Our thinking

Good Business Book Club – Material World by Ed Conway

4 October, 2024

At Good Business, we enjoy a non-fiction book, particularly one that’s filled with interesting facts and that makes us see the world differently. And Material World by Ed Conway hits both those buttons, as it goes deep into six of the materials (sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium) that underpin the modern economy and life as we know it. We may think we are all going digital; the truth is that the digital world is built on a colossal and largely hidden set of systems that span the globe and which require the extraction of millions of tonnes of basic substances that power everything we consume and almost everything we do.

Material World looks at these substances in depth. Where do they come from? What role do they play? And at what cost are they extracted? The social and environmental costs of our unsatiable appetite for these basic requirements for everything we take for granted – from roads to computers to plastic to the food we eat – are laid bare in this book. Weaning ourselves off oil means relying more heavily on batteries – which requires lithium. Digital working may save on transport costs but requires enormous amounts of copper and glass-based fibre optics to facilitate this. And our twin goals of decarbonisation and economic development are likely to collide as the solutions to a low carbon economy require us to rethink our dependency on the materials that underpin the world as we know it.

This has everything to do with sustainability. The quantity of materials extracted in 2019 was more than in the whole of human history up to 1950 and the availability of these materials may well be the limiting factor in future economic growth. Changing a business requires a deep understanding of critical materials, where they come from and the impact they have. Material World should be essential reading for anyone with an interest in this area.

By Claire Jost