U.S. is making do with less of most things, study finds
A new peer-reviewed research study developed a measurement of material usage that suggests from 1970 to 2020, the U.S. is using less of most materials overall — with the important exception of certain staple materials and electrification minerals.
The study’s author, Iddo K. Wernick, wrote a guest article on The Honest Broker, a Substack publication, that is worth excerpting at length:
As climate and energy have become essentially synonymous in our daily lexicon, climate studies have become replete with analyses of energy production. The abundance of energy analyses available today may not lead to simple conclusions, but governments can rely on the extensive efforts that have gone to measuring how society consumes energy and how that consumption might impact the natural environment.
What about materials? What about the physical resources used to construct our homes? Build roads, ports, airports, and vehicles? Distribute fuels and provide constant electric power? What about all of the materials used to construct and support the telecom cables and the data centers that support modern industrial societies?…
Can we measure how much material society uses? Can we capture the environmental impact of the materials society uses?
These questions are incredibly important, especially as governments consider undertaking vast industrial efforts to “electrify everything” through wind turbines, solar panels, battery storage, and transmission lines. The materials used to manufacture these technologies would be needed in large quantities.
The chart below, from Wernick’s study, shows the intensity of use of 100 commodities. Group 1 materials (41 of the 100 commodities) have “dematerialized in absolute terms and relative to the economy as a result of the diffusion of technology, changes in regulations, and market trends.” For 51 commodities in Group 2, these staples grew in absolute terms alongside population growth but grew less rapidly than economic growth.
Finally, the 8 commodities in Group 3 saw demand grow faster than economic growth. These materials include rhenium, diamond (industrial), garnet (industrial), indium, stone (dimension), gallium, titanium metal, and chicken. Gallium should be familiar as a crucial mineral for semiconductors, transistors, and some thin-film solar cells, which China banned for export to the U.S. in December 2024.
However, offshoring of production of raw materials and manufacturing may be disguising the U.S.’ true material usage. Wernick continues:
The decoupling of demand and economic growth for the majority of commodities suggests increasing efficiency in how materials are used in the US economy. Some herald this result as indicating that future economic growth need not mean more material use not only at home, but also globally.
Others focus on the fact that as services dominate the American economy, production has shifted offshore for many commodities. For critical materials like lithium and rare earths, US consumption today comes primarily in the form of products manufactured in other countries.
But can offshoring persist indefinitely? Can materials processors continue to find access to untapped resources with ever lower costs for labor and environmental compliance? …
Greater efficiency allows the rate of economic growth to outpace the reliance of physical materials, but as the economy expands it still absorbs more material, it just does so more efficiently. Also, as services have come to dominate the national economy, much heavy production has moved offshore and the importance of a functioning physical infrastructure has only grown…
Wernick concludes, and I concur:
For the rest of the globe, industrial development will happen. As the standard of living rises around the globe demand for materials will rise. We cannot eliminate the material flows that support modern industrial societies and should not aspire to, but we can take the lessons of the past to better manage them and integrate them with the natural environment.