China used about 146 percent more concrete in three years than the U.S. has in the last century, a fact pointed out by philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in a blog post on the world's dematerialization.
Gates draws his figures on concrete consumption from "Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization," a book by historian Vaclav Smil. Concrete, according to Smil, is the most important man-made material.
From 2011 through 2013, China consumed approximately 6.6 gigatons of concrete. Meanwhile, the U.S. consumed about 4.5 gigatons of concrete from 1901 to 2000.
"Concrete is the foundation, literally, for the massive expansion of urban areas of the past several decades, which has been a big factor in cutting the rate of extreme poverty in half since 1990," stadtes Gates. "In 1950, the world made roughly as much steel as cement, a key ingredient in concrete; by 2010, steel production had grown by a factor of 8, but cement had gone up by a factor of 25."
To put that concrete consumption in perspective, take a look at this Gif of Shanghai's evolution since 1987:
