Every material,
every process
Filter by what a material is, or by where you meet it. Each page walks the full process with every figure sourced.
Iron & Steel
Iron ore is rust. Getting the oxygen back out takes 1,500 °C and a tonne of carbon — the whole decarbonisation problem in one sentence.
Copper
Rock that is more than 99% waste becomes the metal carrying electricity through almost everything you own.
Aluminium
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.
Nickel
Two unrelated rocks give the same metal by completely different routes — and most of the world’s supply comes from the harder one.
Zinc
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.
Cobalt
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.
Lithium
Abundant but rarely concentrated — it hides in rock and brine beside near-identical ions. Making it is a problem of separation, not mining.
Platinum 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.
Silicon
Ordinary sand, climbed up a purity ladder — a furnace makes ~99% metal for alloys, a chemical route reaches nine-nines for chips, then adds impurities back.
Silver & 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.
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.
Limestone & 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.
Glass
Sand, soda ash and limestone melted together. What decides whether it becomes a window or optical fibre is how the melt is shaped.
Sulphuric Acid
The most-produced chemical on Earth, and most of it begins as a pollutant someone had to clean up.
Coal
The one industrial raw material nobody manufactures. What we do is find it, wash it, and split it three ways.
Ammonia
Nearly half the world is fed by nitrogen pulled from the air — a reaction so hard it uses roughly 2% of global energy.
Boron
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.
Phosphate Salts
Life can’t do without phosphorus and nothing replaces it. Freeing it from insoluble rock takes acid — and buries gypsum by the tonne.
Soda 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.
Natural 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.
Graphite
Battery-grade graphite is 99.95% pure carbon, reached from low-grade ore or from petroleum coke baked at 3,000 °C — which is why China controls the supply chain.
No material matches both filters.