What will the global gypsum and insulation industries look like in 50 years’ time (in 2068)? Let’s take a look at some current trends and extend them into the future to see what our world will look like then.
The global population is set to increase to 10.5bn in 20681, with the majority of the increase in Africa and Asia. At the same time, the rate of increase will reduce from 1% per year today to less than 0.3% per year and global urbanisation will increase from 55% today to more like 75% in 50 years’ time. Populations in ‘developed’ nations will rapidly age (and progressively reduce), although developing countries with high proportions of young people today will see this ‘bulge’ ageing as well, and with fertility rates decreasing, will not see younger people coming up to replace them. This unavoidable demographic wave may be the defining global trend in the 21st century.
Large numbers of older people, and fewer ‘working age’ citizens will bring many challenges, some of which may be addressed through increased roboticisation, and through the use of artificial intelligence (and its many manifestations). An interesting study2 shows that properly trained and incentivised operatives can be used to identify cancers in pathology slides. The surprise comes when you find out that the operatives were in fact pigeons. When the results of several pigeons were combined, they achieved accuracies close to trained pathologists - and the pigeons were paid in ‘chicken feed.’ In the same way, what is being gradually realised is that many of the most challenging jobs in today’s world are made up of simpler ‘sub-routines’ that can be carried out by algorithms: think medical diagnostics, much of the legal system and accountancy.3 So, in the future, the number of jobs may fall and the mix of jobs will certainly change. Whether the proportion of ‘bullshit jobs’4 increases or decreases with time remains to be seen. There have been increasingly wide calls for the introduction of a Universal Basic Income5, possibly financed through a tax on robots6, or on turnover. In 50 years’ time, the chances are that you may have more leisure time than you want or know what to do with.
With all those people on the planet, human impacts on the environment will have to be reduced. It’s likely that we will all be eating less meat, possibly due to meat taxes7, while decarbonation of whole economies (including air travel, power generation, personal transport, manufacturing and the wider agricultural industry) will bring both challenges and opportunities.
At the same time, people will still want to live in homes that are comfortable and cheap to run, go out with friends, enjoy their hobbies, watch great TV or play amazing games, eat good food and preferably do something useful and enjoyable with their lives - some things will not change.
Our industries can help with the ‘comfortable and cheap to run’ part of the future. Gypsum-based and insulation products are already at a huge advantage over various other building materials, since they bring air-cleaning, heat- and cold-moderating, sound-deadening properties - and pleasing aesthetics - to buildings at very reasonable cost. In the future, through the application of new technologies (for example the nano-scale optimisation of the chemistry and physics of insulation properties, or the use of new materials such as graphene, aerogels and sophisticated VIPs, as well as new materials yet-to-be invented), the properties of these products will continue to improve.
As we see in this month’s issue, plasterboard and insulation factories are being built around the world at a seemingly ever-increasing rate. ‘Supply brings its own demand,’ as they say, and on this basis alone, the prospects for the market penetration of these products is bright. On current trends, the largest players in the industry will get even bigger, not just through opening their own factories, but by buying their competitors. We also foresee a continuing coming together in individual companies of gypsum and insulation (and of the capability to produce multiple types of insulation materials), along with other specialised building materials (such as cement-based boards, mortars and wood-based or wood-product-containing building materials).
In 50 years there may be fewer people working on the manufacture of the products, but I think humans will still be wielding the screwdrivers on the job-site!
1 http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-projections/
2 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/
journal.pone.0141357
3 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/27/
jobs-risk-automation-according-oxford-university-one/
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_tax
7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_tax
