The Making Of
How things are actually made

Everything is made
from something else

Nine materials, explained properly — and the connections between them. The acid that leaches copper is made from the waste gas of a copper smelter. The limestone in your walls is the same rock that strips impurities out of steel.

The map

From the ground to the things you use

Almost nothing is made from one thing. Follow any material left to right and it ends up somewhere you would recognise — and follow a destination back and you find four or five materials feeding it.

Tap a material to follow it forward — or tap a destination to see what it’s made from

From the ground to the things you use

Swipe the diagram sideways →

The materials

Nine, in three families

Each page walks the whole process, from the rock in the ground to the thing in your hand, with every figure sourced.

Construction The materials the built world is made of — and three of the largest CO₂ sources on Earth.

Cement & Concrete

The most-used manufactured material there is, made by taking a rock apart at 1,450 °C and letting it reassemble in water.

Its CO₂ comes from the rock, not the fire

Limestone & Lime

Burn it, slake it, leave it in the air, and it slowly turns back into stone. The one material that runs in a loop.

The one material that returns to stone

Glass

Sand, soda ash and limestone melted together. What decides whether it becomes a window or optical fibre is how the melt is shaped.

Same recipe, five different products
Metals Four ways of persuading a rock to give up the metal locked inside it.

Iron & Steel

Iron ore is rust. Getting the oxygen back out takes 1,500 °C and a tonne of carbon — which is the whole decarbonisation problem in one sentence.

1.85 billion tonnes a year

Copper

Rock that is more than 99% waste becomes the metal carrying electricity through almost everything you own.

0.5% ore → 99.99% cathode

Aluminium

The commonest metal in the crust, and one of the hardest to free from its ore. Smelting it is really a way of storing electricity.

Recycling uses 5% of the energy

Nickel

Two unrelated rocks give the same metal by completely different routes — and most of the world’s supply comes from the harder one.

Two ores, no shared process
Energy & Chemicals The inputs that almost every other process depends on.

Sulphuric Acid

The most-produced chemical on Earth, and most of it begins as a pollutant someone had to clean up.

Most-produced chemical on Earth

Coal

The one industrial raw material nobody manufactures. What we do is find it, wash it, and split it three ways.

Nobody manufactures it
Why this exists

Real answers, not simplified ones

Most explanations of how things are made are either too shallow to be satisfying or written for people who already work in the industry. These pages aim at the space between: everything explained in plain language, but nothing simplified to the point where you would have to unlearn it later.

Every figure is sourced — USGS, the IEA, worldsteel, the International Aluminium Institute, the Nickel Institute and industry associations — and estimates are labelled as estimates. Where a number is derived rather than reported, it says so.