A raw material is the basic material from which a good product is manufactured or made, frequently used with an extended meaning. For example, the term is used to denote material that came from nature and is in an unprocessed or minimally processed state. Latex, iron ore, logs, and crude oil, Salt Water would be examples. The use of raw material by non-human species includes twigs and found objects as used by birds to make nests.
Famous quotes containing the words raw material, raw and/or material:
“One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;” and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in New England but the weather. I don’t know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk’s factory who experiment and learn how.... In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four-and-twenty hours.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“We have not the slightest idea that women are made of such light material that the breath of any fool or knave may blow them on the rocks of ruin.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)