Making the Modern World

Every civilization is built—literally—on materials. Vaclav Smil argues that understanding modern society means understanding its material metabolism: how humans extract, transform, move, and discard vast flows of matter powered by energy. You live in what Smil calls a material civilization, one that depends on metals, minerals, biomass, and synthetic compounds whose production now exceeds tens of gigatonnes per year. Beneath all abstractions of GDP or digital economy lies this physical foundation of energy, matter, and human ingenuity.

Energy and Matter as Co‑Drivers

Smil positions energy as the prime mover and materials as the manifestation of that energy. For most of human history, limited mechanical energy—human muscle, animals, sails, or water wheels—kept material use small and local. The industrial revolution, driven by fossil fuels, transformed that relationship: cheap mechanical and electrical power unleashed unprecedented flows of ores, cement, fertilizers, and synthetics. Industrial chemistry turned energy itself into new materials, from ammonia-based fertilizers to plastics derived from oil. The story of material civilization is, therefore, inseparable from the story of energy transitions.

Defining What Counts as a Material

Smil cautions that material accounting begins with choosing boundaries—what you decide to include. Include atmospheric oxygen and combustion dominates; exclude water or hidden mining overburden and total mass shrinks dramatically. Different traditions—WRI’s expansive models including “hidden flows” versus USGS’s narrow “raw materials for processing” lists—tell different stories. Smil favors a pragmatic core: focus on materials entering production—ores, biomass, fossil fuels in direct use, and key industrial gases. Boundaries create meaning; ignoring them distorts insights and policies.

From Natural Builders to Human Scale

By comparing human extractions to natural biological movers—coccolithophores precipitating calcite or termites moving clay—Smil places human activity in the biospheric context. Natural processes move comparable masses annually but recycle them locally or within ecological loops. In contrast, human materials are mined, refined, transported, and fixed into artificial landscapes that accumulate rather than cycle—roads, cities, and infrastructure that now outweigh all biomass on Earth. This contrast underscores both our scale and the novel irreversibility of human flows.

Milestones and Acceleration

The long road from chipped flints to the internet traces material advances constrained first by available energy and later expanded by fossil power. Stone, pottery, lime, bronze, and iron marked pre‑modern ingenuity, but energy scarcity capped scale. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries shattered that ceiling: steel, aluminum, cement, ammonia, plastics, and silicon baptized the modern world. By 2000, global steel exceeded 800 Mt annually, aluminum tens of millions of tonnes, plastics over 250 Mt—a magnitude unimaginable in preindustrial times. The capacity to mobilize gigatonnes redefined living standards and planetary impact.

Accounting, Impact, and Future Choices

Smil’s broader message is clear: measure carefully, interpret cautiously, and act pragmatically. Material flow accounts, life-cycle analyses, and energy intensities all hinge on the assumptions behind them. Understanding the energy cost per tonne, the embedded emissions, and the recycling pathways transforms abstract sustainability debates into physical realities. The path forward is not magical dematerialization but smarter materials—efficient design, durable products, recycling loops, and equitable access. Recognizing physical boundaries is the first step toward a saner, less wasteful material future.

Smil shows that the leap from scarcity to abundance came from unlocking fossil energy. Before fossil fuels, materials mirrored energy constraints: slow extraction, local stone and timber use, and craft‑based production. The conversion of coal, oil, and gas into mechanical and electrical power multiplied material throughput exponentially. Steam, electricity, and combustion engines turned human labor into industrial might.

From Muscle to Megawatts

Human and animal muscles dominated mechanical work for millennia. Water wheels and sails extended reach but remained geographically limited. The steam engine destroyed those limits. Coal‑fired power permitted railways, steelmaking, and mass manufacturing to scale beyond anything previously possible. Later, oil-fueled internal combustion and electricity completed energy’s conquest, creating mobile power, instant communication, and a global material economy.

Energy Access and Inequality

Modern material inequality mirrors energy inequality. Affluent minority societies enjoy infrastructures, durable goods, and disposable abundance while billions remain near subsistence. Access to affordable high‑quality energy determines not just productivity but material lifestyles—from apartment blocks to cars and appliances. Peter Menzel’s “Material World” photographs, families surrounded by all possessions, illustrate this divide vividly: energy explains the gap.

Energy Shifts and Material Substitution

When fuel mixes change, materials shift. Electrification cuts fuel flow but increases metal demand: copper for wiring, aluminum for motors, silicon for semiconductors. Transitioning toward renewables reshapes the composition, not just quantity, of materials used. Smil warns that energy transitions are material transitions; solar panels, turbines, and grids require vast inputs of metals and composites.

Energy as the Policy Lever

Material futures ultimately depend on energy futures. Efficiency and recycling help, but the energy basis—its source, cost, and distribution—defines feasible change. For genuine sustainability, reduce the carbon intensity of energy itself while improving how energy drives materials. Without addressing energy, talk of dematerialization is just a linguistic illusion.

You cannot manage what you do not measure, and how you count materials defines the story you tell. Smil surveys material flow accounting systems to show how boundaries, inclusions, and aggregation methods can either illuminate or obscure the real dynamics of material use.

Different Accounting Traditions

Three main traditions coexist: (1) the WRI–Adriaanse maximalist approach counts hidden flows and combustion oxygen; (2) Eurostat’s MFA covers biomass, fossil ores, and dissipative uses but excludes water and oxygen; (3) the USGS focuses strictly on raw materials entering production. Inclusion of oxygen, water, or poorly measured overburden can swell totals dramatically without aiding policy insights. Smil’s pragmatism—exclude what you cannot act on—filters noise from signal.

Pitfalls of Grand Totals

Hidden flows like mine overburden or eroded soil matter environmentally but should be treated separately rather than lumped into a single figure. Aggregating dissimilar items—solid stone, soil, combustion gases—produces technically correct but analytically misleading “totals.” Smil likens these to mixing apples and oxygen pears. Documentation of boundaries is thus an ethical as well as analytical necessity.

Interpreting Metrics

Concepts such as Direct Material Input or Domestic Material Consumption reflect different stages: extraction, trade, and hidden loads. Global studies that exclude water and oxygen converge near 50 Gt/year around 2000, but the truly processed materials entering industrial use are closer to 25 Gt/year—about 4 tonnes per person. Understanding this difference reframes what counts as “growth.”

Pragmatic Guidance

Start by clarifying purpose: Are you informing recycling policy, environmental performance, or long‑term resource management? Match boundaries to questions. Smil’s recurring principle—scope drives meaning—applies to any sustainability metric. Transparency outperforms maximalism when the goal is real insight.

Every kilogram of material embodies energy. Smil teaches you to see materials not as inert matter but as condensed labor, technology, and fuel. Comparing materials on energy terms exposes where environmental leverage lies.

Process vs. Economy‑wide Accounting

Two analytic methods dominate: process analysis (tracing steps and energy inputs) and input–output models (linking monetary flows to energy across industries). Process analysis gives engineering precision; IO analysis captures upstream chains but can exaggerate when aggregated too broadly. Using both helps approximate real embodied energy.

Energy Intensity Benchmarks

Energy needs vary dramatically: sawnwood 0.5–3.5 GJ/t; cement ~3.3–4.5 GJ/t; steel 16–20 GJ/t for best practice blast furnaces but only ~6 GJ/t using scrap; aluminum a staggering ~175 GJ/t; wafer‑grade silicon ~2700 GJ/t. Comparing these explains why aluminum or silicon substitution can worsen total energy even if mass decreases.

Transport and Scale Effects

Moving bulky matter consumes surprising energy. Bulk ships are efficient (~0.05 MJ/t·km) but trucks or aircraft multiply that cost. For low‑value, heavy materials like stone, transport can dominate the energy footprint. Local sourcing and reuse therefore matter more than exotic materials in reducing carbon cost.

Key message

Design choices should combine mass, durability, and embodied energy—not treat weight reduction as automatically sustainable. Aluminum or composites lighten vehicles but may raise production energy and emissions unless recycled effectively.

Recognizing embedded energy links the physical and environmental economies. When energy becomes cleaner, materials inherit fewer emissions; when production shifts across borders, embodied energy travels invisibly with trade. A genuine low‑carbon future thus requires tracking both where and how materials are energized.

Life‑cycle assessment (LCA) extends accounting beyond factories to entire product lives—from raw extraction to disposal. Smil values LCAs for exposing hidden burdens but warns that their validity depends on carefully drawn boundaries.

Indicators and Sensitivities

Standard LCAs track global warming potential, acidification, eutrophication, and smog formation, often expressed in CO2‑equivalents. Small boundary choices—whether to include feedstock energy or recycling credits—swing results. For example, asphalt may appear twice as energy‑intensive as cement if you count bitumen’s chemical energy as embodied fuel.

Use‑Phase and Durability

Many products consume more energy in use than in manufacture. Vehicles embody ~100 GJ but burn ~550 GJ as fuel over a decade; house heating often outweighs construction energy many times over. Omitting usage misleads priorities, favoring low‑energy manufacturing over long‑term efficiency improvements.

Blind Spots and Emerging Issues

LCAs rarely include chronic or diffuse harms such as oceanic plastic pollution or microplastic buildup. Counting only immediate emissions underestimates century‑scale ecological footprints. Multiple LCAs and sensitivity tests reveal how fragile quantitative comparisons can be.

Takeaway

LCA is a decision aid, not an oracle. It compares consistent systems, not absolute truths. Always test boundaries, time scales, and missing impact categories before drawing conclusions.

When done transparently, LCAs complement material flow and energy analyses. Together they translate abstract “sustainability” into measurable tradeoffs across time and space.

Many policymakers equate technical efficiency with dematerialization. Smil dismantles that assumption: relative efficiency gains rarely yield absolute reductions in material throughput because of rebound effects and consumption growth. Instead, progress lies in realistic recycling and smarter design.

Relative vs. Absolute Change

Semiconductors show dramatic relative dematerialization—each byte of memory now requires a billionth of the material once needed—but overall electronic material mass has ballooned because billions more devices exist. Cars exemplify the same paradox: engines grew tenfold in power yet vehicles became heavier. Efficiency enables affordability and expansion, not necessarily reduction.

Recycling Realities

Recycling performance varies sharply by material. Steel and aluminum are mass success stories: 37% and over 70% of production use scrap, saving up to 70–80% of energy. Paper achieves ~55% recovery but fiber degradation limits cycles. Plastics remain the Achilles’ heel: less than 10% of global post‑consumer plastics become new polymers. Technical barriers (polymer contamination, collection logistics) restrict progress. E‑waste, though rich in precious metals, suffers from informal and unsafe recovery systems.

The Rebound Problem

Jevons’ Paradox reappears: improved efficiency lowers cost per function, driving more total consumption. Energy‑intensity of GDP may fall, yet total energy use rises when industrial structures shift abroad or when saved money fuels new spending. Dematerialization in one sector often means rematerialization elsewhere.

Essential insight

Efficiency and recycling are necessary but not sufficient. Only if consumption stabilizes or products last longer will global material throughput plateau.

Smil’s realism points to systemic answers: design for longevity, incentivize returns with deposits, formalize e‑waste recycling, and moderate demand expectations. Real sustainability arises from both technological and behavioral shifts.

Smil’s final perspective is sober but hopeful. Absolute dematerialization—using less total material globally—is improbable soon, yet enormous efficiency gains and waste reductions remain within reach. The task is to use materials wisely and design economies that waste less even as they grow.

Drivers of Continued Growth

Population growth and the pursuit of higher living standards in developing countries guarantee rising aggregate material demand. Even modest convergence toward Western infrastructure levels implies decades of further growth in cement, steel, and polymers. Addressing climate and resource limits therefore requires slowing—not stopping—material expansion.

Four Ways to Waste Less

• Design efficiency: Architects and engineers can cut structural mass 20–50% through better design and digital optimization.
• Manufacturing rationalization: Reduce yield losses, adopt additive manufacturing, and reuse internal scrap.
• Recycling and disassembly: Build deposit and take‑back systems to capture dispersed small items like cans and electronics.
• Smart substitution: Replace materials only when life‑cycle benefits outweigh energy penalties—lightweight aluminum can backfire if primary energy remains fossil‑based.

Technology and Policy Together

New materials—graphene, composites, lithium batteries—offer performance leaps but introduce new extraction and disposal challenges. Smil emphasizes integrated solutions: product leasing, design for recyclability, responsible mining, and procurement standards that favor durability. Policy and behavior must complement innovation.

Final lesson

You can’t abolish materials, but you can manage them smarter. Sustainable prosperity depends on matching technological ingenuity with material restraint.

Smil’s closing message combines realism and agency: measure precisely, act pragmatically, and pursue efficiency with awareness of rebound. Societies that waste less—not those that dream of immaterialism—will shape a livable material future.