Mineral Resources, Economics and the Environment

Construction and industrial minerals are the least known of the world's mineral commodities, even though they are essential for housing and infrastructure (Harben and Bates, 1984). The average US home contains 60 tonnes of concrete products, 25 tonnes of sand, gravel, and stone, 7 tonnes of gypsum products, and 0.1 tonne of glass. The anonymity of these mineral resources is curious because mines and processing facilities for most of them are much closer to most of us than are gold mines and oil wells. This is because their unit values are low and transportation to market can increase costs by as much as 100% (Juszli, 1989). The good news about this is that production of many essential construction minerals is high in most more-developed countries (MDCs) and is an important source of employment. The bad news is that their proximity to populations makes these mines a common focus of land-use and environmental concerns, which directly affect our cost of living.

The mineral resources discussed here can be divided into four groups based on their main uses. Ranked in order of decreasing value and tonnage, these are the construction minerals, the glass raw materials, the fillers, pigments and filters, and the abrasives. World production data for crushed stone, sand and gravel, and common clay are not tabulated and have been estimated here by assuming that US consumption has the same relation to world consumption that US gross domestic product (GDP) has to world GDP. On that basis, the total value of global construction and industrial minerals is about $460 billion.

Construction minerals

The main mineral commodities used directly in construction include cement, aggregate and lightweight aggregate, dimension stone, gypsum, and common clay (Tepordei, 1999). Cement is by far the most valuable member of the group (Figure 13.1), largely because it is actually a processed mineral material like steel rather than a raw mineral commodity. Production growth for these minerals since 1960 has diverged significantly, with cement far outpacing the growth of steel, gypsum matching steel, and clays and aggregate falling far behind. Prices of all of the commodities have also diverged significantly, with clays and sand and gravel keeping pace with the CPI, cement falling slightly behind, and gypsum and crushed stone showing essentially no increase (Figure 13.1).