Concrete and gravel make up 79% of the mass of everything humans have made
2015 estimate: concrete 0.42 trillion tonnes, gravel and other aggregates 0.34, out of 0.96. Bricks, asphalt, metals and everything else together: 21%.
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Item counts, prices and mass are different scales. The study estimates the weight of accumulated materials, rather than their economic value.
Bars share one scale. The source values and their units are listed below.
- Concrete trillion tonnes, 2020 study estimate
0.417 (2015)
- Aggregates: gravel etc. trillion tonnes, 2020 study estimate
0.344 (2015)
- Total in-use categories trillion tonnes, 2020 study estimate
0.96 (2015)
Use year-end 2015 components. Share = 100×(concrete + aggregates) / sum of six in-use categories, excluding waste. These are the Nature 2020 model data; “other” combines multiple materials and does not measure plastic alone.
Elhacham et al., Nature 588, 442–444 (2020), DOI 10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5; author files/code pinned to commit 5a0170a51d164c1cc98b232452e86feb1e4ee334. A teratonne is 10¹² tonnes. Human-made material stocks at year-end, not annual production. In-use total excludes separately retained waste. 1900–2015 are historical estimates; 2016–2037 are the 2020 study extrapolation, not 2026 observations or an updated forecast. Biomass is a global model estimate; irregular years are not interpolated. Dry excludes water; wet includes it using the authors’ dry-to-wet conversion assumptions. Biomass after 2017 is author extrapolation. Relative standard deviation retained in %, not a 95% interval. Crossings 2020±6 (dry) and 2037±10 (wet) are published model results sensitive to definitions and uncertainty, not precisely observed transition dates. We preserve source-table years, without reproducing the figure’s shifts or smoothing.
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