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Our elemental footprint

Nature Materials volume 18, pages 408–409 (2019)Cite this article

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To the Editor — This year marks the 150th anniversary of Mendeleev’s formulation of the periodic table, which gave us a simple way to understand the elements and placed limits on which ones can exist. With around 100 stable elements at our disposal, today’s technologies rely on an increasingly complex palette of materials; and individual materials are made from increasingly complex mixtures of chemical elements1. Our command and control of all this complexity is one of triumphs of materials science, but it comes at some cost.

Beer cans, originally made of a single type of steel, now use three distinct aluminium alloys and a total of at least five chemical elements, providing materials optimized individually for the can’s body, top and pop tab. And beverage containers are relatively simple: when aluminium cans first appeared in 1959, it was rare for a structural alloy to include more than three or four elements; today, it is common to have eight or more as materials science pushes forward to set new records for key materials’ properties.

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Fig. 1: Elemental footprints.

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  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

    Alexander H. King

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King, A.H. Our elemental footprint. Nat. Mater. 18, 408–409 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-019-0334-3

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