America’s Commodity Appetite: Evidence of Dematerialization

America's economy has grown better at extracting more value from less stuff.

A new study by Iddo K. Wernick from the Rockefeller University’s Program for the Human Environment titled “Is America Dematerializing? Trends and Tradeoffs in Historic Demand for One Hundred Commodities in the United States” offers a remarkable portrait of how much the United States has changed in terms of material consumption since 1900.

The study examines the usage trends of 100 commodities—including iron ore, chickens, gallium, and titanium—and shows that a nation that started the 20th century with a seemingly bottomless appetite for raw materials pivoted dramatically around 1970. This pivot, which paradoxically coincided with the first Earth Day, marked a moment when the American economy began a decades-long march toward what Wernick calls “relative dematerialization.” In essence, “dematerialization” refers to the gradual uncoupling of resource use from economic growth.

In Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, Gale L. Pooley and I document a parallel phenomenon on the global stage, finding that resources become more abundant over time. Our key insight is that time prices—or the time required to earn the money to buy a specific good—have been falling for almost two centuries for almost all commodities. Although Wernick focuses on physical consumption patterns within the United States, his study corroborates a related idea: Increasing efficiencies allow Americans to produce or obtain more output from fewer inputs, which helps to keep price increases in check.

The Rockefeller paper breaks commodities into three groups based on their trends from 1970 to 2020. The first group consists of only eight commodities—including gallium, titanium, and chicken—for which demand grew faster than gross domestic product (GDP), showing that certain products vital to the modern economy (and the dinner table) can still outpace the broader economy. The use of the second group of 51 commodities, such as petroleum and nitrogen fertilizer, grew more slowly than overall GDP but increased in absolute terms. That relative decoupling translates to lower intensity of use: We consume more resources as our economy expands but less per dollar of economic output.

Finally, the use of the third group—41 commodities, including iron ore, cadmium, asbestos, and even water—experienced declines in both absolute consumption and intensity of use. According to Wernick, some of these, like asbestos, fell out of favor due to safety concerns, while others, like iron ore, lost ground because of new manufacturing technologies, such as electric arc furnaces, which made recycling more economical. Once indispensable commodities saw demand shrink, underlining the fact that most resources need not remain economically essential in the long run.

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Wernick’s study also acknowledges the role of globalization in shifting the patterns of resource use: Certain energy-intensive or pollution-heavy production processes have migrated offshore, meaning the United States can appear more material-efficient while importing finished goods that embed resource usage from elsewhere. But that shift is neither absolute nor one way: The United States also exports large quantities of agricultural products, effectively shipping out “embodied” water, fertilizer, and cropland. These exchanges do not cancel each other out, but the global supply chain, which allows resources to flow to where they are most valued, benefits everyone.

Critics of this optimistic narrative often point to the “Jevons paradox,” whereby increased efficiency leads to cheaper commodities and triggers higher total consumption. The evolution of the American economy after 1970 certainly raises intriguing questions. Was relative dematerialization achieved at the cost of higher economic growth, which slowed around the first Earth Day? Is dematerialization a product of market-driven efficiencies or a result of government-imposed environmental laws and regulations?

Looking into the future, what will happen to American resource use as the United States becomes an information powerhouse? Although computing is electricity-intensive, it can create massive value with little use of physical commodities. And what if we are on the cusp of using incredibly dense fuels to generate that electricity, as the deals between tech companies and new nuclear companies might indicate?

The march of technological progress, combined with the deregulation and economic growth drives promised by the second Trump administration, may yet provide answers to those questions.

All told, Wernick’s findings confirm that, while the American economy has never ceased to crave materials—including metals, foods, and newly indispensable high-tech elements—it has grown better at extracting more value from less stuff. Our ingenuity is decoupling growth from sheer material input, though whether that trend can be sustained over the long run remains an open question.