The Materials Transition: How Everything We Make Can Be Made Better
* a backgrounder for a series of future posts about companies and technologies of the materials transition
Climate change is one of a tangle of existential crises. Slashing emissions (net zero) and reducing waste (circularity) are essential, but not enough to avert environmental catastrophe. The materials transition is a complete rethink of how everything around us can be made better, smarter and different. Coupled with the energy transition, the materials transition provides a way to navigate through the polycrisis, threading the needle of dwindling resources and the needs of a growing population. Introducing “negamatts” (the materials twin of Amory Lovins’ “negawatts”) to highlight benefits that can cascade across sectors from not using business-as-usual materials and processes. Understanding the implications of materials supply chains, manufacturing and distribution enables dynamic strategic systems thinking.
Researching a book about the materials—a topic literally as vast as everything you can imagine—has sent me into silo-skipping overload:
Textiles. Packaging. Construction. Energy. Digital. Agriculture. Body (implants, fillings, drug coatings, make-up).
Solid. Liquid. Gas. Plasma.
Nano. Molecular. Cellular. Structural. Process. Systems. Design.
Mining. Drilling. Manufacturing. Agriculture. Water.
Colors. Coatings. Supply Chains. Logistics.
We are in the midst of a materials transition every bit as significant and critical as the energy transition. In fact, the energy transition, which comes with a long list of materials needed to make solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear reactors, batteries and power grids, isn’t possible without a materials transition.
The materials transition is a complete rethink of how everything from fabric dyes to construction materials and computer chips can be made better, smarter, different. Waste streams, including CO2 emissions, become feedstocks. Supply chains are simplified and shortened. Toxic chemicals, including petrochemicals, are replaced or designed out of the mix. New materials are invented. New uses are found. Efficiencies in energy, water, production and distribution are the guiding metrics.
The energy transition is about replacing greenhouse gas-spewing coal, oil and gas with emissions-free solar, wind, geothermal, wave power, hydrogen, batteries, and nuclear. Yet climate change driven by rising levels of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere is not the only existential threat. And the goal of “net zero” through the electrification of everything, while essential, will not be enough to prevent ecological collapse and economic disaster.
The facts are eye-crossing: The population is expected to spike another 20% over the next 25 years to nearly 10 billion people, on a planet facing shortages of everything from water to copper. Forty percent of arable land is now considered “degraded.” Biodiversity is in rapid decline (including the dramatic loss of pollinators, upon whom the entire food pyramid rests). Micro and nano plastics are in brains, lungs and wombs. Petrochemicals have poisoned land and water. The heat and humidity keep rising.
We are in the thick of a full-on polycrisis, a Gordian knot of catastrophes. Tipping points are tipping, colliding, merging and amplifying each other.
MORE AND LESS
More people means more of absolutely everything will be needed, including more of what we don’t yet know we need. Twenty years ago, no one needed an iPhone because it hadn’t been invented yet. Back then, only the Chinese had the foresight to realize that rare earth elements, an obscure collection of 17 metals with names that look like typos, could be leveraged for global geopolitical gain.
Circularity, which waves the banner for “reduce / reuse / recycle,” is a move in the right direction, replacing the industrial-age, linear paradigm of “take / make / waste.” But you can’t recycle your way to more. And quite a lot has been wasted.
By some estimates there could be more gold embedded in e-waste rotting in landfills than there is in Fort Knox. Meanwhile, all the easy-to-get metals have been mined. Instead of five pounds of copper for every hundred pounds of blasted rock, which was typical a century ago, the ratio today might be as little as one pound of copper for every 300 pounds of blasted rock. With demand soaring thanks to AI (data centers) and electrification (the energy transition), industry experts warn of a looming “copper famine.” There is still plenty of copper to be found, but it is much more difficult and expensive to mine; it can take nearly 30 years and a half-trillion dollars to open a new mine. And that’s only one metal. Even aluminum, a near infinitely recyclable metal, is facing headwinds.
Shortages and chokepoints plague almost every supply chain, including the supply chain for silicon used to make chips. The impacts aren’t limited to the pricey Nvidia chips coveted (and hoarded) by big tech companies competing to win the AI race, but also the gazillions of chips that are in practically everything: cars, washing machines, phones, toys, power tools and doorbells. Between wear and tear and obsolescence, the average lifespan of a chip from quarry to landfill could be a dozen years. Maybe less.
Phosphorous has been called “life’s bottleneck”: a finite, essential nutrient upon which all life depends and for which is no substitute. Not only is phosphorous a key ingredient in fertilizers, these days it is also used to make lithium-ion batteries, steel, concrete and even food additives. An estimated 80% of the world’s supply is concentrated in just one country: Morocco.
Freshwater, which can be an ingredient, a medium, or a material, is a declining resource that is used for everything: drinking, farming, mining, manufacturing, cooling, extracting oil and gas, and as steam to make electricity from coal, gas, oil or nuclear.
So much water has been pumped out of the Earth’s aquifers, the planet’s “true north” axis tilts a little more each year, enough to affect GPS readings. Mountain glaciers, whose seasonal ebbs and flows provide water for an estimated two billion people, are shrinking. This isn’t a gentle, drip, drip, drip melting, but a dramatic thawing that can cause catastrophic floods and landslides, followed by permanent drought.
At the same time, higher temperatures evaporate more water from polar ice caps, oceans, lakes, ponds, streams, rivers and also soil—which has been steadily drying out over the last twenty years. Rising sea levels pose yet another threat, pushing saltwater into aquifers and land.
Underground, ground, frozen and surface freshwater is turning into water vapor, a greenhouse gas that further warms the planet. Terrestrial tributaries are rushing into aerial rivers that can deliver biblical amounts of rain.
So is water a climate change problem? Or the other way around?
Polycrisis.
ARCS
To rethink materials, look to Nature, where absolutely nothing is wasted, with life form, micro to macro, constantly becoming and coming apart, often at the same time. Everything breaks down into components, molecules and eventually elements. Birds use rabbit fur to line nests, while rabbits prefer leaves for their burrows. The fur, the leaves, the birds and the rabbits will at some point become fodder for microbes and fungi. A feather that once soared high above the clouds will in time find its way deep underground, a feast for the denizens of the soil’s microbiome.
It’s recycling, up-cycling, down-cycling, side-cycling and divvied-up-cycling; renewal as a series of large and small multidirectional arcs.
Nature does arcs, not circles. It is not about a cradle turning back into a cradle, but instead how the component parts of the cradle might be used to build other things once it is done functioning as a cradle.
That baked-in resourcefulness is key to creating abundance. An old-growth forest can support far more species and larger populations than the monoculture tree farm planted to replace it. An old forest is brimming with arcs, which also makes it a much more effective carbon sink. A biodiverse ecosystem has a greater complexity in its chains of predator-and-prey and waste-to-feedstock. It keeps more carbon cycling among more carbon-based life forms living near or beneath the surface. Carbon is sequestered in life itself. This is Gaia in action: Earth as a self-regulating system where life creates the conditions for life.
AN IDEA WHOSE TIME KEEPS COMING
The need to be smarter about using resources is hardly a new insight.
In the early 1990s, industrial ecology and industrial symbiosis emerged as academic disciplines to bring the lessons of the old-growth forest and other thriving ecosystems to manufacturing. In 1992, architect Bill McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart published Cradle to Cradle, an immensely popular book that introduced the idea of parallel regenerative metabolisms of biological and technological nutrients that must be kept apart for a healthy planet. A few years later, Janine Benyus published Biomimicry, single-handedly inventing and branding a design discipline that takes its cues from nature where there is no waste. And in 2010, Dame Ellen MacArthur started her eponymous foundation to promote the circular economy.
All of them drew inspiration from the work of architect Walter Stahel, who coined the phrase “cradle to cradle” in 1970, and from a team led by environmentalist and pioneering data scientist Donella Meadows that published Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind in 1972.
The roots of that work, in turn, go back to the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus who published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 arguing that the human population would always be doomed to outgrow its food supply, no matter how many technical fixes were used to improve production.
Ben Franklin, an avid paper recycler, lived by the dictum, “Waste not, want not.” Marine biologist Rachel Carson warned about the consequences of bludgeoning delicate ecologies with powerful poisons in her book, Silent Spring. Conservationist Aldo Leopold championed a Land Ethic.
The story of Joseph in the Book of Genesis is about preparing for inevitable periods of famine: the need to develop strategies that level out nature’s cycles of boom and bust. That people ought to live in balance with nature is a central tenet in indigenous cultures all over the world.
What’s new is the polycrisis.
In the 18th century when Malthus and Franklin were writing, atmospheric carbon levels hovered around 280 parts per million, well below the 350 ppm considered to be the limit of climate stability. The global population was one billion.
By the 1940s, during Leopold’s time, the numbers were 310 ppm and 2.3 billion.
In 1962, when Silent Spring was first serialized in the New Yorker: 318 ppm and 3.1 billion.
A decade later, when The Limits to Growth was published: 327 ppm and 3.8 billion.
Twenty years after that when Cradle to Cradle was published: 356 ppm and 5.5 billion.
In 2010, when the Ellen MacArthur Foundation was founded: 390 ppm and 7 billion.
Today, in 2025: 430 ppm and 8.2 billion.
In the span of a dozen generations, the Earth’s weather has gone from predictable and stable to increasingly erratic and extreme, while the human population has exploded eight-fold and is still growing.
MAPPING THE POLYCRISIS
Since 2011, economist Kate Raworth has been working on visualizations to describe the breadth and depth of the polycrisis. Her signature “doughnut” graph, recently updated for its third iteration, is now also available as an unrolled “baguette.”
Raworth focuses on two parameters: The outer ring of the doughnut represents Earth’s Ecological Ceiling, beyond which natural systems fail. The inner ring marks the Social Foundation, the bare minimum required for human well-being. The trick is to stay within the green of the doughnut or baguette.
It is not going well.
The columns in red indicate trouble. More red, more trouble.
It is easy to see where the problems are and also compare disparities of impact. The richest countries causing the most environmental damage suffer the fewest social impacts, while it’s the other way around for the poorest countries.
What the graphs don’t show are the relationships between crises. Is there a correlation between climate change, an environmental problem, and food insecurity, a social concern? Do water shortages affect social cohesion? Does nutrient pollution impact ocean acidification?
The good news in the very bad news of a polycrisis is that everything connects. That’s an opportunity. If a change in one area can make things worse in others, then there is also the potential for a change to trigger far-reaching ripples of benefits. To navigate out of a polycrisis, find ways to leverage its complex dynamics to advantage.
NEGAWATTS
Raworth’s graphs reinforce the tendency to focus on each crisis as a separate problem to be solved, which can create a sort of leaderboard for disasters that also puts them in competition for funding. Is hunger worse than climate change? In a recent, controversial “Notes” missive, Bill Gates said yes: alleviating human suffering is more urgent because he believes civilization will survive climate change. Critics quickly noted that the impacts of climate change—floods, droughts, heatwaves, megafires—dramatically increase and intensify human suffering by reducing crop yields, wiping out homes, boosting the spread of fungal and insect-borne diseases, and causing people to overheat. We are not evolved to survive “wet-bulb” temperatures where stifling levels of humidity make it impossible to cool off by sweating. It is hard to see how civilization can make it through all these disasters without some serious dings. Yet it is also hard to deny the overwhelming urgency of a hungry person.
Similarly, the UN’s decision to divide Climate, Biodiversity and Desertification (land use) into three separate meetings (Conference of Parties or COPs) has made it more difficult to see them as part of the same polycrisis. The Climate COP, which by far gets the most attention, has defined climate change as a carbon problem and has tasked nation’s with developing plans to lower emissions. This is accomplished mostly through technology—the energy transition—with some “nature-based solutions” in the mix (the commodification of restoration / preservation projects valued as carbon sinks that can be turned into fungible carbon credits).
Replacing fossil fuels with emissions-free power generation makes sense. Less obvious is the outsize impact of energy efficiency, which can literally be hidden in the walls. Efficiency takes many forms: cheap blackout shades to block the summer sun, insulation, triple-pane windows, energy-efficient appliances, lighter materials to make car bodies, regenerative brakes. Even plumbing can be designed for efficiency. Using fatter pipes and switching from 90°elbow joints to 45° connections dramatically reduces friction, so smaller motors can handle the pumping load.
Energy efficiency is a systemic leverage point whose benefits cascade in all kinds of directions.
It is an ongoing economic stimulus. Lower utility bills are a perk that drops directly to the bottom line, giving people more money to spend on other things: vacations, movies, housing, student loans. It is a recurring benefit, too, with savings on every bill. Companies have more money to invest in their businesses, or for dividends. The businesses that benefit from all the redirected spending have better bottom lines, too. This is how economies grow. Over the last three decades, US GDP ballooned four-fold (from $6.5 trillion to $29 trillion), while the population grew by a third (257 million to 340 million). Energy efficiency helped make this happen.
Efficiency means more productivity using less power. If the power is generated from fossil fuels, that means fewer emissions. If power is generated from renewables, it means no emissions. At scale, it can mean the need for fewer power plants. In fact, until AI and data centers came along, coal plants in the US were closing.
Efficiency means rooftop solar panels, coupled with batteries, can supply a greater percentage of a building’s energy needs. In a building with its own power source, computers, cash registers, refrigerators and HVAC keep on running even when there is an outage on the grid—which happens more often as the weather becomes more extreme and the grid ages. Grid outages are estimated to cost the US economy $150 billion annually.
Energy Efficiency slows the rate of climate change. Since 1992, Energy Star rated products have collectively kept an estimated four gigatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere. That is 4,000 times more than Climeworks, the world’s largest Direct Air Capture (DAC) company, hopes to pull out of the air by 2030. Without the energy efficiency gains of the last forty years—in buildings, manufacturing and transportation—we might easily be looking at atmospheric carbon levels topping 500 ppm and irreversible, runaway climate change. Today’s 430 ppm is bad news. But it could be worse. Add more efficiency, along with emissions-free power generation and biodiverse forests, and it could get better.
Amory Lovins, co-founder of energy consultancy RMI, calls these cascading benefits “negawatts” (a felicitous typo of “megawatts”). Like arcs, negawatts are an integral part of how systems work.
NEGAMATTS
“Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
This quote, a perennial favorite in business circles, is about systems thinking. Often, the only way to solve for “x” involves solving for “y” and “z,” too. Pull back far enough and it is easier to see the opportunities for strategic change.
My first inkling that materials could be a motherlode of arcs and negawatts was a story about an unlikely pairing of a microbe and a running shoe. For the last twenty years, scientists at Lanzatech, a US-based global chemical company, have been tweaking a bacterium that eats carbon and poops out ethanol (Clostridium autoethanogenum (C. auto). Using a low-heat, low emissions, continuous fermentation process, these bugs can poop out considerable quantities of ethanol.
Lanzatech’s ethanol is a chemically-identical, environmentally superior version of ethanol made from corn or sugarcane. It takes water and petrochemicals to grow the crops; fleets of tractors, trucks and tankers to plant, harvest and haul from farm to silo to distillery to refinery. Sugarcane fields are often burned before harvesting make it easier to get cut the cane. The distillation process that turns plant feedstocks into the ethanol generates CO2 emissions.
About five years ago, On, a Swiss running shoe company founded by green-hearted triathletes, wanted their shoes, which are made out of a plastic called EVA (ethylene-vinyl acetate), to be more environmentally friendly. They turned to Lanzatech for help. Lanzatech’s microbial ethanol was used a feedstock to make ethylene which was then made into EVA plastic.
Lanzatech’s hungry microbes do not care where the carbon they eagerly gobble up comes from. For the On project, carbon was sourced from the smokestack of a steel plant. The carbon could just as easily have come from landfill gas (methane), or even from a direct air capture (DAC) plant. Carbon, the greenhouse gas, became carbon, the material resource.
On also experimented with a “shoe-as-a-service” business model using another “green” shoe they’d developed made from castor beans. Customers paid a $30 monthly fee for the use of a pair of running shoes, instead of buying them outright. When the shoes wore out, On replaced them with a new pair shipped in packaging that could be used to return the old pair. In the pilot, recycle rates soared from less than 10%, which is typical, to more than 80%, which is unheard of. Even with a motivated client base, this was an extraordinary success.
It took several prototypes and millions of dollars, but the On / Lanzatech team figured out how to make a shoe from carbon emissions. EVA plastic is still a plastic, but a fossil-free EVA is a plastic with negamatts: benefits that flow from using better materials and processes.
Scaled up, this proof of concept could:
Chip away at demand for fossil feedstocks; no drilling required
Chip away at carbon emissions, through low heat ethanol production and siphoning carbon from smokestacks, landfills and DAC plants
Develop a distributed network of ethanol production, simplifying supply chains, reducing shipping costs
Free up land now used to grow fuel crops to grow food crops instead (and if those crops are grown regeneratively, there can be a second-tier negawatt of reduced petrochemical inputs)
Deliver carbon sequestration through shoe-as-a-service recycling
Create a spin-off revenue stream using spent microbes to make high-protein livestock feed.
The goals of net zero and the principles of circularity are embedded in production processes and the business model. But the larger story is about better answer: a fossil-free EVA supply chain with the potential one day to replace fossil EVA.
In 2024, On sold $2.6 billion worth of shoes. That is a small segment of the $50 billion global running shoe market, which is a small segment of the $450 billion global shoe market. EVA isn’t used in every shoe, but it is used in a lot of them and also many of other products, including shower curtains, HEPA filters, solar panels and toys. Imagine if all EVA-based products were made from carbon emissions.
Who would have thought that changing the feedstock of a material to make a running shoe could have such far-ranging positive impacts on climate change, land use and food production?
There are still many hurdles before this delightful idea becomes a viable supply chain able to compete with a market glutted with cheap plastic. But now we know that it is possible.
Recently, Lanzatech recently inked a deal with another Swiss company, Mibelle Group, to provide CO2-derived chemicals to brew up an alternative to palm oil used as an ingredient in make up. In fact, several companies are working on palm oil alternatives for the personal care sector and also the food sector. Negamatts include:
Reducing the economic incentive to clear biodiverse tropical rainforests to plant monocrop palm oil plantations
Developing a distributed network for production, simplifying supply chains, reducing shipping costs
POLY-ANSWERS, THE MATERIALS TRANSITION & ME
A fossil-free EVA is a poly-answer. So is an alternative to palm oil. Could enough poly-answers counter a polycrisis? I was hooked and went looking for more.
My social media algorithms were quick to pick up on my new passion, regularly serving up videos and articles on how to make lower-carbon cement, new ways to smelt old metals, nano-materials stronger than steel, and everything, positively everything, it is possible to make from mushrooms, algae, silk, or a bunch of microbes in a vat.
Tocco reports on China’s industrial stack or the unexpectedly fascinating world of paints and coatings became a breakfast staple. Trade magazines dominated morning email. A good LinkedIn post could set me off on a whole new adventure in research.
Leads led to leads and interviews to interviews. I became an avid tracker of globe-spanning supply chains. Stray facts sparked epiphanies: What if the plastic that lines trillions of aluminum cans could be replaced with a film or gel made from algae?
The materials transition is a revolution hiding in plain sight. Products that look exactly as they have always looked can be different on a material level. A classic Herman Miller Aeron office chair manufactured in 2025 looks identical to the first Aeron that rolled off the production line in 1994. But nearly all of the new chair is made from old stuff. Up to 91% is recycled (depending on the availability of recycled materials), including as much as 2.5 pounds of what is euphemistically referred to as “ocean-bound plastic”—old fishing nets and nurdles that otherwise end up degrading into microplastics, swirling in the prison of a “garbage patch” gyre, escaping into food chains.
The materials transition is about synergies, mash-ups and collaborations that arc across sectors. For example, BYD, the Chinese EV company, is considering using leather made from mushrooms for car upholstery. Mushroom leather’s negamatts include using only a tiny fraction of the land needed to raise cattle; a tiny fraction of the water needed to raise cattle; no livestock feed, freeing up arable land for food crops; fewer toxic chemicals for processing.
Strong by Form, a Chile-based startup that makes wood composites, is collaborating with BMW to develop structural automotive parts that are stronger than steel and lighter than aluminum. The negamatts range from metals that don’t need to be mined, smelted and refined to light-weighting that improves fuel efficiency.
Meanwhile, BYD has started to use sodium-ion batteries instead of lithium-ion batteries in some of its models. Not only are sodium-ion batteries made from more abundant, cheaper materials, but they are also safer, less prone to burst into flames. Negamatts include lower insurance costs.
Put it all together and imagine an EV with a cheaper, safer battery, a body made of a light-weight wood composite and plush mushroom leather seats.
The materials transition is well underway, yet even those working on the frontlines don’t always realize they are part of a movement. They are focused on building businesses to make alternatives to plastics and decarbonize manufacturing processes. They are inventing new materials and designing products that use fewer materials (e.g., a magnet-free motor with only the tiniest bit of copper). They see themselves as part of a broader effort toward sustainability.
But this is bigger.
The materials transition, paired with the energy transition, can set us on a path toward a transformed, post-polycrisis future.
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Over the next several months, I will be posting about some of the companies I’ve come across in my book research. If you know of companies or technologies you think should be on my radar, please share! Thank you. — J.A. Ginsburg