Every road, wall, bottle and beam humanity has ever made is still, mostly, sitting here. In 2020 that pile crossed a line no species has crossed before: the stuff we build now weighs as much as every living thing on Earth combined.
1,154 Gt
Human-made mass, 2020
1.15 trillion tonnes of concrete, gravel, brick, asphalt, metal and plastic — versus roughly 1.1 trillion tonnes of dry living biomass. In 1900 the same pile weighed 35 Gt: three percent of life.
01 · The crossover
Two curves, one century
Living biomass has stayed roughly flat for 120 years. Ours has not. The lines meet in 2020 — and if you count demolished buildings and discarded goods as part of the total, they already met in 2013.
Endpoint values are the published figures (35 Gt in 1900; 1,154 Gt in 2020; biomass ≈1.1 Tt dry). The intermediate shape of the human-made curve is traced from Fig. 1 of Elhacham et al., Nature 2020 — read off the published chart, not a table of measured values.
02 · The great acceleration
A century that ignites in the 1950s
Each band is one decade, lit in proportion to how much human-made mass existed then. For half the strip there is almost nothing to see. Then post-war construction turns the lights on.
1900 · 35 Gt — 3% of biomass
1,154 Gt · 2020 — 100%
Brightness scales with total accumulated human-made mass at each decade (gamma-adjusted for legibility). Source: Elhacham et al., Nature 2020.
03 · The ledger
What 1.15 trillion tonnes is made of
It is not gadgets. It is overwhelmingly the ground beneath your feet, rearranged: concrete and the gravel that goes into it account for 81% of everything we have built.
Two pairs, each on its own scale, from the study's own accounting. The plastic figure includes plastic in use and plastic waste, after recycling.
Dry mass, gigatonnes. Left pair and right pair use different scales, as in the source figure. Source: Elhacham et al., Nature 2020, Fig. 3.
05 · The flow
The pile grows by 30 gigatonnes a year
That is the net addition — what stays after demolition. The gross throughput is far larger: humanity now pulls 106 billion tonnes of material out of the planet annually, and about half of it goes straight into stock we intend to keep.
Global material extraction 30 → 106 Gt/yr, 1970–2024 (UNEP International Resource Panel, Global Resources Outlook 2024). Sand, gravel and aggregates 9.6 → ~50 Gt/yr (UNEP/GRID-Geneva, Sand and Sustainability) — the second-most extracted material on Earth after water.
06 · The stakes
The bill for building the world
Mass is not a neutral measure. Digging, hauling, firing and pouring it is one of the largest single sources of warming and dirty air on the planet.
~7%
of global CO₂ emissions come from cement alone
IEA · second-largest industrial emitter
60%+
of planet-warming emissions trace to resource extraction & processing
UNEP IRP · Global Resources Outlook 2024
40%
of health impacts from air pollution trace to the same activity
UNEP IRP · Global Resources Outlook 2024
If current trends hold, human-made mass including accumulated waste is projected to pass 3 trillion tonnes by 2040 — nearly triple all dry living biomass. Projection, not measurement (Elhacham et al., 2020, extrapolated).
Why it matters
A civilisation is now a geological quantity
The number is startling, but the useful part is what it reframes. We tend to argue about emissions as if they were a byproduct of energy alone. Most of them are a byproduct of mass — of moving the planet around and setting it in place.
Roughly 55% of all resource use now goes into building or renewing stock that will stand for decades (Krausmann et al., PNAS 2017). What we build today is a commitment we cannot easily unmake.
Which points at the lever: build less, build lighter, build longer, and reuse what already stands. Retrofit beats demolition. Low-clinker cements and recycled aggregate cut the heaviest fraction. Timber substitutes for concrete in mid-rise.
None of it is glamorous, and all of it is measurable in gigatonnes. The pile is not going to shrink. The question is only how fast it keeps doubling — and every 20 years is the current answer.
Sources & notes
Elhacham, E., Ben-Uri, L., Grozovski, J., Bar-On, Y.M. & Milo, R. “Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass.” Nature 588, 442–444 (2020). Anthropogenic mass 2020 ≈1.1 Tt; 1900 ≈35 Gt (3% of biomass); doubling ≈every 20 years; accumulation ≈30 Gt/yr; crossover 2020 ±6 (2013 ±5 including waste); plastic 8 Gt vs all animals 4 Gt; buildings & infrastructure 1,100 Gt vs trees & shrubs 900 Gt; “more than each person's bodyweight produced every week.”
Material breakdown (concrete 549, aggregates 386, bricks 92, asphalt 65, metals 39, other 23 Gt) — Elhacham et al. 2020 dataset, as tabulated by Visual Capitalist (2021).
Bar-On, Y.M., Phillips, R. & Milo, R. “The biomass distribution on Earth.” PNAS 115(25), 6506–6511 (2018). Total biomass ≈550 Gt C; plants ≈450 Gt C (≈90% of biomass); humans ≈0.06 Gt C; livestock ≈0.1 Gt C; wild mammals ≈0.007 Gt C.
UNEP International Resource Panel, Global Resources Outlook 2024 (launched at UNEA-6, March 2024). Extraction 30→106 billion tonnes/yr since 1970; projected +60% by 2060; extraction & processing = 60%+ of warming emissions and 40% of health-related air-pollution impacts.
UNEP / GRID-Geneva, Sand and Sustainability: 10 strategic recommendations to avert a crisis (2022) and subsequent updates. ~50 billion tonnes of sand, gravel and aggregate a year — second-most-used resource after water; up from 9.6 billion tonnes in 1970.
International Energy Agency — cement: ~7% of global CO₂ emissions; the second-largest industrial emitter.
Krausmann, F. et al. “Global socioeconomic material stocks rise 23-fold over the 20th century and require half of annual resource use.” PNAS 114(8), 1880–1885 (2017). Stocks reached 792 Gt in 2010; ~55% of resource use now goes into stock.
OECD, Policy Scenarios for Eliminating Plastic Pollution by 2040 (2024). Plastics production and use 435 Mt in 2020, projected 736 Mt by 2040.
Flagged as non-measured: the shape of the human-made-mass curve between 1900 and 2020 in §01 is traced from the published figure rather than a released data table; the 3 Tt-by-2040 figure in §06 is an extrapolation by the study's authors, not an observation.