Material World with Ed Conway

 

Amy (overexcited), Ed and Fiona at Rothschild&Co preparing for the talk

July 2025

 

Featuring: Ed Conway, Data and Economics Editor of Sky News and author of Material World, co-hosted with Rothschild & Co

At July’s Earth Set breakfast, we took a deep dive into the raw stuff of modern life — and the complex, fragile, often invisible systems that bring it to us.

Hosted by Richard Brass, Co-Head of Wealth Management at Rothschild & Co., the session featured a conversation between Fiona and Ed Conway.

Together, they explored what underpins not just the green transition, but civilisation itself: six essential materials - sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium - and the staggering complexity of how we extract, refine, and use them.

We could easily have spent the entire day in discussion - and happily locked Ed in the building. His book is, in essence, six books in one, each focused on a single substance. Each chapter could warrant its own masterclass.

We barely made it past sand and salt. But what a story they tell.

Sand and the Sublime

We began, appropriately, with sand, the most abundant yet underappreciated building block of our world. Sand makes glass, and glass underpins fibre optics and silicon chips. But as Ed explained, not just any sand will do. Almost every chip and solar panel in the world depends on ultra-pure quartz sourced from a single quarry in Spruce Pine, North Carolina.

This fact - that the entire digital economy depends on one seam of rock - was just one of many unsettling revelations in the session. What surprised many in the room was that Conway, a senior economics editor, had to piece together these supply chains largely from scratch. “There is no spreadsheet,” he said. “Even the people involved in each step rarely understand the whole.”

This fragmentation, he argued, is both a sign of economic ‘efficiency’ and a source of real vulnerability. We don't think about the upstream processes that allow us to build phones, cars, solar panels — but perhaps we should.

Salt, and Why Everything Still Starts There

If sand is the most surprising material in the book, salt may be the most under-celebrated. Historically a tool of empire and taxation, salt remains foundational to modern industrial chemistry - and to life.

Conway walked us through how salt is used to produce chlorine (for water treatment), caustic soda (for glass, paper, and lithium processing), and countless other industrial inputs. “Without salt,” he said, “we don’t have batteries, we don’t have clean water, and we don’t have 90% of the pharmaceuticals we rely on.”

We heard about the role of Cheshire’s salt in the birth of Britain’s chemical industry — and about the quiet decline of that very infrastructure. One of the UK's two major salt processors is expected to shut down within the year. Few outside the sector are paying attention.

Supply Chains, Shocks, and the Limits of Control

The conversation repeatedly returned to supply chains, not just their complexity, but their opacity. Fiona highlighted the challenges of procuring EV components when even a windscreen-grade silica shortage can delay a fleet.

We heard how Tesla’s vertical integration allowed it to reprogram chips more quickly than its rivals during the pandemic - and how most OEMs still operate at arm’s length from the deep tiers of their suppliers.

Andy Palmer in the audience (former CEO of Aston Martin and COO of Nissan) raised examples of single points of failure: a chip factory in Japan destroyed by the 2011 tsunami that temporarily shut down global satnav supply; the fact that virtually all tier-three parts for auto-dimming mirrors are made in a single Birmingham factory.

Deindustrialisation and the UK’s Blind Spot

Ed didn’t pull punches on the state of UK industrial strategy. “We are deindustrialising faster than any other developed country,” he warned, citing the silent closure of fertiliser and salt plants and the loss of foundational capabilities in steel, chemicals, and high-purity manufacturing.

In a powerful moment, he described standing at the Port Talbot blast furnace watching the sheer force of molten rock being transformed, and realising that the “main product” wasn't steel, but carbon. But there are now alternatives. Electric arc furnaces, Ed explained, are not just cleaner - they’re also capable of producing some of the highest-grade steels in the world. Military-grade steel for submarines, aircraft landing gear, even precision-engineered components are now routinely made from recycled material using EAFs. The idea that virgin steel is always superior, he said, is outdated - the real issue is ensuring we have the right recycling and reprocessing infrastructure to match demand.“

That shift - from linear to circular, from extractive to regenerative - is still underdeveloped in UK policy. Several guests echoed the need for a deeper focus on basic materials, recycling, and secure supply chains.

The audience, made up of founders, investors, engineers, and policymakers, resonated with the tension between awe and vulnerability. As Lorna McAtear, Head of Fleet at National Grid, put it “we need to be dirty to be green” - yet very few people understand how brittle and energy-hungry the clean tech supply chain really is.

The Race to Rethink Our Foundations

If there was a unifying thread, it was this: the green transition is not just about new technology. It’s about rebuilding the physical systems that make those technologies possible - from extraction and processing to recycling and resilience.

Many in the room left with the sense that we are vastly underprepared, not just in capacity, but in understanding.

As Fiona put it, “We need to anticipate the next ‘chip shortage’ before it hits us. And to do that, we have to trace these materials all the way back to the ground.”

That is what Material World invites us to do. Not as a thought experiment, but as a survival strategy.

📘 Material World is available for sale at all good book outlets. We really recommend the audiobook - Ed reads it himself - and his enthusiasm is totally infectious.