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How Many Materials 

Has China’s Urbanization Consumed?

In his book, Make the World Modern:Materials and Dematerialization, Professor Vaclav Smil discusses the materialsindispensable for modern world and everyday life, including biomaterials,construction materials, metals, plastics, industrial gases, fertilizers andmaterials in electronics. The most stunning statistic in this book is about China and concrete: China used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S.used in the entire 20th Century.

Vaclav Smil, 2013.Make the world modern: materials anddematerialization,Wiley.

Source: 

Picture source: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Making-the-Modern-World

On June 12, 2014, Bill Gates posted abook review on his website, Have You Hugged a Concrete Pillar Today?, introducing and reviewing a book, Make the World Modern: Materials and Dematerialization by Professor Vaclav Smil. This book discusses the materials indispensable formodern world and everyday life, such as wood, cement, and steel. It is full of mind-blowing facts and data. The most stunning statistic in thisbook is about China and concrete. China used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. used in the entire 20th Century.

Václav Smil is a Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. His interdisciplinary research interests encompass a broad area of energy, environmental, food, population, economic, historical and public policy studies.

Source:http://www.wired.com/2013/11/vaclav-smil-wired/

His nearly three dozen books have analyzed the world’sbiggest challenges—the future of energy, food production, andmanufacturing—with nuance and detail. They’re among the most data-heavy booksyou’ll find, with a remarkable way of framing basic facts. For instance, humansconsumed 17 percent of what the biosphere produced in 2013.

Make the WorldModern: Materials and Dematerialization tells the story ofhow human being use and make materials to improve the life quality. It alsolooks to the possibility of dematerialization in the future.

The story of humanity – evolution of our species; prehistoricshift from foraging to permanent agriculture; rise and fall of antique,medieval, and early modern civilizations; economic advances of the past twocenturies; mechanization of agriculture; diversification and automation ofindustrial protection; enormous increases in energy consumption; diffusion ofnew communication and information networks; and impressive gains in quality oflife – would not have been possible without an expanding and increasinglyintricate and complex use of materials. Human ingenuity has turned thesematerials first into simple clothes, tools, weapons, and shelters, later intomore elaborate dwellings, religious and funerary structures, pure and alloyedmetals, and in recent generations into extensive industrial and transportationinfrastructures, megacities, synthetic and composite compounds, and intosubstrates and enablers of a new electronic world.

This material progress has not been a linear advance but hasconsisted of two unequal periods. First was the very slow rise that extendedfrom pre-history to the beginnings of rapid economic modernization, that is,until the eighteenth century in most of Europe,until the nineteenth century inthe USA, Canada, and Japan, and until the latter half of

the twentieth century in Latin America, the Middle East, andChina.

How much further should the affluent world push its materialconsumption? Are any further increases associated with genuine improvements inquality of life? To what extent is it possible to divorce economic growth andimprovements in the average standard of living from increased materialconsumption? In other words, does relative dematerialization (reduced material useper unit of product or performance) lead to absolute decline in demand formaterials?

In order to answer these questions in a convincing manner Imust review the evolution of human material uses; describe all the principalmaterials, their extraction, production,and their dominant applications; andtake a closer look at the evolving productivities of material extraction,processing, synthesis, finishing, and distribution and at the energy costs andenvironmental impact of rising material consumption.

Table Global Population, Economic Product, and Production of Food, Major Materials, and Fuels，1900–2010

 I will also lookat possible actions that could reduce our dependence on materials whilemaintaining a good quality of life and narrowing the gap between affluent andlow-income economies. But the author also reminds us that we must realize thatin the long run even the most efficient production processes, the leastwasteful ways of design and manufacturing, and (for those materials that can berecycled) the highest practical rates of recycling may not be enough to resultin dematerialization rates great enough to negate the rising demand formaterials generated by continuing population growth, rising standards ofliving, and the universal human preference for amassing possessions. If thepoorest 80 percent of the planet reaches a living standard that’s just a thirdof what people in rich countries enjoy, the world should expect to continueusing more materials for generations to come. We can use aluminum as an exampleto illustrate this point. 

Source:https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Making-the-Modern-World

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.

The following is an edited excerpt from chapter 4 of this book. Readers can have an idea about how many materials China’s modernization and urbanization have consumed in the past 3 decades.

Materials in China‘s Modernization

China’s three post-1980 decades added up notonly to the fastest, but also to the largest, economic advance in history.

According to official statistics, between1980 and 2010 China’s annual rate of economic growth was 9.6% (IMF, 2013). Thisimplies a doubling every 7.3 years resulting in a 2010 GDP(in constant prices) 17.8 times higher than in 1980. In per capita terms, themultiple was still roughly 13-fold (NBSC, 2013; IMF, 2013).

In 1980, China’s economy was (in PPP terms)only about half the size of Italy’s, by 2010 it was the world’s second largest,more than twice as large as that of Japan (IMF, 2013).

In 2015, Chinese economy wasbigger than Japan，Germanyand UK combined.

Source: https://twitter.com/damienics/status/705641597107449859

Consumption of some materials has grown at an even fasterrate than has the expansion of GDP.

China’s huge post-1980 construction boom has engenderedunprecedented demand for all construction materials. A rough estimate is thatthe domestic extraction of construction minerals increased 25-fold between 1980and 2010, and that it nearly tripled during the first decade of thetwenty-first century (SERI, 2013). This overall output multiple was almost exactlymatched by the output of two major manufactured construction materials, cementneeded to make concrete, and plate glass.

The pace of China’s frenzied concretization and its overallscale has been stunning. In 1980 the country produced just short of 80 Mt ofcement, a decade later it had more than doubled the total to about 210 Mt, bythe year 2000 it rose to 595 Mt and by 2010 that total had tripled and reached1.88 Gt (nearly 24 times the 1980 total and 57% of the global production forless than 20% of the world’s population), and it rose further to 2 Gt in 2011(NBSC, 2013). 

Perhaps no other comparison illustrates the scale of this concretization better than this one: consumption of cement in the USA totaled about 4.56 Gt during the entire twentieth century – while China emplaced more cement (4.9 Gt) in new construction in just three years between 2008 and 2010, and in the three years between 2009 and 2011 it used even more, 5.5 Gt (NBSC, 2013).

Source:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/24/how-china-used-more-cement-in-3-years-than-the-u-s-did-in-the-entire-20th-century/

Poor quality and enormous overcapacity have also beenproblems in the plate glass industry, whose output increased 25 times between1980 and 2010, from about 25 to 630 million weight cases, or from just 1.25 to31.5 Mt (NBSC, 2013). China thus produced 60% of the world’s flat glass demandof about 55 Mt in 2010. Moreover, a major share of that excess capacity hasbeen in energy-intensive and highly polluting enterprises; their output ofroughly 20 Mt, or nearly two-thirds of the total production, was low-qualityfloat glass.

Expansion of China’s steelmaking has matched almost exactlythe pace of GDP growth: raw steel output rose 17.2 times between 1980 and 2010,from 37.1 Mt in 1980 to 637.4 Mt in 2010, when it accounted for nearly 45% ofthe global output (WSA, 2013). But as the extraction of iron ores increasedabout 14 times (from 75 000 t to 1.07 Gt) an increasing share of this outputhas come from imported materials. China has been by far the largest iron oreimporter (nearly 60% of the global total and close to 70% of the domesticdemand) with Australia and Brazil being the major suppliers. 

And while the country has been the near-monopolistic exporter of rare earths and a major exporter of molybdenum and magnesium (also of graphite), it has been also the world’s largest importer of bauxite (44 Mt in 2010) and, at nearly 1.2 Mt in 2010, of copper ores and concentrates.

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).

But the material category that has seen the greatest production increase has been the synthesis of plastics, with a nearly 70-fold rise between 1980 and 2010. Of course, that large multiple is due to a rapid development from a very low base (less than 900 000 t in 1980) but the absolute output of 62 Mt in 2010 was larger than the production of about 57 Mt in EU27 (Europe Plastics, 2011).

Finally, the need to secure more food and better nutrition for a still-growing population has led to substantial gains in the production (and imports) of fertilizers. New Haber – Bosch plants were added to raise the output of nitrogenous fertilizers from 10.3 Mt N in 1980 to 45.2 Mt in 2010, but in 2009 the record output was 48.6 Mt N, a nearly 5-fold increase in three decades, while production of phosphate fertilizers posted a roughly 8-fold increase to 19 Mt. Disparity between N and P growth rates is explained by China’s attempt to move away from excessive nitrogen uses toward more balanced fertilization with N:P:K ratios improving the efficiency of applications. As a result, China has been buying record amounts of potash from Canada.

China has also become a prominent importer of materials for recycling, and the USA has been their greatest supplier. This trade is certainly one of the most remarkable indicators of changing national fortunes, as the world’s largest affluent economy has become the primary supplier of waste materials to the second largest economy experiencing a rapid rate of growth. In 2011 the USA exported more than $11 billion of waste and scrap (materials belonging to the 910 category of the North American Industry Classification System) to China. This was less than the exports of transportation equipment or agricultural products – but more than the exports of all nonelectric machinery and more than five times as much as the shipments of all electrical equipment and appliances (Smil, 2013). China is also the world’s largest importer of plastic and electronic waste.

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