Lithium to Electric Vehicle
From a salt flat or a granite pegmatite to the pack under a car floor.
Copper to the Grid
From 0.5% rock to 99.99% cathode to the wire in a wall.
Rare Earths to Electric Motor
Seventeen near-identical elements, separated one at a time, ending as a magnet in a wheel.
Nickel to Battery Cathode
Two ore types, two processing routes, and a wall between them that took twenty years to break.
Sand to Semiconductor
Ordinary quartz to a crystal so pure that one stray atom in a billion is a defect.
Iron Ore to Steel
The largest material flow on Earth, and the hardest one to decarbonise.
Uranium to Electricity
Yellow powder to a fuel pellet the size of a fingertip that holds as much energy as a tonne of coal.
Phosphate to Food
A finite rock, a chemical plant, and the yield of every field on Earth.
Standing tree to house frame
The stump-to-stud route that most of the world's homes are built through, and where the value is actually added.
Plantation to cardboard box
How the trees a sawmill does not want become the packaging around everything bought online.
White oak to wine barrel
The one wood chain where the buyer is paying for a chemical property, and where two industries bid for the same logs.
Sawdust to power station
How a disposal problem at a sawmill became an internationally shipped energy commodity, and why policy is the whole market.