Industries

Fields of economic activity, and the materials they consume.

• Aerospace manufacture

  Where weight is worth paying for — the industry that makes exotic materials ordinary and pays the price for them.

• Automotive manufacture

  The industry that buys more of most engineering materials than any other, and changes them faster than any other.

• Chemical manufacture

  The industry that turns a handful of feedstocks into tens of thousands of substances, and consumes materials mostly as plant.

• Construction

  The building of structures — by tonnage, the largest consumer of materials of any human activity.

• Electronics manufacture

  The industry that uses the widest range of elements of any — and the smallest quantity of most of them.

• Energy generation

  Turning something into electricity — and the industry whose material demands have changed more in twenty years than in the previous hundred.

• Medical devices

  Materials that must survive a body, and that a body must survive — where the qualification cost exceeds the material cost by orders of magnitude.

• Mining and quarrying

  The industry every other material industry starts with, and the one whose constraints are geological rather than technical.

• Semiconductor manufacturing

  The fabrication of integrated circuits, overwhelmingly on silicon wafers.

• Shipbuilding

  Structures the size of buildings that have to float in the most corrosive ordinary environment there is.