Material/Intro

Air, water and the twenty most abundant elements in the earth's crust give us nearly all of the raw material needed to create all the machines and goods that mankind requires, such as:

• Buildings and construction materials
• Cars, trains, ships and aircraft
• Industrial machinery
• Robots
• Computers and electronic products
• Food

Creating useful compounds of these fundamental elements simply involves energy (which is massively abundant) and the right processing. The point is that these reserves of material are not going to run out - processing and using up the entire earth's crust would be quite a challenge for even the most wasteful societies. However no-one (or at least no sensible person) is advocating wasteful processes just because material and energy are plentiful; one aspect of technological progress is the increasing efficiency of design and manufacturing – i.e. doing more with less.

Recycling should soon become far more widespread than it is now, further reducing the burden of having to process new material for creating goods and infrastructure. Product design and engineering will become increasingly sympathetic to the recycling process which is becoming increasingly automated.