Animation by PostNew (voor The Correspondent)

Take a look at the world around you: the building you’re sitting in, the screen you’re looking at, the clothes you’re wearing, the vehicle that’s going to take you to your next appointment.

They are all things made by human beings.

There are more different types of “things” on this planet than there are organisms. As a comparison, there are at least 8,000 different “species” of mobile phone alone, while the number of currently recognised species of mammal is registered at 6,495.

And all those “things” are made out of something.

Only, we almost never think about what. Take something as simple as a pencil. Can you name the four base materials from which it is made? How about the 100+ materials making up the 400 parts of the cheapest toaster on the market?

Materials are the building blocks of our society, but we almost never think about them. “Even a diligent reader of economic news may go for days without seeing any reference to materials that form the physical foundation of modern civilisation,” scientist Vaclav Smil writes in his latest book Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities.

And yet, our relationship with those very materials is more important today than ever before. Of all the materials that we build our civilisation with (wood, aluminium, paper, all manner of metals, silicon – the list goes on and on), there are four that stand out due to the tremendous impact that they have on society and the environment.

I’m talking about concrete, steel, fertilisers and plastic. Take any one of these four away, and our society would look fundamentally different.

At the same time, these four materials are particularly polluting. The production of concrete and steel, taken together, is responsible for 15% of worldwide CO2 emissions. Synthetic ammonia, the primary component in fertiliser, is the main culprit behind the disruption of the natural nitrogen cycle. Plastic ends up in the sea, where it is slowly replacing all marine life. And the production of these four materials combined accounts for over 10% of worldwide energy consumption – most of it generated from fossil fuels.

It’s the Catch-22 of the 21st century: the materials we build our civilisation with are destroying our civilisation at the same time.

But how did it come to this? And can we change it?

The archaeologist’s view: material culture ...

I’m an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where I study how we deal with materials and how people through the ages have developed their knowledge and skills about materials. Some of you might be asking yourselves why an archaeologist would be focused on themes and questions like these. You might be thinking of asking me: “Aren’t archaeologists mainly occupied excavating amazing new finds and peering into the distant past?