Everything humans have built and made weighs 27 times as much as in 1900
According to a 2020 Nature study, the mass of concrete, bricks, asphalt, metals and other materials in buildings, roads and objects grew from 0.036 to 0.96 trillion tonnes by 2015.
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Concrete, aggregates, bricks, asphalt, metals and other materials accumulate. These are in-use object stocks; waste is retained separately and excluded from this total.
The whole line is the 2020 study’s historical estimate, trillion tonnes at year-end. The measure counts in-use materials; published extrapolations are stored separately.
- Human-made in-use mass trillion tonnes, 2020 study estimate
0.036 (1900) → 0.96 (2015)
Sum six stock categories in anthropogenic_mass_2015.xlsx from the pinned author repository. Compare year-end 1900 and 2015. These are source model estimates, not a direct weighing of the world. Post-2015 values are excluded from the annual indicator.
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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