Everything is made
from something else
Twenty-one materials, explained properly — and the connections between them. The acid that leaches copper is made from the waste gas of a copper smelter. The limestone in your walls is the same rock that strips impurities out of steel.
From the ground to the things you use
Almost nothing is made from one thing. Follow any material left to right and it ends up somewhere you would recognise — and follow a destination back and you find four or five materials feeding it.
Tap a material to follow it forward — or tap a destination to see what it’s made from
Swipe the diagram sideways →
Twenty-one, in three families
Each page walks the whole process, from the rock in the ground to the thing in your hand, with every figure sourced.
Cement & Concrete
The most-used manufactured material there is, made by taking a rock apart at 1,450 °C and letting it reassemble in water.
Its CO₂ comes from the rock, not the fireLimestone & Lime
Burn it, slake it, leave it in the air, and it slowly turns back into stone. The one material that runs in a loop.
The one material that returns to stoneGlass
Sand, soda ash and limestone melted together. What decides whether it becomes a window or optical fibre is how the melt is shaped.
Same recipe, five different productsIron & Steel
Iron ore is rust. Getting the oxygen back out takes 1,500 °C and a tonne of carbon — which is the whole decarbonisation problem in one sentence.
1.85 billion tonnes a yearCopper
Rock that is more than 99% waste becomes the metal carrying electricity through almost everything you own.
0.5% ore → 99.99% cathodeAluminium
The commonest metal in the crust, and one of the hardest to free from its ore. Smelting it is really a way of storing electricity.
Recycling uses 5% of the energyNickel
Two unrelated rocks give the same metal by completely different routes — and most of the world’s supply comes from the harder one.
Two ores, no shared processZinc
The metal that rusts on purpose: it corrodes so the steel it coats doesn’t. Winning the pure metal is so hard that most is made with electricity, not fire.
~60% just protects steelCobalt
Over 98% surfaces as a by-product of copper and nickel, and about 73% comes from a single country — the battery metal the world can’t simply make more of.
>98% is a by-productLithium
Abundant but rarely concentrated — it hides in rock and brine beside near-identical ions. Making it is a problem of separation, not mining.
Separation, not miningPlatinum Group Metals
Six near-identical metals arrive together in traces — it can take 10–40 tonnes of rock and half a year to make one ounce of platinum.
Up to 40 tonnes of rock per ounceSilicon
Ordinary sand, climbed up a purity ladder — a furnace makes metal for alloys, a chemical route makes the nine-nines wafer a chip is cut from.
From sand to 99.9999999% pureSilver & Gold
Too unreactive to smelt and too dilute to see — and most silver is a by-product of mining something else. Both are rebuilt from dissolved rock to 99.99% pure.
Most silver is never mined on purposeSulphuric Acid
The most-produced chemical on Earth, and most of it begins as a pollutant someone had to clean up.
Most-produced chemical on EarthCoal
The one industrial raw material nobody manufactures. What we do is find it, wash it, and split it three ways.
Nobody manufactures itAmmonia
Nearly half the world is fed by nitrogen pulled from the air — a reaction so hard it uses roughly 2% of global energy.
Feeds nearly half the worldBoron
Boron never occurs pure. The world digs borate minerals from two deserts, then dissolves and re-grows them as crystals of borax and boric acid.
The element you can’t minePhosphate Salts
Life can’t do without phosphorus and nothing replaces it. Freeing it from insoluble rock takes acid — and buries gypsum by the tonne.
~5 tonnes of gypsum per tonneSoda Ash
A simple powder the world can’t do without — yet there’s no clean way to get it: you either mine a rare mineral or build it from salt and limestone.
Mined or built, never simpleNatural Gas
Raw gas leaves the well wet and sour. Cleaning it to pipeline spec — then moving a gas that resists being moved — is the whole job.
Fires power stations, feeds ammoniaGraphite
Battery-grade graphite is 99.95% pure carbon, reached from low-grade ore or from petroleum coke baked at 3,000 °C.
The anode in almost every batteryReal answers, not simplified ones
Most explanations of how things are made are either too shallow to be satisfying or written for people who already work in the industry. These pages aim at the space between: everything explained in plain language, but nothing simplified to the point where you would have to unlearn it later.
Every figure is sourced — USGS, the IEA, worldsteel, the International Aluminium Institute, the Nickel Institute and industry associations — and estimates are labelled as estimates. Where a number is derived rather than reported, it says so.
Questions, corrections or a material you’d like to see explained? Email [email protected].
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A short note with each new page — how something is really made, and the connections that surprised me along the way. A couple a month at most, and you can unsubscribe anytime.