Material World Quotes

“You can get anything you want from anywhere in the world at a bargain price, but don't [whatever you do] expect to understand how it was made or how it got to you.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“This is a magical metal: alongside hydrogen and helium it was one of the three primordial elements created in the Big Bang, making it one of the oldest pieces of matter in the universe. No other element has quite the same combination of lightness, conductivity and electrochemical power.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“For all the attention lavished on other sources of greenhouse gases such as aviation or deforestation, the production of cement generates more CO2 than those two sectors combined. Cement production accounts for a staggering 7–8 per cent of all carbon emissions.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“Khewra salt mine in Pakistan, which is said to date back to the era of Alexander the Great. You’ve probably encountered Khewra salt before; it is better known these days as pink Himalayan salt, though the mine is actually about 200 miles from the Himalayan foothills, making this a cheeky bit of marketing, a little like bottling London’s River Thames and selling it as Yorkshire Dales spring water.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“And the deeper one delves, the clearer it is that each of these supply chains is interwoven with another. We are in a web, not a chain.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“there is an important distinction between this use of fossil fuels and the way we mostly used them in the preceding three centuries. Here, we are building with them, not burning them.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

“As things stand, China controls about 80 per cent of the world’s battery production capacity. Indeed, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, one of the chroniclers of this new era of gigafactories, even if all the European and American grand visions for battery production actually materialised, by the beginning of the 2030s China will still be turning out seven out of every ten batteries produced anywhere in the world.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

“My men can eat their belts,’ General George S. Patton told Dwight Eisenhower, ‘but my tanks have gotta have gas.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

“Electricity is no longer just the second greatest thing in the world after God; it is the first great hope for addressing climate change.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

“If much of what makes us human is our determination to turn one substance into another, then salt is among our most important tools.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

“What makes this all the more discomforting is not merely the bad stuff—the carbon emissions whose consequences we are finally starting to understand, the particulate pollution in our cities and the plastic waste in our seas—but the good stuff too. It is the billions of lives lived thanks to oil and gas. It is the fact that oil and gas are so useful as well as so destructive.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“Reducing our carbon footprint will mean increasing our copper footprint.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“And iron is indeed everywhere. It courses through our bodies in our red blood cells. It is the main element in the planet’s core and the second most abundant metal in the earth’s crust (at 5 per cent, after aluminium which is 8 per cent).”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“To say that concrete is everywhere is hardly an exaggeration. Despite the fact that we only began mass producing this mixture of sand, aggregates and cement just over a century ago, there are now more than 80 tonnes of concrete on this planet for every person alive – around 650 gigatonnes in total. To put that slightly meaningless number into perspective, it is considerably more than the combined weight of every single living thing on the planet: every cow, every tree, every human, plant, animal, bacterium and single-celled organism. Each year we produce enough concrete around the world to cover the entire landmass of England.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“No one knows for sure who first invented glass. The earliest and most famous origin story comes from Pliny the Elder, the Roman soldier-intellectual who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79. The tale goes that many centuries earlier, Phoenician sailors had landed on a beach in what is now Israel. The Phoenicians, the great traders of the ancient era, were importing blocks of natron, an early form of soap rich in sodium (natron is why sodium’s chemical symbol is Na). Before turning in for the night, the Phoenicians lit a fire on the beach, and in the absence of anywhere else to rest their pots, they perched them on some of the natron blocks. As they lit their fire and heated the blocks of natron, something extraordinary happened. Pliny writes: “Upon its being subjected to the action of the fire, in combination with the sand of the seashore, they beheld transparent streams flowing forth of a liquid hitherto unknown: this, it is said, was the origin of glass.”[5”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“Indeed, if you’re on a pristine beach in the Caribbean or Hawaii, the chances are that your feet are probably sinking into parrotfish excrement: the fish eat the corals, extract the nutrients, and poop the remaining calcium carbonate on to the seabed. For the most part, the whiter and warmer the beach, the more likely it is to have come out of the bottom of a parrotfish.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“There are tektites: glassy pebbles created by meteorites or comets smashing into the earth’s surface, bits of which then fuse into shiny stones. There are fulgurites: gnarly, hollow tubes you sometimes find on a beach or dune after a lightning strike.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“Obsidian, a jet-black stone used by our prehistoric ancestors as a tool, is actually a kind of volcanic glass formed by magma as it rapidly cools into stone.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“In the Cheshire town of Northwich, not far from where the brine comes out of the ground, you will find another part of this salt diaspora, an old ICI site run these days by Tata Chemicals, which also owns British Salt. That the Cheshire salt which once provided Gandhi with the cause for his iconic satyagraha is now being produced by an Indian company is one of those ironies little appreciated outside the Material World.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“A few years ago some geologists sifted through the data [and] estimated that the amount of sand, soil and rock we humans mine and quarry and dredge each year is some 24 times greater than the amount of sediment moved each year by Earth’s natural erosive processes, which is to say rivers grinding away sand and sending it down towards the sea. Humans, in other words, are a considerably bigger geological force than nature itself, and have been, according to the data, ever since 1955. Or – another way of looking at it – by 2020 the total weight of human-made products, from iron to concrete and everything else besides, was greater than the total weight of every natural living thing on the planet.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“Brothers and sisters,’ said the man. ‘I want to tell you this. The greatest thing on earth is to have the love of God in your heart, and the next greatest thing is to have electricity in your house.’

This was the early 1940s. The man was a farmer, speaking at a church in rural Tennessee. His farm had been electrified not long before and he was occasionally seen out there, sitting on a knoll, gazing in wonder at the lights blazing out from his house, his barn and his smokehouse.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization