China used more cement in 3 years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th Century

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/24/how-china-used-more-cement-in-3-years-than-the-u-s-did-in-the-entire-20th-century/

by jonbaer • 11 years ago

230 151 11 years ago

washingtonpost.com

Igglyboo2• 11 years ago

China went through their industrial revolution far later than the US, this is to be expected, especially with a population ~3x as large.

jessaustin2• 11 years ago

Based on population one might expect 33 years. Would the additional factor of eleven really be expected from the fact that various developments occurred later? ISTM that the Chinese just really prefer concrete as a building material. It isn't as though all new construction in USA is concrete.

Igglyboo2• 11 years ago

China has access to far more information on architecture and technology in general than the US had in 1900, that would shrink the 33 years down a lot farther.

azinman2• 11 years ago

That would be fascinating to augment this article. Take all the places that the Chinese have used concrete, look at alternative materials, then add those up in the U.S. and China as well.

That said they've obviously been investing at an outrageous rate since 2000 in modernizing themselves. The U.S. has started on that way before and without centralizing planning in the same way has done it more slowly over time (with a smaller population in 2015, let alone 1900. Important to realize the U.S. population has grown a lot over the past century).

rhino369• 11 years ago

For houses, America is somewhat an outlier. Most of the world builds concrete houses and America uses lumber.

altcognito• 11 years ago

Just to add more data pointsto the discussion, here is a discussion surrounding concrete consumption due to roads.

http://reason.org/news/show/what-the-us-can-learn-from-china...

Retric• 11 years ago

IN 1900 US population was 1/4th what it is today (76M). The US also had access to a lot more wood per person so our homes use far less concrete. Also, US useless more asphalt vs concrete for roads so it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison.

swframe• 11 years ago

I wonder how much was used to build their ghost cities: http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-ghost-cities-in-2014-2...

svachalek• 11 years ago

This always reminds me of people snickering about how much snow is in their backyard whenever the topic of climate change comes up.

If you subtract the 15% unoccupied rate from your link from the 6.6 gigatons of concrete, it's still a lot more than the U.S. used in 100 years.

nosuchthing• 11 years ago

I wonder if sooner rather than later, those ghost cities might actually fill up once they bottom out and become affordable like how bad parts of SF or Oakland or NYC used to be cheap?

seanmcdirmid14• 11 years ago

Ordos is in the middle of the Gobi. Build a ghost city in the middle of say Arizona, why would they come?

qwertyuiop12343• 11 years ago

They are being filled up.

https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/koos-jansen/guest-post-5-c...

beachstartup2• 11 years ago

people ridicule it because it's so different than the american way, which is to severely restrict housing construction to cause enormous increases in price so that nobody can afford to live anywhere without taking out massive loans, while poor people get kicked out of their homes.

doubleshadow• 11 years ago

How much concrete did the US use from 2011-2013?

benihana• 11 years ago

cement and concrete are different materials

chm2• 11 years ago

But you need cement to make concrete.

LeonRobrotsky• 11 years ago

For anyone else that's curious, cement is mixed with water and some sort of aggregate to make concrete.

maxerickson• 11 years ago

If you want to be real careful you should say Portland cement.

(because, for instance, the bitumen in asphalt roads is also a cement)

peeters• 11 years ago

According to [1], it (cement) has been around ~70 megatonnes in each of those years, while the same site agrees with the article and puts China at around ~2 gigatonnes for each of those years.

Usage in the U.S. took a nosedive in 2008, I assume because of the recession. Pre-2008 shows a local maximum in 2005 of 128 megatonnes; so still an order of magnitude less.

[1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/273367/consumption-of-cem...

pmastela• 11 years ago

Something like Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns [1] helps explain this ostensibly unbelievable fact. It reminds of a similar statistic about the number of years that passed before a country's GDP doubled. UK did it in 154 years (early 17th century to mid 18th century) and China doubled its GDP in just 12 years [2].

For further reading check out an answer on Quora [3] where I found the McKinsey Global Institute report.

[1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns

[2] http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/dotcom/Insights%20a...

[3] http://www.quora.com/What-dont-we-know-about-the-Chinese-eco...

brudgers• 11 years ago

A rough analogue for changes to the environment in regard to the US might be the logging of old growth forests to fuel construction and urbanization.

ngokevin2• 11 years ago

Typical of exponential population growth. The past few years of any resource usage will be more than all of the resource usage of human history combined.

Shivetya• 11 years ago

well that and their housing will be built with cement while a great amount of US housing is wood frame construction.

Still its a demonstration of unbound budgets. The future cost of maintaining it all will be the test of time. While much has been made of China's ghost towns quite a few are getting people yet I am curious as to the maintenance being done and in a timely manner. There is also the question of quality, there have been a few newsworthy stories out of China of shoddy construction.

spikels3• 11 years ago

Population growth is not exponential but actually slowing. This is one of many misconceptions about demographics - an absolutely fascinating and important subject which gets little attention in the media or schools.

Here's a nice intro from Joel Cohen, a longtime leader in the field:

http://www.floatinguniversity.com/lectures-cohen

ngokevin2• 11 years ago

The rate may be slowing (as expected), but the overall rate has been exponential until now. Like it took us forever to get to 1 billion, but getting to 7 billion took no time at all from that point.

jordanthoms• 11 years ago

It's frankly amazing that people are still going on about population growth. Anyone who looks at the trends - people are getting richer and moving to cities at a massive rate, and when people do that they go from having 6+ children to two or less - knows that population growth is slowing fast, and will continue to. Population growth excluding immigration is already negative across much of the western world, and will be the case everywhere before long.

In fact, the bigger issue in the western world, and eventually the whole would will be dealing with it, is what happens when this slowdown in births happens. Just as when you got a huge economic boom from having many young people, you get a economic drag when all those people age and have less young people to support them.

yueq• 11 years ago

In China every building is built with cement. In US most homes are built with wood.

myth_buster• 11 years ago

From the article:

And where many houses in the U.S. are made of wood, China suffers from a relative lack of lumber. Unlike in the U.S., many people in China live in high- or low-rise buildings made out of cement.

A critical argument, but unfortunately mentioned towards the end of the article. But overall its a interesting article and this gif [0] comparing Shanghai '87 vs '13, from it gives a good perspective of the modernization (akin to images of Dubai).

[0] https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2015/03/...

VieElm• 11 years ago

Why does such a large geographical region lack wood? Really? Maybe they just don't care and are happy with cement buildings.

D_Alex2• 11 years ago

Is it a critical argument though? Even if single-family homes in the US tend to be made out of wood, that sector does not seem to be that big, and would certainly not account for any major portion of the difference (roughly 6 million new dwellings in US built per year, say half of them wooden houses, say 10 tonnes of cement (ie 60 tonnes of concrete) per house = 30 million extra tonnes per annum, about 1.5% of Chinese consumption).

Dams, roads, bridges, factories, shipyards and large malls high-rise buildings is where the cement goes, and China is using ~20 times more than the US... My reading is that they are developing fast and catching up to the Western world in material standards of living.

The interesting question is...: how long will this momentum last, and will they keep going lont enough to overtake the current first world economies? I can see good arguments for both sides of this question.

seanmcdirmid14• 11 years ago

Not just that: China uses lots of unskilled labor that can work with concrete but not very well with steel frames. They also use more concrete per floor (we have thick walls and floors) as a form of over building since the quality isn't that great.

Singapore, a modern city by any other definition, uses concrete in the same way so they can import cheap construction labor from India.

jacquesm4• 11 years ago

Using more concrete per floor can make a building weaker just as easily as it can make it stronger. There is some complexity here, more isn't simply stronger.

muddyrivers3• 11 years ago

I think it is the opposite. BECAUSE less steel frames were used, they could hire lots of unskilled labor.

Steel was strictly state-controlled. It had a status of "strategy" material. So it was "scarce". The first generation of uber-rich families were created because these families (of highest government officials) could get their hands on these strictly controlled materials. They simply sold the rights of these materials, not the materials themselves, to the manufacturers at a hefty price.

wnevets• 11 years ago

I must see this story come up on the internet at least once a month. Why is this so fascinating to people?

Xeoncross• 11 years ago

You obviously have never gone out and looked at concrete. How can you not be amazed.

That and it's common usage would probably make it a great linkbait story...

kidlogic• 11 years ago

Pound-for-pound, cement is the largest producer of carbon emissions in the world.

LLWM• 11 years ago

Fearmongering

restalis• 11 years ago

It gives a glimpse on the rate of change around us, and out there in the world. This big picture is fascinating to behold at, for many people.

bch• 11 years ago

Pedant: Cement != Concrete. Cement is one component of concrete. Concrete is composed of water, aggregate, and cement.

The video linked to by Gates' blog says[0] "The most important material in terms of sheer mass in our civilization is cement made into concrete" "The chinese poured into their buildings and roads [...] as much concrete in just 3 years as United States in 1 century".

"In modern times, researchers have experimented with the addition of other materials to create concrete with improved properties, such as higher strength, electrical conductivity, or resistance to damages through spillage."[1]

There's more available[2] to concrete these days than what the US infrastructure used up to 2000[3]. Not that 3 years consumption > 100 years consumption isn't impressive, but:

1) not only are we not comparing the same period

2) it's not clear we're comparing the same material

I often hear cement and concrete used interchangeably, but had the difference drilled into me when I worked (doing computer work) in the industry briefly. For that reason (cement != concrete) and potential advancements in concrete (maybe there are new composites that let us use a fraction of what used to be necessary?) it's not entirely clear what the numbers mean, outside of "China is growing fast".

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi7O9pmM_A0&feature=youtu.be...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#Modern_additives

[2] http://www.columbiatribune.com/editorial_archive/pollution-e...

[3] https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2015/03/...

thinkpad20• 11 years ago

The linked article makes this clear:

In case you need a refresher, cement is a powdery lime-and-clay substance that is combined with water and gravel or sand to make concrete.

jacquesm4• 11 years ago

Anybody that does not understand the difference between cement and concrete is going to be in for a surprise when they mix up a batch of dark gray goop and try to use it for something in construction.

The shrinking alone will cause some interesting effects.

There are a lot of lay-man misconceptions about concrete, one of the more persistent ones is that concrete needs to 'dry'. It doesn't, it needs to cure, it's a chemical reaction that gives concrete its strength, not something going into solution to allow pouring that then dries and solidifies.

Concrete is very interesting material, its history is fascinating and the materials science behind it as well.

Such a simple thing in principle, so incredibly complex. Just like glass another one of those materials with vast depth.

Osmium2• 11 years ago

Concrete is very interesting material, its history is fascinating and the materials science behind it as well.

It's one of those deceptively 'unsexy' materials too from an outsider's perspective: think of steel and someone may think of, what, swords? watches? but think of concrete and someone thinks of brutalist architecture and urban decay. But there's no reason why concrete is any less fascinating and complex than steel.

What I suppose I'm saying is that it has a PR problem, and I'm glad people like yourself are leaving comments like that to help solve it :)

carapace• 11 years ago

Didn't they just recently rediscover how the Romans made their concrete?

tokenadult3• 11 years ago

Similar stories have been written about other parts of the world. They didn't have the same impressive aggregate total of concrete (or the ingredient in concrete called cement) used, but there were impressive housing and road construction figures from Ireland and Spain and many parts of the United States before the housing markets collapsed in those countries. China is still at risk for a housing collapse,[1] particularly because workers' incomes are not rising as fast as the cost of newly constructed apartments, and overall national population growth has slowed. Housing construction in China is propelled by many of the same speculative lending practices that propelled the last boom in the United States, and may not result in all those new housing units being occupied by anyone able to pay enough rent to produce a positive return on investment.

[1] http://www.dw.de/chinas-real-estate-market-weighed-down-by-o...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-13/pimco-warn...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/19/business/international/in-...

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/03/02/commentary/wo...

qwertyuiop12343• 11 years ago

The fundamental difference between China housing price drop and US is majority of Chinese buy properties with cash or get mortgage with very large deposit like 40%. So the risk of subprime crisis is very low.

tokenadult3• 11 years ago

That is a very big difference between house-buying patterns in east Asia in general and house-buying patterns in the United States, and has been for a long time. But that didn't help Japan avoid a housing bust, because if builders build on speculation, their debt drags down the economy even if house-buyers don't have comparable levels of debt. Speculative bubbles always leave someone holding debts that they can't pay off when the bubbles burst.

adventured2• 11 years ago

That was true 10 to 15 years ago. It's no longer accurate. China has become a massive accumulator of debt at the consumer level. While it's not as bad as the US subprime situation was, it is bad and getting worse.

Since year 2000, China's household debt has gone from 8% of GDP, to now 40% of GDP as a ratio (the US is 75% by comparison). Mortgage debt has become a common problem in China. At the rate household debt is expanding in China, they'll be up to 60% in four years or so.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-02-19/china-hous...

seanmcdirmid14• 11 years ago

Speculation is rampant and a people I know are leveraged on multiple properties, lying to banks to get loans.

The risk of a crisis is very real; even if the risk of default is low, the risk of the marketing seizing up because no one wants to buy at a price sellers are willing to sell at is incredibly real.

Rents in Beijing are pretty cheap now, getting cheaper actually, while housing prices remain rediculously high. Heck, my apartment complex is prime but only about 60% occupied (the other units bought but being held for speculation alone). Something has got to give.

westiseast• 11 years ago

Well... no bubble is the same, otherwise we'd be able to spot them and avoid them every time, right? If there is a common factor in housing bubbles, it's the extent to which housing moves away from its primary purpose (ie. a roof over a family's heads). In China housing has become a massive source of income for local governments, income for developers, and an investment vehicle for rich people. It has all the signs of being a classic bubble and the only question is how/if the government can deflate it. Also don't forget that a lot of people pay cash because they can't get a mortgage or don't trust the banks, but they still borrow money from friends, family, lending circles or other informal sources - there is often still a wobbly chain of debt behind each purchase.

bubbleburster• 11 years ago

according to these stats the US did the same in the last 5 years

http://www.statista.com/statistics/273367/consumption-of-cem...

swombat• 11 years ago

That was the first thing I thought when I saw this stat posted a little while ago. "Fine, the stat sounds impressive, but there's a lot of other stats that other countries do more of in the last few years than in the 20th Century".

For example, anyone could write a dramatic headline declaring that we've created more computer chips in the last X months than in the 20th century. That doesn't mean much.

In short, this feel like some sort of crappy statistic handpicked to make China look bad, when in fact it's the whole world that's using a lot more concrete, not just China!

barkingcat• 11 years ago

Wait why is this bad? I thought it was crappy statistics handpicked to make China look good!?

Why is progress in countries outside the western civilizations a bad thing?

Don't we want the people who make our iphones and oculus rift headsets and shiny usb-c devices to have apartment buildings to live in?

D_Alex2• 11 years ago

But the stats you linked show US consumption of circa 100 million tonnes per annum. The article shows Chinese consumption at about 2100 million tonnes per annum.

So: the US did not "do the same in the last 5 years", and with China currently using cement at ~20 times the rate US is, the claim is very believable.

kryptiskt2• 11 years ago

Measuring progress in tons of concrete is like judging programs based on lines of code.

jacquesm4• 11 years ago

Not really. It's more like observing the number of shipping containers going in and out of a country and deriving some rough figures on the economy from there (or trends).

Lines of code have to be examined in detail to figure out their impact, concrete is the universal component of construction, if more concrete is used there will be more construction going on.

kryptiskt2• 11 years ago

Loads of code means someone put lots of money into it, same as when loads of concrete is poured. It says nothing of the benefit of the program/structure that has been built.

I don't want to dub any specific piece of software the Three Gorges Dam of code. But it surely is out there.

jostmey• 11 years ago

How about comparing lumber usage? The U.S. may not have used as much cement, but we probably had more wood available.

P.S. I imagine using cement is more eco-friendly.

semi-extrinsic• 11 years ago

Your imagination is wrong, sadly. The cement industry accounts for nearly 5% of global CO2 emissions, about half of which comes from the chemical decomposition of calcium carbonate (which is how you make cement).

arh68• 11 years ago

The bit about buildings lasting 20-30 years really surprised me. The Pantheon stands for a millennium, but 30-year-old concrete crumbling? The article cites a Goldman Sachs quote from a tumblr [1] notes at the bottom of the list:

    An estimated 25-30% of China’s cement capacity is low-grade cement
    not used in other countries (P.C. 32.5 grade).

I'm not a cement/concrete expert, but PC 32.5 does seem to be a low grade. Higher than PKC 32.5 (composite cement) but lower than PC 42.5. So I found this other source that puts it in stark terms [2]:

    According to the China Cement Association, low-grade cement products 
    (all 32.5 grade) accounted for 72% of the total cement output in China 
    in 2013, with the P.C. 32.5 grade cement accounting for 54%.

So 72% of cement was 32.5 grade, and most of that (54/72%) is PC 32.5. I was a bit skeptical at first, but now I really wonder if/when these structures start to crack &/ crumble.

[1] http://ftalphaville.tumblr.com/post/100653486301/contextuali...

[2] http://pg.jrj.com.cn/acc/Res/CN_RES/INDUS/2014/2/19/c6835c29...

elihu• 11 years ago

I'm not an expert on this and I may be mis-remembering something I read somewhere once, but I believe the Roman formula for concrete was quite a bit different. The reasons we don't use it in modern construction are: it takes a really long time to cure, and it's made with salt water, which might cause rebar to rust.

shubb• 11 years ago

China had it's own historical cement recipe, including rice. Recently discovered it may have useful properties that can be reapplied today. http://phys.org/news194411869.html

kijin2• 11 years ago

I think China is going to suffer an epidemic of infrastructure failure in the near future, perhaps as early as the mid-2020s if the 20-30 years estimate is correct.

For comparison, South Korea's extraordinary growth was followed by a series of infrastructure failures in the mid-90s. A relatively new bridge suddenly fell into a river during the morning rush. A department store imploded, killing over 500 people. Gas explosions all over the place. IIRC none of the major accidents in Korea were caused by low-grade concrete specifically, but there seems to be a general parallel between what the Chinese have been doing lately and the "build now, worry about quality later" mentality that Koreans adopted during their period of rapid growth. Both result in crumbling buildings 20-30 years later.

PakG1• 11 years ago

It's already happening. There are high-profile stories of bridges collapsing and so on. I live in Shenzhen right now and was looking for a new apartment during the summer last year. My roommate noted that a lot of the landlords all know that the apartment buildings will be replaced and rebuilt in 20-30 years.

If that's true, the expectation is already there. However, my impression is that this belief stems from this idea that construction will always be happening because that's how the economy rolls.

The question is what percentage of the population believes that this cycle really is the end game and what percentage of the population thinks they're investing into infrastructure what will last their entire life.

jgamman• 11 years ago

uumm, yeah - I'm a concrete guy at the moment. PC = Portland Cement, 32.5 = MPa of force needed to overcome strength [1]. Normal concrete is in the 20 MPa to 50 MPa range and the strength needed is just a design parameter - it's not a quality issue. typically a slab for a house would be at the 20 MPa end and a massive industrial warehouse closer to 30 MPa (something to do with forklift wheels being small and hard), bridge spans etc ask a structural engineer. the fact that China is using a lot of grade 32.5 concrete is more likely due to the fact that they are building a lot of infrastructure that requires... 32.5 MPa strength. NB 'Grade' in the concrete industry refers to compression strength, not a quality statement. Every country has loads of standards about how cement is made, the constituents that can be added and how concrete is batched, delivered, structures designed etc. Cracks and crumbles are more likley due to inadequate design and placement of the fresh concrete. As others say, it's been around for literally 1000s of years but has infinite depth of complexity - i believe MIT found the actual formula for PC around 2010. amazing that we just used it for its bulk properties without knowing the actual chemical formula ;-)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S-JnRMers8

tsotha• 11 years ago

The Pantheon stands for a millennium, but 30-year-old concrete crumbling?

It took the wealth of a civilization to produce the Pantheon. We could make more durable buildings if we used stone, too, but do you really want to pay $10m for a house?

koolkat• 11 years ago

"The growth in any doubling time is grater than the total of all the preceding growth" So maybe any developed country including the U.S. did the same.

notastartup• 11 years ago

I think what is not being discussed is debt. Debt is used to finance this type of growth.

alexzhou• 11 years ago

so what,as a Chinese I still can't afford a house

China used more cement in 3 years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th Century

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