Human Population Increase and Changes in Production and Usage of Trace Elements in the Twentieth Century and First Decades of the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

People currently live in a unique time, the Anthropocene. Since the acceleration of the Industrial Revolution (~1850), humans have become a huge geological force. In 1800, 1 billion people lived in the world, but in 2018 the global human population exceeded 7.6 billion. The beginning of large-scale human impacts during the 1950s was related to the dynamics of global population growth thus far unprecedented in human history. The years 1950-1970 were defined by a quickly expanding chemical industry and the widespread popular belief that so-called progress would result in seemingly endless improvement in the quality of everyday life but that led to destruction and pollution of environment with huge amounts of chemicals (including metals) from industry, agriculture and transport. Anthropogenic metal emission still persists in the world, but its main sources are no longer located in Europe and North America, however, in Asia where half of the global population live. For example, in 2015 aluminium ore mining increased 33 times compared to 1950 and the mining of other economically important metals [iron (Fe), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn)] >6 times. In the case of highly toxic metals such as cadmium (Cd) and lead (Pb), this increase was 4.3 higher, respectively, but there was a 50% decrease in mercury (Hg) production. It is estimated that at least 60 elements (out of 118 naturally occurring on Earth) were mobilized from minerals and introduced into biogeochemical cycles on a larger scale (>50%) as the result of human activity rather than natural causes. Never in Earth’s history a single species has dominated the biosphere the way Homo sapiens population does now.