The Twenty-Two
Metre Cube
Gold is almost perfectly indestructible, so nearly every gram ever mined is still here — in a vault, a wedding band, a circuit board. Melt all of it together and the result is startlingly small. Then look at what it cost to gather.
220,700tonnes mined, all of history
Every gram humanity has ever pulled from the ground, end-2025 — enough to fill a single cube about 22.5 metres on a side. Two-thirds of it was mined after 1950. World Gold Council.
All of it would fit under a seven-storey ceiling
Gold is dense — 19.3 tonnes per cubic metre — and it barely corrodes, so the world's supply behaves like a savings account that only ever grows. At today's mining rate the cube gains roughly 11 centimetres on each edge per year.
The cube, to scale
Where the 220,700 tonnes sit
Eight orders of magnitude of thinness
Gold is not rare so much as diffuse. The whole industry exists in a narrow band of concentration — rich enough to pay for the digging, common enough to find. Note the far right: the richest ore on Earth is now sitting in a drawer of dead phones.
Grams of gold per tonne of material — logarithmic
Five years that nearly doubled the metal
Gold spent 2021 and 2022 flat, then went vertical. The USGS recorded a record annual average price in 2024 — and then beat it by 38% in 2025.
Annual average gold price, US$ per troy ounce
Where 3,300 tonnes a year comes out
Mining is concentrated but not cornered: China, Russia, Australia, Canada and the United States together account for 41% of world output, and the remaining 59% is spread across dozens of countries. South Africa, which once produced most of the world's gold, now mines 90 tonnes a year.
Mine production, 2025 estimate
Top producers, tonnes (2025e)
An ounce of gold, and everything behind it
Because the metal is so diffuse, the real product of a gold mine is rock. Grades have been falling for a decade, so each gram takes more digging, more energy and more waste than the last.
Mine waste generated to produce a single 18-carat gold ring weighing under an ounce. Earthworks.
Annual greenhouse gas emissions from gold mining, with national intensities ranging from 129 to 2,754 kg CO₂e per ounce. Ulrich, Trench & Hagemann, 2022.
Share of the ~2,200 tonnes of mercury released to air, land and water each year that comes from artisanal gold mining — the single largest source. UNEP, 2018.
The grade squeeze
The richest gold deposit is in a drawer
Every year the world throws away tens of millions of tonnes of electronics containing gold at concentrations no geologist would ever find in rock. Most of it is never collected.
Electronic waste, 2022
Supply, 2025
Gold is the one metal we almost never lose
Which makes it unusual: the environmental cost of gold is almost entirely in the getting, not the using. A gram recovered is a gram that never has to be blasted out of a mountain.
- Recycle the electronics, not just the jewellery. Only 22.3% of the world's e-waste was formally collected in 2022 — the rest took its 300–400 g/t of gold to landfill.
- Ask where a piece came from. Recycled and certified-origin gold already supply more than a quarter of the market; demand is what moves that share.
- Mercury is the sharp end. Artisanal mining supports 10–15 million livelihoods and is not going away — mercury-free processing is the fix, not shutting it down.
- Old gold is real supply. Because it never degrades, every gram in a drawer is indistinguishable from a gram in a new mine's output.