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Material World
Industry

Construction

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

Construction consumes more material by mass than any other human activity, dominated by aggregate, cement and steel. Its material choices are therefore consequential far beyond the sector: cement and steel together account for a substantial share of global industrial carbon dioxide emissions largely because of how much of them construction uses.

Medium confidence Weak evidence checked recently · only one source, so there is nothing to cross-check it against · stated directly by the source

How this connects

Where a connection has been confirmed by an outside reference, that reference is named beside it.

uses

  • Portland cement — material
  • Steel — alloy
  • Granite — rock
  • Dimension stone — material · cladding, flooring, kerbs and monuments
  • Concrete — material · foundations, frames, floors and civil structures
  • Brick — material · load-bearing walls and cladding
  • Gypsum — mineral · plasterboard and plaster, and as the set retarder in cement
  • Basalt — rock · crushed as a premium aggregate for road base and ballast
  • Sandstone — rock · as building stone and as a source of construction sand
  • Slate — rock · roofing, flooring and cladding
  • Wood — material · structural timber, joinery and engineered panels
  • Soda-lime glass — material · glazing, facades and internal partitions
  • Stainless steel — alloy · cladding, fixings and structural elements exposed to weather
  • Polyvinyl chloride — material · pipe, window frames, cladding and cable, which is where most of it goes
  • Polyethylene terephthalate — material · as insulation board and geotextile, which is where a good deal of recycled bottle material ends up
  • EPDM — material · single-ply flat roofing membrane and glazing gaskets, chosen for a fifty-year exposure life
  • Polyurethane — material · insulation board and spray foam, and the sealants and adhesives around them
  • Phenolic resin — material · as the glue in plywood and engineered timber, which is a larger construction material than it is usually credited as being
  • Epoxy resin — material · anchoring reinforcement into hardened concrete, and injection repair of cracked structure
  • Crude oil — material · as bitumen for roofing and asphalt for roads — the bottom of the barrel, and a construction material by volume
  • Anodising — process · architectural aluminium, where a fifty-year finish is expected of a window frame
  • Reinforced concrete — material · frames, floors, foundations, bridges and dams — and its eventual corrosion is a materials failure rather than a design one
  • Aggregate — material · by mass the most extracted solid material on Earth, and invisible in most accounts of materials because it is cheap and local
  • Gypsum plaster — material · as plasterboard, which replaced a skilled wet trade with a dry one and is the internal surface of most modern buildings
  • Lime mortar — material · in conservation, where it is a requirement rather than a preference — a cement mortar harder than a soft historic brick destroys the brick
  • Mineral wool — material · insulation, fire stopping and the protection of structural steel
  • Asphalt concrete — material · the surface of nearly every paved road there is
  • Plywood — material · sheathing, flooring and concrete formwork, which is most of it by volume
  • Plastic — material · pipe, window profile, insulation and membrane — a share that sits in buildings for fifty years and is rarely part of the argument
  • Water — compound · for concrete, which consumes it chemically, and for the far larger volumes used washing aggregate and suppressing dust
  • Sand — material · which takes the great majority of it, and is why sand is the second most consumed material on earth after water

Sources

  • Material World
    Our own writing

Questions this page answers

Where it comes from, and what it becomes

Follow Construction back to what it starts as, and forward into what it becomes. Each step is a documented one — a real route material takes, not a chain of inference.

Upstream — what it comes from

  • Construction → uses → Steel → is composed of → Iron → is produced by (as pig iron, high in carbon and brittle until refined) → Smelting → takes as input (as the element removed, not added) → Oxygen → is produced by (the largest output by tonnage, and the reason air separation units sit beside steelworks) → Air separation
  • Construction → uses → Portland cement → is composed of (as calcium oxide within the clinker phases, not as free lime) → Quicklime → is produced by (the solid residue once carbon dioxide has been driven off) → Calcination → takes as input (heated until the carbonate decomposes to lime and carbon dioxide) → Limestone → is composed of → Calcite
  • Construction → uses (foundations, frames, floors and civil structures) → Concrete → is composed of (the binder — the expensive, energy-intensive, chemically active part) → Portland cement → is composed of (as calcium oxide within the clinker phases, not as free lime) → Quicklime → is produced by (the solid residue once carbon dioxide has been driven off) → Calcination → takes as input (heated until the carbonate decomposes to lime and carbon dioxide) → Limestone
  • Construction → uses (load-bearing walls and cladding) → Brick → is produced by (fired in a continuous tunnel kiln, the atmosphere governing colour as much as the temperature) → Firing → takes as input (to 1200–1300 °C, which is the vitrification that separates it from earthenware — and it is a temperature rather than a recipe) → Stoneware → is sourced from (a clay that survives 1200 °C and above, which an earthenware clay does not) → Clay → is sourced from (clay is chiefly what feldspar becomes when it weathers) → Orthoclase
  • Construction → uses (glazing, facades and internal partitions) → Soda-lime glass → is produced by (drawn off the tin bath as a sheet flat on both surfaces) → Float glass process → takes as input (with difficulty, which is why flat borosilicate costs several times what window glass does) → Borosilicate glass → is produced by (with boron oxide replacing most of the soda, which is what drops the thermal expansion to a third and lets a hot dish go into water) → Glass melting → takes as input (as the stabiliser, and without it a soda-silica glass would slowly dissolve in water) → Limestone
  • Construction → uses (cladding, fixings and structural elements exposed to weather) → Stainless steel → is composed of (the balance) → Iron → is produced by (as pig iron, high in carbon and brittle until refined) → Smelting → takes as input (as the element removed, not added) → Oxygen → is produced by (the largest output by tonnage, and the reason air separation units sit beside steelworks) → Air separation

These are the most distinct paths back. Construction can be traced through others besides.