This new series looks at a range of common materials and explores where each one comes from, how it is extracted, purified, designed, manufactured and recycled. Each book examines the material's properties and the technologies used to shape it into products used in everyday life. Features include: lavish illustration with photos and detailed technical artwork; technology boxes showing the steps in a particular manufacturing process; historical facts explaining how processes were done in the past; into the future sections which look at what advances might be made in the 21st Century