would not understand why do I need to know urea contains 45%N versus ammonium nitrate (35% N), or special equipment (hollow steel knives) to apply gas to crops (?!). But Smil connects these dots together under ‘Fertilizers’ and those somehow become interesting.
“Because ammonia is a gas under ambient pressure, it can be applied to crops only by using special equipment (hollow steel knives), a practice that has been limited to North America. The compound has been traditionally converted into a variety of fertilizers (nitrate, sulfate) but urea (containing 45% N) has emerged as the leading choice, especially in rice - growing Asia, now the world's largest consumer of nitrogenous fertilizers; ammonium nitrate (35% N) comes second.”
On the Life Cycle Assessment – Smil put it best:
“…What I like best about LCAs is that they repeatedly offer interesting and counterintuitive results. Which paving has the lower impact: natural granite - slab or a concrete sidewalk? Mendoza et al. (2012) concluded that – largely because of the energy needed to cut and move the stone – the granite sidewalk has a 25 – 140 % higher impact than the concrete one. Which transport packaging of fruits and vegetables carries the lowest CO2 equivalent: traditional light (less than 1 kg) one - way wooden boxes made from an obviously renewable material whose energy content can be recovered by incineration; even lighter one - way cardboard boxes that could be either incinerated or recycled; or much heavier (2 kg) multi-way plastic crates that must be washed between uses? When the impact is scaled to 10 annual rotations per person, the GWP of plastic crates is about 10 % lower than that of wooden boxes and less than half of that of cardboard packaging; when scaled to 1 million annual rotations plastic crates generate about 332 kg of CO2 equivalent, wooden boxes about 367 kg, and cardboard boxes 708 kg (University of Stuttgart, 2007) ...”
On dematerialization (don’t get too optimistic about it):
“Evolution of American passenger cars provides another well - documented example of an impressive relative dematerialization, in this case that of the machine's prime mover, that has not been accompanied by any aggregate decline in consumed materials…
while the typical mass / power ratio declined by 93 % between 1920 and 2011, average engine power increased more than 11 - fold: this means that the increased engine power erased about 75 % of the material savings resulting from the vastly improved mass / power ratio of these prime movers, and that these gains were completely negated due to more than trebled average curb weight…
This failure to reduce car mass is even worse when assessed in per capita terms , because the rate of vehicle ownership did not remain constant…
the combined effect of additional power, higher weights, and higher rate of ownership had increased the average per capita mass of materials deployed in passenger cars registered in 2011 nearly 35 - fold when compared to their mass in 1920…
5. Re-thinking of measuring economic growth
“This is the only model, the only paradigm, and the only precept, as the economists in command of modern societies cannot envisage a system that would deliberately grow at a minimum rate, even less so one that would experience zero growth, and the idea of a carefully managed decline appears to them to be outright unimaginable. The pursuit of endless growth is, obviously, an unsustainable strategy (Binswanger, 2009) …
This perspective dictates that minimizing entropy should be the foremost goal for a rational society. Rephrased in plain terms using the titles of recent books on the subject, we should stop shoveling fuel for the runaway train of economic growth (Czech, 2000), confront consumption (Princen et al., 2002) , embrace the logic of sufficiency and break with the throwaway culture (Slade, 2006) …
These realities have greatly blurred, if not erased, the boundaries between necessary and superfluous consumption, as yesterday's unattainables become tomorrow's indispensables. They have also converted human desires into a continuous process of collecting and discarding as mass production and consumption have succeeded in creating a new ethos of ephemerality (Cooper, 2001). Intentional obsolescence has become a key driver for many industries making consumer products, a development going back to GM's decision of the late 1920s to launch a new model every year (Slade, 2006) …
The consumption pattern of China's nouveaux riches appears to be a particularly slavish copy of the worst American experience, as it consists of fake mansions within gated communities, obligatory large SUVs (Pierson, 2012) , and obsessive amassment of luxury goods ranging from Swiss watches to custom - made yachts (KPMG China, 2013)…
Gripes:
1. If you find it effortful trying to make an intuitive sense of all the numbers, units and measurements, in just the few quotes here, you are alone.
Interestingly, Smil himself acknowledged such towards the end
“Those readers who have persevered (and have, along the way, complained about too many numbers) have now reached the point where they should be impressed by the magnitude and complexity of the global material edifice erected by modern civilization since the middle of the nineteenth century…”,
My gripe is less about the numbers (the decimal system scale is natural to most people K, M, B… for thousands, millions, billions), more taxing is to keep track and making a sense of the different physical units far from daily existence (how to understand the energy usage of MJ, or an energy intensity measurement of xyz MJ/KG?)
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 10, 2018
Vznik, vývoj, spotřeba materiálu - analýzy
August 6, 2020
Smil has a way with numbers. This book felt like reading an extremely interesting dictionary - cover-to-cover. I could barely contain the cognitive dissonance of absorbing a mostly bland, number-heavy recent history of technology, while at the same time being totally glued to the minutia of carbon vs hydrogen energy potential in methane. It's the definitive history of global material flows, a book most will refer to often, and relatively useful in bouncing technology back after a global apocalypse. 5/5
December 8, 2015
Smil’s “Making the Modern World” is a fascinating tour through the many materials and industrial processes that enable our modern, high-consumption lives. From forest products and steel to fertilizers and silicon, Smil has put together an astonishingly thorough study of our material world. One of the key questions that drives the book is “are we using more or less materials than we did in the past?” Before reading the book, I was sure that my minimalist, efficient, highly digital life had to be less material/energy intense than earlier generations. Now I’m not so sure - you have to include the energy and material costs that go into mining metals, refining silicon, powering internet infrastructure, etc. Eye-opening stuff.
I also picked up on a couple “Mr. Money Mustache”-style comments from Smil in regards to our seemingly incessant materialism:
“This calls for a new society where, once basic material needs are taken care of, the sense of wellbeing and satisfaction would be derived from experiences that are not at all, or only marginally, correlated with higher energy flows and expanding material possessions.”
“Indeed, states now exist to a large extent in order to maintain and to promote economic, technical, and legal foundations and infrastructures of mass consumption.”
Smil also weighs in on issues like “will we run out of resources?” (not any time soon) and “what about China?” (growth must slow soon - major problems on horizon in terms of aging population and deteriorating infrastructure). Overall, it’s a really interesting book but is so jam-packed with numbers that it’s a bit difficult to get through.
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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.
We must realize that in the long run even the most efficient production processes, the least wasteful ways of design and manufacturing, and (for those materials that can be recycled) the highest practical rates of recycling may not be enough to result in dematerialization rates great enough to negate the rising demand for materials generated by continuing population growth, rising standards of living, and the universal human preference for amassing possessions. This makes it highly likely that in order to reconcile our wants with the preservation of the biosphere's integrity we will have to make deliberate choices that will help us to reduce absolute levels of material consumption, and thereby redefine the very notion of modern societies whose very existence is predicated on incessant and massive material flows.
In any case, in terms of total material flows, all pre-industrial societies remained in the wooden age: in all forested environments, no materials were as ubiquitous as timber for buildings and wood for tools, utensils, implements, and machines.
But the most consequential material development in antiquity was not the routine use of a wide variety of biomaterials (wood, bones, hides, plant-, and animal-textiles) and common construction (stones, clays, sand, concrete) and ornamental (tiles, glass) materials, but the ability to smelt and to shape a growing array of metals. Ore mining and metal smelting resulted in an epochal advance that began with the use of copper and its alloys and was followed by smelting of iron ores, making iron the dominant metal of the ancient Greece and Rome, the two great Mediterranean civilization whose accomplishments influenced so much of subsequent European, and global, history.
Producing copper from abundant sulfide ores... roasted ore was smelted in shaft furnaces and then smelted once again to yield 95–97% pure metal. All of this devastated local and regional wood resources, and copper smelting was a leading cause of Mediterranean deforestation, particularly in Spain and Cyprus.
Even as the demand for wood was falling due to the displacement of fuelwood and charcoal by fossil fuels and coke (in France, coal began to supply more than half of all energy by the mid 1870s; in the USA the tipping point between fuelwood and coal and oil came in 1884–85) and owing to the shift of ship construction from timber to steel, new markets for sawnwood were created by the large-scale expansion of coal mines and by construction of railways.
Structural steel (more specifically long I-beams riveted from smaller pieces) made skyscrapers possible by doing away with thick load-bearing walls.
Aluminum was discovered by Hans Christian Oersted in 1825, and for the next 60 years it was produced only in minuscule amounts to make novelty jewelry; as late as 1884 its single largest application was a 2.85 kg pyramidal cap topping the newly built Washington monument
Post-World War II demand for copper has been dominated by five major final markets: copper in construction goes into electrical wiring, plumbing, refrigeration, and air conditioning conduits, and also has visible uses (copper sheathing and roofing); industrial machinery, fittings and wiring, and heat exchangers; every category of transportation machinery; industrial electrical and electronic products, above all telecommunication and lighting; and a wide range of consumer products dominated by electronic gadgets and electrical cords and, in many countries, coins. Copper has maintained its third ranking among the twentieth century metals as its global consumption rose from less than 500 000 t in 1900 to more than 13 Mt in the year 2000.
I saved fertilizer advances for the last entry in this brief review of material innovations of the twentieth century – but if the order of presentation were to be determined by the existential importance for the survival of our species, then Haber–Bosch ammonia synthesis should have come first.
Clearly, modern management makes it possible to exploit forests in a nondestructive manner.
A new North American house of 200 m2 requires about 14 t of lumber (typically yellow pine) and another 14 t of panel products (mostly plywood) for a total mass of 28 t.
By the turn of the century, paper consumption had become saturated in many affluent countries, and wood pulp for domestic production began to decline because of more intensive paper recycling. In the USA, wood pulp production peaked during the mid-1990s (at just above 60 Mt/year) and since then it has been in decline, a trend roughly matched by the output of paper and paperboard whose decrease (more than 10% since 2000) accelerated after 2007 due to the economic downturn. This was accompanied by a massive decline in pulp, paper, and board mill employment (from 200 000 in 1999 to less than 120 000 a decade later) and a substantial rise in output per mill employee (from 450 t/year in 2000 to nearly 700 t/year in 2010). Similarly, disaggregated demand figures from Japan show that the consumption of “information-use” paper peaked during the late 1990s and has since declined by nearly 25%, that of plain copier paper began to fall after 2008, and demand for sanitary-use paper has been flat since 2005…. But global consumption of paper keeps rising, driven by large increases in demand in populous Asian countries, above all in China.
Not surprisingly, given China's limited forest resources, the country has become the world's largest importer of waste paper, buying 25 Mt in 2010 and 28 Mt in 2011, with the USA being its largest supplier (total US exports of recovered paper more than doubled from 10 Mt in 2000 to 21 Mt in 2011).
Before I review the production methods and the uses of construction materials that dominate the world of the early twenty-first century, I must point out that hundreds of millions of people – Berge (2009) puts the total at more than 30% of humanity – continue to live in structures whose material, locally available clay, has not undergone any elaborate processing and that can be made without any modern energy inputs.
Concrete (particularly its reinforced form) is now by far the most important manmade material both in terms of global annual production and cumulatively emplaced mass.
Given the unprecedented rate of post-1990 global concretization, it is inevitable that the post-2030 world will face an unprecedented burden of concrete deterioration.
In aggregate terms, the USGS accounts translate to a domestic consumption of about 1.9 t/capita in 1900, 5.6 t in 1950, and 12 t/capita in the year 2000; after leaving out bulk construction materials these rates are reduced, respectively, to 1.2, 2.3, and 3 t/capita, which means that the use of construction materials rose from about 0.7 t/capita in 1900 to 3.3 t in 1950, and 9 t in the year 2000.
Wood is the only material category showing a century-long decline of per capita consumption, from about 800 kg in 1900 to about 400 kg by 1950 and about 300 kg/capita in 2000.
The only major construction material that has seen only a modest production increase is industrial roundwood, whose output rose by less than 30% in three decades, from less than 80 to about 102 Mm3 (FAO, 2013). China's extensive pre-Communist deforestation, pre-1980 overexploitation, mismanagement of remaining natural forests, and mass-scale reforestation campaigns producing spindly growth of a few widely planted species (pines, eucalyptus) explain the continuation of an inadequate domestic timber supply that necessitated more than quadrupling of imports between 1980 and 2010, from just over 8 to more than 35 Mm3, with Canada being the largest exporter and with a rising share of imports coming from Africa and contributing to the destruction of the continent's tropical rainforests (FAO, 2013; Smil, 2013).
Unbleached packaging paper made from thermo-mechanical pulp is the least energy-expensive kind (as little as 23 GJ/t); fine bleached uncoated paper made from kraft pulp consumes at least 27 GJ/t and commonly just over 30 GJ/t (Worrell et al., 2008). Most people find it surprising that this is as much as a high-quality steel.
Perhaps the most interesting result concerns the energy cost of inorganic fertilizers: given their truly existential importance it is reassuring to realize that the energy needed to produce them adds up to a surprisingly small share of global supply. Assuming averages of 55, 20, and 10 GJ/t for, respectively, N, P, and K (all including the cost of final formulation, packaging, and distribution) would result in a total demand of a bit more than 5 EJ in the year 2010 (with nitrogenous fertilizers accounting for about 90% of the total) – or only about 1% of the TPES.
I hasten to add that a still high level of global malnutrition is due to unequal access to food, not to inadequate food supply.
Another case of a highly rewarding energy pay-off is the cost of silicon wafers. As explained, their embodied energy is orders of magnitude higher than for any of the commonly used materials (on the order of 20 TJ/t compared to 20 GJ/t for steel), but the steadily increasing crowding of transistors has limited the annual mass of wafers needed to produce all of the world's microchips to only about 7500 t in 2009 and to an aggregate energy expenditure of just 150 PJ, or about 0.03% of TPES.
These calculations also make it clear that modern civilization can afford all this steel and fertilizers and microchips because scientific discoveries and technical advances have greatly reduced their energy intensities.
Even when using liberal rates for average energy intensities of all biomaterials other than paper, construction materials other than cement, and metals other than steel and aluminum we end up with a grand total of no more than 120 EJ, or less than 25% of the world's TPES: we create the modern world's material wealth with no more than a quarter of all energy we use.
An additional advantage of managed forests and tree plantations are their contributions to oxygen generation and carbon sequestration and, if trees are harvested in rotation and promptly replanted, such plantations can be long-lasting stores of carbon. Even more importantly, proper forestry management can increase the phytomass storage and annual productivity of natural forests, as shown by a nearly century-long perspective from Finland.
And among the enormous number of quotidian consumer products that still contain no microprocessors (from apparel to cookware, from basic tools to hand-built furniture) there has not been a single example where mass per unit of product or per an indicator of performance has improved by several orders of magnitude, even reductions on the order of 1 magnitude (resulting in identical product performance while reducing its mass to around 10% of its original value) are extremely rare, and in most cases relative dematerialization has amounted to less than 30% compared to the same types of products available a generation ago.
Indeed, there can be no doubt that relative dematerialization has been a key (and not infrequently the dominant) factor promoting often massive expansion of total material consumption. Less has thus been an enabling agent of more.
At the same time, widespread possession of a widening range of consumer goods and the deliberately engineered rapid obsolescence of many products are two notable factors that militate against dematerialization even in the most affluent societies already suffused with goods, and the net outcome can be determined only by taking a longer look at aggregate demand in modern economies.
Clearly, there is no recent evidence of any widespread and substantial dematerialization – be it in absolute or relative (per capita) terms – even among the world's richest economies. Undoubtedly, they have seen a more subdued growth of raw material inputs, and trends explain this moderation: affluent societies have already put in place extensive and highly material-intensive infrastructures; ongoing outsourcing of material-intensive (and often also polluting) industries to foreign low-cost producers has lowered the direct domestic consumption of primary inputs; and relative dematerialization has slowed down the growth of demand.
Although there was no shortage of admirable extraction, construction, and consumption feats in pre-1850 history, only the creation, transformation, and expansion of modern civilization made human societies dependent on enormous, incessant, and now also truly global flows of materials.
Specific reserve totals, for a country, a continent, or the world, are commonly divided by relevant annual production totals to calculate reserve/production (R/P) ratios. For example, according to the USGS the global R/P ratio for copper was 42.8 years in the year 2011 (USGS, 2013). This ratio does not imply that there will be no copper left to mine by the end of 2054. Indeed, the metal's global R/P ratio was nearly identical in 1995 and in 1980 (Doggett, 2010), and the relative constancy of this (and most other mineral extraction ratios) means that industries successfully maintain acceptable levels of reserves relative to annual production.
In reality, our civilization is no danger of running out of any major mineral, not imminently (in years), not in the near term (in one or two decades), and not on the scale of average human life-span (60–80 years).
Chinese growth rates of material consumption must come down. After all, in 2010 the country was already consuming 36% more steel per capita than the EU-27 and 50% more than the USA. And the recent peak per capita rates of China's cement consumption were 2.5 times the Japanese level, more than 3 times the German or the US rate, and in some of the country's regions they were as high, or even higher, than Spain's 2007 rate of 1300 kg/capita that preceded the collapse of Spain's construction industry; all countries whose annual cement consumption surpassed for a while 1 t/capita experienced, sooner or later, the burst of their construction bubble (Bell, 2012).
by 2040 China will have the same share of people above 60 years of age as Japan had in 2010
Recycling should aim at maximum practicable rates and by far the most important universal step in that direction would not require exceptional arrangements or ruinous investment. Products should be designed with disassembly and recycling in mind, a task that has been made much easier by modern CAD (computer-assisted design) but one that is still rarely seen as important. Such rational, recycling-friendly design would be especially helpful in managing the rising mass of e-waste.
Consequently, even if no alarm clocks, rolodexes, voice recorders, or digital cameras were ever bought because of the smartphone's multifunctionality, the material savings represented by such a loss of demand would be largely obliterated by the expanding claims for the same kind of resources ranging from aluminum and glass to wires and microprocessors.
But alternatives are imaginable and unorthodox economists and ecologists have long argued for the decoupling of energy use and material consumption from standard perceptions of progress, for a transition toward a low-growth, then a zero-growth society, and eventually even to a managed reduction of energy and material flows. The reason for this advocacy is obvious: the fundamental incompatibility of the growth imperative and of the second law of thermodynamics (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971 1975). This perspective dictates that minimizing entropy should be the foremost goal for a rational society.
To this I would say: do not underestimate the appeal of possession, acquisition, ownership, and excess consumption. Without exaggeration, material acquisition in modern societies can be seen as a common form of the addictive behavior that is usually associated with alcohol, smoking, drugs, or gambling. A major difference is that this addictive behavior has become even more pervasive, as it has crossed all national and cultural barriers and evolved into a compulsive global phenomenon.
An arrangement that could allow more frequent changes of models and that would assure complete recycling at the end of a product's life is not to sell any major manufactured items but merely rent them on long-term service contracts and then return them to their makers for disassembly and reuse: this approach could be applied to products ranging from computers to car tires and from refrigerators to air conditioners.
“voluntary simplicity can only appeal to those who have enough to choose to live with less.”
As yet, nothing has been irretrievably foreclosed, and at this point it is not difficult to imagine rational futures of moderated energy and material use aimed at maximizing global quality of life for a stationary, even slowly declining, population – nor that of a further indiscriminate quest for energy and materials that results, to a large extent, in wasted ephemeral consumption, perpetuates the great global gap in the average standard of living, and weakens the fundamental biospheric functions, the only irreplaceable foundations of any civilization. We must hope that human ingenuity (so admirably deployed particularly during the past two centuries) and adaptability (displayed, unfortunately, not well ahead of anticipated crises but only when they are upon us) will, sooner rather than later, guide us along the first path – but even in that case the transformation of humanity's material uses will be a gradual and difficult process with an uncertain outcome.
I also picked up on a couple “Mr. Money Mustache”-style comments from Smil in regards to our seemingly incessant materialism:
“This calls for a new society where, once basic material needs are taken care of, the sense of wellbeing and satisfaction would be derived from experiences that are not at all, or only marginally, correlated with higher energy flows and expanding material possessions.”
“Indeed, states now exist to a large extent in order to maintain and to promote economic, technical, and legal foundations and infrastructures of mass consumption.”
Smil also weighs in on issues like “will we run out of resources?” (not any time soon) and “what about China?” (growth must slow soon - major problems on horizon in terms of aging population and deteriorating infrastructure). Overall, it’s a really interesting book but is so jam-packed with numbers that it’s a bit difficult to get through.
#######################
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.
We must realize that in the long run even the most efficient production processes, the least wasteful ways of design and manufacturing, and (for those materials that can be recycled) the highest practical rates of recycling may not be enough to result in dematerialization rates great enough to negate the rising demand for materials generated by continuing population growth, rising standards of living, and the universal human preference for amassing possessions. This makes it highly likely that in order to reconcile our wants with the preservation of the biosphere's integrity we will have to make deliberate choices that will help us to reduce absolute levels of material consumption, and thereby redefine the very notion of modern societies whose very existence is predicated on incessant and massive material flows.
In any case, in terms of total material flows, all pre-industrial societies remained in the wooden age: in all forested environments, no materials were as ubiquitous as timber for buildings and wood for tools, utensils, implements, and machines.
But the most consequential material development in antiquity was not the routine use of a wide variety of biomaterials (wood, bones, hides, plant-, and animal-textiles) and common construction (stones, clays, sand, concrete) and ornamental (tiles, glass) materials, but the ability to smelt and to shape a growing array of metals. Ore mining and metal smelting resulted in an epochal advance that began with the use of copper and its alloys and was followed by smelting of iron ores, making iron the dominant metal of the ancient Greece and Rome, the two great Mediterranean civilization whose accomplishments influenced so much of subsequent European, and global, history.
Producing copper from abundant sulfide ores... roasted ore was smelted in shaft furnaces and then smelted once again to yield 95–97% pure metal. All of this devastated local and regional wood resources, and copper smelting was a leading cause of Mediterranean deforestation, particularly in Spain and Cyprus.
Even as the demand for wood was falling due to the displacement of fuelwood and charcoal by fossil fuels and coke (in France, coal began to supply more than half of all energy by the mid 1870s; in the USA the tipping point between fuelwood and coal and oil came in 1884–85) and owing to the shift of ship construction from timber to steel, new markets for sawnwood were created by the large-scale expansion of coal mines and by construction of railways.
Structural steel (more specifically long I-beams riveted from smaller pieces) made skyscrapers possible by doing away with thick load-bearing walls.
Aluminum was discovered by Hans Christian Oersted in 1825, and for the next 60 years it was produced only in minuscule amounts to make novelty jewelry; as late as 1884 its single largest application was a 2.85 kg pyramidal cap topping the newly built Washington monument
Post-World War II demand for copper has been dominated by five major final markets: copper in construction goes into electrical wiring, plumbing, refrigeration, and air conditioning conduits, and also has visible uses (copper sheathing and roofing); industrial machinery, fittings and wiring, and heat exchangers; every category of transportation machinery; industrial electrical and electronic products, above all telecommunication and lighting; and a wide range of consumer products dominated by electronic gadgets and electrical cords and, in many countries, coins. Copper has maintained its third ranking among the twentieth century metals as its global consumption rose from less than 500 000 t in 1900 to more than 13 Mt in the year 2000.
I saved fertilizer advances for the last entry in this brief review of material innovations of the twentieth century – but if the order of presentation were to be determined by the existential importance for the survival of our species, then Haber–Bosch ammonia synthesis should have come first.
Clearly, modern management makes it possible to exploit forests in a nondestructive manner.
A new North American house of 200 m2 requires about 14 t of lumber (typically yellow pine) and another 14 t of panel products (mostly plywood) for a total mass of 28 t.
By the turn of the century, paper consumption had become saturated in many affluent countries, and wood pulp for domestic production began to decline because of more intensive paper recycling. In the USA, wood pulp production peaked during the mid-1990s (at just above 60 Mt/year) and since then it has been in decline, a trend roughly matched by the output of paper and paperboard whose decrease (more than 10% since 2000) accelerated after 2007 due to the economic downturn. This was accompanied by a massive decline in pulp, paper, and board mill employment (from 200 000 in 1999 to less than 120 000 a decade later) and a substantial rise in output per mill employee (from 450 t/year in 2000 to nearly 700 t/year in 2010). Similarly, disaggregated demand figures from Japan show that the consumption of “information-use” paper peaked during the late 1990s and has since declined by nearly 25%, that of plain copier paper began to fall after 2008, and demand for sanitary-use paper has been flat since 2005…. But global consumption of paper keeps rising, driven by large increases in demand in populous Asian countries, above all in China.
Not surprisingly, given China's limited forest resources, the country has become the world's largest importer of waste paper, buying 25 Mt in 2010 and 28 Mt in 2011, with the USA being its largest supplier (total US exports of recovered paper more than doubled from 10 Mt in 2000 to 21 Mt in 2011).
Before I review the production methods and the uses of construction materials that dominate the world of the early twenty-first century, I must point out that hundreds of millions of people – Berge (2009) puts the total at more than 30% of humanity – continue to live in structures whose material, locally available clay, has not undergone any elaborate processing and that can be made without any modern energy inputs.
Concrete (particularly its reinforced form) is now by far the most important manmade material both in terms of global annual production and cumulatively emplaced mass.
Given the unprecedented rate of post-1990 global concretization, it is inevitable that the post-2030 world will face an unprecedented burden of concrete deterioration.
In aggregate terms, the USGS accounts translate to a domestic consumption of about 1.9 t/capita in 1900, 5.6 t in 1950, and 12 t/capita in the year 2000; after leaving out bulk construction materials these rates are reduced, respectively, to 1.2, 2.3, and 3 t/capita, which means that the use of construction materials rose from about 0.7 t/capita in 1900 to 3.3 t in 1950, and 9 t in the year 2000.
Wood is the only material category showing a century-long decline of per capita consumption, from about 800 kg in 1900 to about 400 kg by 1950 and about 300 kg/capita in 2000.
The only major construction material that has seen only a modest production increase is industrial roundwood, whose output rose by less than 30% in three decades, from less than 80 to about 102 Mm3 (FAO, 2013). China's extensive pre-Communist deforestation, pre-1980 overexploitation, mismanagement of remaining natural forests, and mass-scale reforestation campaigns producing spindly growth of a few widely planted species (pines, eucalyptus) explain the continuation of an inadequate domestic timber supply that necessitated more than quadrupling of imports between 1980 and 2010, from just over 8 to more than 35 Mm3, with Canada being the largest exporter and with a rising share of imports coming from Africa and contributing to the destruction of the continent's tropical rainforests (FAO, 2013; Smil, 2013).
Unbleached packaging paper made from thermo-mechanical pulp is the least energy-expensive kind (as little as 23 GJ/t); fine bleached uncoated paper made from kraft pulp consumes at least 27 GJ/t and commonly just over 30 GJ/t (Worrell et al., 2008). Most people find it surprising that this is as much as a high-quality steel.
Perhaps the most interesting result concerns the energy cost of inorganic fertilizers: given their truly existential importance it is reassuring to realize that the energy needed to produce them adds up to a surprisingly small share of global supply. Assuming averages of 55, 20, and 10 GJ/t for, respectively, N, P, and K (all including the cost of final formulation, packaging, and distribution) would result in a total demand of a bit more than 5 EJ in the year 2010 (with nitrogenous fertilizers accounting for about 90% of the total) – or only about 1% of the TPES.
I hasten to add that a still high level of global malnutrition is due to unequal access to food, not to inadequate food supply.
Another case of a highly rewarding energy pay-off is the cost of silicon wafers. As explained, their embodied energy is orders of magnitude higher than for any of the commonly used materials (on the order of 20 TJ/t compared to 20 GJ/t for steel), but the steadily increasing crowding of transistors has limited the annual mass of wafers needed to produce all of the world's microchips to only about 7500 t in 2009 and to an aggregate energy expenditure of just 150 PJ, or about 0.03% of TPES.
These calculations also make it clear that modern civilization can afford all this steel and fertilizers and microchips because scientific discoveries and technical advances have greatly reduced their energy intensities.
Even when using liberal rates for average energy intensities of all biomaterials other than paper, construction materials other than cement, and metals other than steel and aluminum we end up with a grand total of no more than 120 EJ, or less than 25% of the world's TPES: we create the modern world's material wealth with no more than a quarter of all energy we use.
An additional advantage of managed forests and tree plantations are their contributions to oxygen generation and carbon sequestration and, if trees are harvested in rotation and promptly replanted, such plantations can be long-lasting stores of carbon. Even more importantly, proper forestry management can increase the phytomass storage and annual productivity of natural forests, as shown by a nearly century-long perspective from Finland.
And among the enormous number of quotidian consumer products that still contain no microprocessors (from apparel to cookware, from basic tools to hand-built furniture) there has not been a single example where mass per unit of product or per an indicator of performance has improved by several orders of magnitude, even reductions on the order of 1 magnitude (resulting in identical product performance while reducing its mass to around 10% of its original value) are extremely rare, and in most cases relative dematerialization has amounted to less than 30% compared to the same types of products available a generation ago.
Indeed, there can be no doubt that relative dematerialization has been a key (and not infrequently the dominant) factor promoting often massive expansion of total material consumption. Less has thus been an enabling agent of more.
At the same time, widespread possession of a widening range of consumer goods and the deliberately engineered rapid obsolescence of many products are two notable factors that militate against dematerialization even in the most affluent societies already suffused with goods, and the net outcome can be determined only by taking a longer look at aggregate demand in modern economies.
Clearly, there is no recent evidence of any widespread and substantial dematerialization – be it in absolute or relative (per capita) terms – even among the world's richest economies. Undoubtedly, they have seen a more subdued growth of raw material inputs, and trends explain this moderation: affluent societies have already put in place extensive and highly material-intensive infrastructures; ongoing outsourcing of material-intensive (and often also polluting) industries to foreign low-cost producers has lowered the direct domestic consumption of primary inputs; and relative dematerialization has slowed down the growth of demand.
Although there was no shortage of admirable extraction, construction, and consumption feats in pre-1850 history, only the creation, transformation, and expansion of modern civilization made human societies dependent on enormous, incessant, and now also truly global flows of materials.
Specific reserve totals, for a country, a continent, or the world, are commonly divided by relevant annual production totals to calculate reserve/production (R/P) ratios. For example, according to the USGS the global R/P ratio for copper was 42.8 years in the year 2011 (USGS, 2013). This ratio does not imply that there will be no copper left to mine by the end of 2054. Indeed, the metal's global R/P ratio was nearly identical in 1995 and in 1980 (Doggett, 2010), and the relative constancy of this (and most other mineral extraction ratios) means that industries successfully maintain acceptable levels of reserves relative to annual production.
In reality, our civilization is no danger of running out of any major mineral, not imminently (in years), not in the near term (in one or two decades), and not on the scale of average human life-span (60–80 years).
Chinese growth rates of material consumption must come down. After all, in 2010 the country was already consuming 36% more steel per capita than the EU-27 and 50% more than the USA. And the recent peak per capita rates of China's cement consumption were 2.5 times the Japanese level, more than 3 times the German or the US rate, and in some of the country's regions they were as high, or even higher, than Spain's 2007 rate of 1300 kg/capita that preceded the collapse of Spain's construction industry; all countries whose annual cement consumption surpassed for a while 1 t/capita experienced, sooner or later, the burst of their construction bubble (Bell, 2012).
by 2040 China will have the same share of people above 60 years of age as Japan had in 2010
Recycling should aim at maximum practicable rates and by far the most important universal step in that direction would not require exceptional arrangements or ruinous investment. Products should be designed with disassembly and recycling in mind, a task that has been made much easier by modern CAD (computer-assisted design) but one that is still rarely seen as important. Such rational, recycling-friendly design would be especially helpful in managing the rising mass of e-waste.
Consequently, even if no alarm clocks, rolodexes, voice recorders, or digital cameras were ever bought because of the smartphone's multifunctionality, the material savings represented by such a loss of demand would be largely obliterated by the expanding claims for the same kind of resources ranging from aluminum and glass to wires and microprocessors.
But alternatives are imaginable and unorthodox economists and ecologists have long argued for the decoupling of energy use and material consumption from standard perceptions of progress, for a transition toward a low-growth, then a zero-growth society, and eventually even to a managed reduction of energy and material flows. The reason for this advocacy is obvious: the fundamental incompatibility of the growth imperative and of the second law of thermodynamics (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971 1975). This perspective dictates that minimizing entropy should be the foremost goal for a rational society.
To this I would say: do not underestimate the appeal of possession, acquisition, ownership, and excess consumption. Without exaggeration, material acquisition in modern societies can be seen as a common form of the addictive behavior that is usually associated with alcohol, smoking, drugs, or gambling. A major difference is that this addictive behavior has become even more pervasive, as it has crossed all national and cultural barriers and evolved into a compulsive global phenomenon.
An arrangement that could allow more frequent changes of models and that would assure complete recycling at the end of a product's life is not to sell any major manufactured items but merely rent them on long-term service contracts and then return them to their makers for disassembly and reuse: this approach could be applied to products ranging from computers to car tires and from refrigerators to air conditioners.
“voluntary simplicity can only appeal to those who have enough to choose to live with less.”
As yet, nothing has been irretrievably foreclosed, and at this point it is not difficult to imagine rational futures of moderated energy and material use aimed at maximizing global quality of life for a stationary, even slowly declining, population – nor that of a further indiscriminate quest for energy and materials that results, to a large extent, in wasted ephemeral consumption, perpetuates the great global gap in the average standard of living, and weakens the fundamental biospheric functions, the only irreplaceable foundations of any civilization. We must hope that human ingenuity (so admirably deployed particularly during the past two centuries) and adaptability (displayed, unfortunately, not well ahead of anticipated crises but only when they are upon us) will, sooner rather than later, guide us along the first path – but even in that case the transformation of humanity's material uses will be a gradual and difficult process with an uncertain outcome.
August 12, 2019
With such intense research and data collection from the author, he truly gave an in depth breakdown of the usage, trend and potential life span of our limited natural resources on planet earth. Tracing the journey of the modernization of men, the usage of wood, mental, plastic, air and energy amount has increased over the times.
Men have managed to reduce the usage of energy and waste, a so call more effective, productive way of processing these resources, with the intention of using, needing less. However, that may not have been the case, as men in turn has gone into higher consumerism and buying more stuff then actually needed. So in such, more are being used, which bring about heavy cost, as described in his chapter on dematerialization. Dematerialized, is moving to a level in which no material is required at all. As he was in the topic, I would look around my immediate environment to see the amount of things around me, and asking are all these essentials? Do I know the cost, beyond the dollar and cents that is spent on them? A question that you normally asked us in class, "what is the real cost"?
My take, looking at the data and charts given, the assumption was that as lifestyle improve, choice of material substitution for materials, there would be decline from wood to metal, plastic to silicon. However, the population growth rate is not proportional to the recorded usage of material. In fact there is higher usage. The shifting into industrialization age, as well many developed countries stop manufacturing, outsourcing them to developing countries, the quick demand from the shift adds to the require of materials. As country develops, more and more materials are needed as well, in terms to support infrastructure and building structures. Thus as country develops, it required and consumes more.
What is troubling though is the talk about e-waste, with the mentioning that not many have the understanding, knowledge and practice of handling this. With phones in the numbers of billions, soon to be equivalent to the global population (in fact, adding PC, tablets and other gadgets, that number would already surpass the world population), how do we handle this material that is neither biodegradable or reusable after lifespan? Do we really need to keep changing our tech hardware all the time. In relationship to this book, it brings the question back to the need of buying and upgrading hardware constantly. Yes, its an upgrade, an improvement, but is it needed now?
Awareness to cost, awareness to how as individual we can play our part, awareness to how a material life cycle.
Men have managed to reduce the usage of energy and waste, a so call more effective, productive way of processing these resources, with the intention of using, needing less. However, that may not have been the case, as men in turn has gone into higher consumerism and buying more stuff then actually needed. So in such, more are being used, which bring about heavy cost, as described in his chapter on dematerialization. Dematerialized, is moving to a level in which no material is required at all. As he was in the topic, I would look around my immediate environment to see the amount of things around me, and asking are all these essentials? Do I know the cost, beyond the dollar and cents that is spent on them? A question that you normally asked us in class, "what is the real cost"?
My take, looking at the data and charts given, the assumption was that as lifestyle improve, choice of material substitution for materials, there would be decline from wood to metal, plastic to silicon. However, the population growth rate is not proportional to the recorded usage of material. In fact there is higher usage. The shifting into industrialization age, as well many developed countries stop manufacturing, outsourcing them to developing countries, the quick demand from the shift adds to the require of materials. As country develops, more and more materials are needed as well, in terms to support infrastructure and building structures. Thus as country develops, it required and consumes more.
What is troubling though is the talk about e-waste, with the mentioning that not many have the understanding, knowledge and practice of handling this. With phones in the numbers of billions, soon to be equivalent to the global population (in fact, adding PC, tablets and other gadgets, that number would already surpass the world population), how do we handle this material that is neither biodegradable or reusable after lifespan? Do we really need to keep changing our tech hardware all the time. In relationship to this book, it brings the question back to the need of buying and upgrading hardware constantly. Yes, its an upgrade, an improvement, but is it needed now?
Awareness to cost, awareness to how as individual we can play our part, awareness to how a material life cycle.
November 20, 2019
Václav Smil se v této knize zabývá nejpoužívanějšími materiály, způsobem jejich výzoby i v průběhu historie, objemy, ve kterých se spotřebovávají v průběhu času a energetickými náklady na jejich výrobu. Kromě statistik pro jednotlivé státy, kde se na mnoha stránkách sepisují statistická data, k čemuž by stačil ideálně jeden graf, je knížka velmi zajímavá a informativní. Druhá část se zabývá dematerializací - tedy snižováním materiálové náročnosti jendotlivých výrobků i ekonomik. Smil ukazuje, že na stejné výrobky je v průběhu času potřeba stále méně základních surovin, jako je ocel, hliník, papír a podobně. Současně s tím ale dochází ke stále větší spotřebě všech materálů, jak si zlevňující výrobky může dovolit čím dál více lidí a ja kčím dál více lidí bohatne. Nějaké celosvětové snížení těžby surovin tedy nejde v následujících generacích očekávat, ikdyž západní státy dosáhly ve většině surovin stavu nasycení, nebo jejich spotřeba dokonce klesá. Stačí to ale více než vyvažovat spotřeba samotné Číny, jejíž rostoucí a neefektivní ekonomika spotřebovává v mnoha oblastech polovinu celosvětových surovin. Začíná se k ní připojovat i Indie.
Poslední, relativně krátká, kapitola j eSmilův názor na to, co by se mělo dělat v budoucnu. Jeho ideálem je téměř bezsurovinová ekonomika, touží po řízeném poklesu spotřeby a HDP, chce zajistit všeobecnou rovnost a štěstí. Cílem snažení by podle něj mělo být minimalizování nárůstu entropie. Staví se proti volnému trhu a individuálním rozhodnutím, která jsou podle něj sobecká a hloupá a vedou ve svém důsledku k nespokojenosti toho, kdo je provedl. Vše to jsou naprosto nechutné levicové ideologické žvásty, které kazí závěr jinak zajímavé knihy. Všichni podobní autoři si tak nějak neuvědomují, že nejlépe minimalizují nárůst entropie mrtvoly a přesně k nim také nucené prosazování takovýchto ideí vede. Ještě nic nezlepšilo životní situaci tak velkého počtu lidí jako volný trh a svoboda jít za vlastními cíly. Samozřejmě s co nejmenšími možnými náklady.
Poslední, relativně krátká, kapitola j eSmilův názor na to, co by se mělo dělat v budoucnu. Jeho ideálem je téměř bezsurovinová ekonomika, touží po řízeném poklesu spotřeby a HDP, chce zajistit všeobecnou rovnost a štěstí. Cílem snažení by podle něj mělo být minimalizování nárůstu entropie. Staví se proti volnému trhu a individuálním rozhodnutím, která jsou podle něj sobecká a hloupá a vedou ve svém důsledku k nespokojenosti toho, kdo je provedl. Vše to jsou naprosto nechutné levicové ideologické žvásty, které kazí závěr jinak zajímavé knihy. Všichni podobní autoři si tak nějak neuvědomují, že nejlépe minimalizují nárůst entropie mrtvoly a přesně k nim také nucené prosazování takovýchto ideí vede. Ještě nic nezlepšilo životní situaci tak velkého počtu lidí jako volný trh a svoboda jít za vlastními cíly. Samozřejmě s co nejmenšími možnými náklady.
May 18, 2020
This is a book with over 30 pages of references - yes, it is dense with facts and figures.
Smil brings to light topics, that are overlooked. For one, the effect of concrete deterioration on the economy - at least $3.6 trillion for America by 2020 and many tens of trillions for China by 2030. Another being the increase in paper consumption even in our current digital age due to increased demand in cardboard boxes for packaging, coated papers for writing and for its use in sanitation.
He slices through some common place arguments. One of them being - Going digital is environmentally friendly. He argues that consumption has merely shifted from paper to consumption of materials required to keep digital servers up and running.
The main question that made me pick up this book was to answer the question - How can we become a society that consumes sustainably? Human beings aspire to be financially wealthy. This is associated with owning and consuming materials. With this mental model at play, as more individuals enter the “newly rich”, society will become a bit more unsustainable. Smil's answer to this question is that we will need a sufficiently threatening external driver to change our current rate of consumption. Think, eradication due to global warming in the next 10 years.
In summary - worth the time and effort but definitely not a fun read.
Smil brings to light topics, that are overlooked. For one, the effect of concrete deterioration on the economy - at least $3.6 trillion for America by 2020 and many tens of trillions for China by 2030. Another being the increase in paper consumption even in our current digital age due to increased demand in cardboard boxes for packaging, coated papers for writing and for its use in sanitation.
He slices through some common place arguments. One of them being - Going digital is environmentally friendly. He argues that consumption has merely shifted from paper to consumption of materials required to keep digital servers up and running.
The main question that made me pick up this book was to answer the question - How can we become a society that consumes sustainably? Human beings aspire to be financially wealthy. This is associated with owning and consuming materials. With this mental model at play, as more individuals enter the “newly rich”, society will become a bit more unsustainable. Smil's answer to this question is that we will need a sufficiently threatening external driver to change our current rate of consumption. Think, eradication due to global warming in the next 10 years.
In summary - worth the time and effort but definitely not a fun read.
July 30, 2023
This book had some interesting ideas, but overall it was quite dry and academic. The authors go into exhaustive detail about the history and science behind materials like steel, plastic, and silicon that have shaped the modern world. However, all of the scientific talk about properties and manufacturing processes made my eyes glaze over. I appreciate the research that went into this book, but it often felt like reading a textbook rather than an engaging exploration of how materials have changed society.
The author clearly know this subject area very well (zzzz), but did not do a great job of making the content relatable or tying it into broader social impacts. The book lacks compelling stories or examples that would have helped bring the topic to life. Instead, it barrage the reader with facts and figures that are soon forgotten.
In the end, I think this book will mainly appeal to a niche academic audience. The average reader is likely to get bored with the overly technical writing style and lack of narrative elements. I was hoping to gain some big picture insights into how materials have shaped the modern world, but this book was too narrowly focused on technical minutiae. Unless you have a specific interest in materials science, I'd suggest looking elsewhere for perspectives on how technology has changed society over time.
The author clearly know this subject area very well (zzzz), but did not do a great job of making the content relatable or tying it into broader social impacts. The book lacks compelling stories or examples that would have helped bring the topic to life. Instead, it barrage the reader with facts and figures that are soon forgotten.
In the end, I think this book will mainly appeal to a niche academic audience. The average reader is likely to get bored with the overly technical writing style and lack of narrative elements. I was hoping to gain some big picture insights into how materials have shaped the modern world, but this book was too narrowly focused on technical minutiae. Unless you have a specific interest in materials science, I'd suggest looking elsewhere for perspectives on how technology has changed society over time.
June 1, 2021
The book is impeccable when providing data, background and logical insights. However it is hard to read, the first part of the book or close to 60% can feel like a very slow, intensive and long theory class at the University. The rest becomes more interesting since changes from the theories to real work applications, that everyone can easily follow. The author is very detailed in many regards, this book is a reference book, not a "summer list" type of book, so, if you plan to read it, keep that in mind, and go the entire journey.
I also approached to this book since it was the more informative of his pieces, and it was in a short manner. I would love to come across a Smil's book aimed to the general public, not the nerdy of us, I would certainly read it.
Last comment, you will need to visualize the data in your mind in several occasions, there is no visual reference within the book
I also approached to this book since it was the more informative of his pieces, and it was in a short manner. I would love to come across a Smil's book aimed to the general public, not the nerdy of us, I would certainly read it.
Last comment, you will need to visualize the data in your mind in several occasions, there is no visual reference within the book
March 29, 2021
I've read Vaclav Smil's books before, so I knew what I was getting into. But for those who haven't, I have a fair warning: you will need to work through this dense with numbers, heavily researched book. It's less than 200 pages but feels like 400. However, I think this is the right way to write about such serious and complex topic as materials and their disposal. I've learned a lot about how various materials are produced, used and recycled. Also, I feel I'm left with much better understanding on where we are and how much work we need to do as a civilization to reverse the current trend of unconstrained resource consumption.
June 7, 2020
Woof. Mostly a barrage of specific stats in service of the argument that humanity uses lots of resources. The last couple chapters are more digestible than the first 2/3 of the book. Interesting points on the implications of China's building spree (lots to fix in the 2030s) and generally impressive in the breadth and depth of research, but not recommended.
November 15, 2021
An analytic more than prescriptive book. Takeaways are that
1. Efficiency of use of most materials has risen drastically in the last century
2. Counterintuitive, this has driven increased consumption as price of goods dropped and population has increased
3. Use of materials will likely continue to increase in coming years barring radical changes in lifestyle on a global basis
1. Efficiency of use of most materials has risen drastically in the last century
2. Counterintuitive, this has driven increased consumption as price of goods dropped and population has increased
3. Use of materials will likely continue to increase in coming years barring radical changes in lifestyle on a global basis
September 17, 2020
Dense book. Took a few false-starts before actually sitting down and reading it (and with notebook and pen in hand!). Good overview of global use of materials and materials in general. Good jumping off point if you really want to explore a particular material more in-depth.
August 12, 2021
Readability: Hard -o--- Easy
Practicality: Low -o--- High
Insights: Few -o--- Many
Length: Long ---o- Short
Overall: Bad -o--- Amazing
July 31, 2023
Not bad. There were definitely some good passages but altogether I thought it was quite dry. I usually really enjoy Smil’s way of quantitatively describing phenomena but somehow this book didn’t really do it for me in the same way.
October 3, 2017
Wait the numbers out
Hard to get through the marass of numbers in the first half of the book but rewarding analysis after that.
Hard to get through the marass of numbers in the first half of the book but rewarding analysis after that.
November 16, 2017
An comprehensive treatise on materialization and a compelling argument for the need of Dematerialisation.
April 27, 2019
Thorough.
Information dense.
Information dense.
September 3, 2019
Writing was super boring. I couldn't digest it.
October 28, 2019
One of my favorite books.
Every STEM student should read this book.
Every STEM student should read this book.
April 17, 2021
An elaborated explanation of the order in REDUCE - REUSE - RECYCLE.
July 17, 2021
Someone get this man an editor! Way too many details and numbers to convert the broader message.
November 9, 2021
Dry and lots of numbers but had some good insights on pollution
April 7, 2024
highly informative read about the materials that make up the modern world. technical at points but overall readable with minimal scientific background knowledge
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