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The World is Running Out of Sand, and People Are Dying as a Result (medium.com)
You may be thinking: But sand is everywhere, there are whole deserts filled with the stuff. The sand in a desert, though, is useless as a construction material. The grains are out in the open and blow around for thousands of years. From a report: This rounds them off until they become useless as building blocks. Imagine trying to make a building with golf balls. In order to build, sand with angular edges must be used. The preferential type is the kind found in a river bed, sea, or beach. The fact that desert sand is useless makes for some unexpected situations. Despite being surrounded by endless miles of sand, the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, was built with sand imported from Australia. Dubai also imports sand for its beaches from Australia. Apparently desert sand doesn't do well in a beach atmosphere either. Sand also regenerates slowly. It takes thousands upon thousands of years for rock and sediment to break down into the usable grains we all rely on.
The world has seen a construction boom in recent years. The base that boom is built on, quite literally, is concrete. The United Nations estimates that the world consumes more than 40 billion tons of building aggregate -- sand, gravel, and crushed stone -- each year. Some estimates predict consumption will top 50 billion tons by next year, with China alone gobbling up much of the world's concrete supply as it undergoes a massive urbanization. According to data from the U.S. Geological Survey, between 2011 and 2013 China used more concrete than the U.S. used throughout the entire 20th century. Other parts of Asia, such as India, are rapidly expanding as well. The urbanization driving this construction boom, and increasing reliance on concrete, shows no signs of slowing. By 2030 the U.N. expects 60 percent of the world's population to live in urban areas.
[...] One of the prime issues with sand is that it's heavy. Heavy items incur large transportation costs, especially over a long distance. The scarcity and high prices attract the attention of criminals. Why go to a legal mining area when sand can be extracted for next to nothing elsewhere? "Sand mafias" are groups of criminals that illegally dredge sand from areas where extraction is prohibited. Since they're not following laws, all environmental protocols are ignored. Often rivers are illegally mined, destroying the habitat for fish and fishermen. Sometimes land from private villages is even taken over by these mafias. If they're confronted, violence often results. And according to a 2015 Wired story on sand mafias in India, police are typically of little help: "The conventional wisdom says that many local authorities accept bribes from the sand miners to stay out of their business -- and not infrequently, are involved in the business themselves."
The world has seen a construction boom in recent years. The base that boom is built on, quite literally, is concrete. The United Nations estimates that the world consumes more than 40 billion tons of building aggregate -- sand, gravel, and crushed stone -- each year. Some estimates predict consumption will top 50 billion tons by next year, with China alone gobbling up much of the world's concrete supply as it undergoes a massive urbanization. According to data from the U.S. Geological Survey, between 2011 and 2013 China used more concrete than the U.S. used throughout the entire 20th century. Other parts of Asia, such as India, are rapidly expanding as well. The urbanization driving this construction boom, and increasing reliance on concrete, shows no signs of slowing. By 2030 the U.N. expects 60 percent of the world's population to live in urban areas.
[...] One of the prime issues with sand is that it's heavy. Heavy items incur large transportation costs, especially over a long distance. The scarcity and high prices attract the attention of criminals. Why go to a legal mining area when sand can be extracted for next to nothing elsewhere? "Sand mafias" are groups of criminals that illegally dredge sand from areas where extraction is prohibited. Since they're not following laws, all environmental protocols are ignored. Often rivers are illegally mined, destroying the habitat for fish and fishermen. Sometimes land from private villages is even taken over by these mafias. If they're confronted, violence often results. And according to a 2015 Wired story on sand mafias in India, police are typically of little help: "The conventional wisdom says that many local authorities accept bribes from the sand miners to stay out of their business -- and not infrequently, are involved in the business themselves."
(INSERT SCARY PROBLEM) is due to overpopulation. All of them. The answer is not to waste time and money trying to treat all the symptoms; the answer is to fix them all at once by setting a goal to reduce the world's population by 75% by the year 2100. All other problems will solve themselves.
Since Plastic lasts for centuries and is such a problem, let the scientists make Plastic Sand! The USA National Labs can do this; as well as MIT, etc., etc.
We are running out of every non-recyclable material on earth, wether it is sand, copper, oil or anything you can think of. We live in a finite planet, and thus nothing can be mined forever.
The only real question is at what pace are things running out, and how easy it is to replace them? The market's laws will rise price of things the less available they are, until eventually it will be more price convenient to use an alternative. With sand in particular, it eventually rise the price of it so it will be conveniente to use some process to dessert sand or bring it from far away places.
Like the story about how bamboo bicycles would be the next big thing and would be more sustainable than aluminum when aluminum is 5% of the Earth's crust, but this one takes the cake. What a testament to what great lives we have made that we need to scare ourselves with such obvious B.S.
90% of the earths crust is silicates. You want them a given size or shape ? Hit them or melt them. I'll worry about having enough sunlight for everyone on the planet before I worry about concrete aggregates.
Oh one other thing I might look for here. Who will profit from having controls placed on sand extraction here odds are they are financing the scare propaganda.
A 3 minute google search and I was able to find many, many articles outlining uses for desert sand. Among those uses... building materials.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90...
Young people are the target. The idea is that since young people are rather ignorant of how world works due to lack of experience, they can be primed with certain kinds of propaganda.
Most of us older folks already have enough experience to know that most of these hyperbolic "small problem we're going to sensationalize" claims are bogus. If price of sand goes up enough, we'll simply start using crushed rock instead. That's it.
Ahhh city folk.
No, no they do not. And I don't know if you've seen sand mining in action but it basically strips off the top soil out of a huge region of land , the mine closes 2-3 years after it opens and leaves the whole place completely environmentally wrecked. Your lucky if you get spares grass for cows, but probably not because all that soils been shredded out for the mineral sand and what remains is just bad dirt.
Its about the most un-endless mining you can think of, and rivers are frigging worth. You have about 3-4 feet of the stuff to dig up aaaand then thats it.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Interesting Planet Money podcast about sand. Mostly about beach sand. https://www.npr.org/templates/...
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
Goddamn iPhone typing. By "spares" read sparse. By "worth" read "worse".
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
"The largest use of pumice in the United States is the production of lightweight concrete blocks and other lightweight concrete products...The second most common use of pumice is in landscaping and horticulture."
So, no. The primary market is not acid washed jeans.
This kind of dishonesty is why people have distrust towards environmental issues. Don't do it.
Stone dust, the remains from rock crushing for gravel, has already been tested for concrete. It works fine:
https://www.researchgate.net/p...
This shouldn't be surprising, since it is the same stuff the bigger gravel comes from. If there is not enough of the dust, we can just crush the rock finer until there is.
Go pound desert sand.
E Proelio Veritas.
...we'll simply start using crushed rock instead
Can't we just let them have Florida and Long Island?? We could even include the residents at no extra charge...
Not miles. The only countries still not using the metric system are the USA, Belize, Myanmar and Liberia. Not the United Arab Emirates.
They're surrounded by a metric fuckton of worthless shit.
Better?
Couldn't they use a solar furnace to fuse the sand grains together, then grind them down to get grains of the right size?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Deserts used to be ocean bed. They actually find entire whale skeletons in the Middle East deserts.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The other thing that you get good at as you get older is spotting a straw men and ad hominems.
The problems being reported in this is not indicative of our "running out of sand", but the price of cheap, legally-mined sand rising. This is how economics works: in a capitalist society you'll never run out of a mineral resource because it will get priced out of practicality, leaving you with plenty of that commodity still in the ground that you just can't use. This has three consequences: (1) people try to get more efficient at using the resource; (2) people look for alternatives; (3) the rising price of the commodity fosters conflict and crime, until the first two consequences succeed in reducing the demand.
So we'll always be able to make natural sand-based concrete; it'll just be too expensive to use as liberally as we do today. That's the reason we aren't using crushed stone today: it's physically feasible, but economically pointless. If it ever becomes economically feasible to use crushed stone, either there's been some kind of rock-breaking technological breakthrough, or we're paying a lot more for concrete.
A world in which concrete was expensive would look very different, and transitioning to such a world would likely involve some societal stress.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You know what has actually run out since 1971. Not a god damn thing. Not once, not ever.
Every time it has been corporations whining that they had to pay $.04 per ton for something instead of $.01, or people who want to pay $100 a month for rent in a city where the cheapest 400 square foot apartment costs $500,000 to buy and rent is around $1900 a month, or people who want you and the gov't to fund their pet program so they don't have to do honest work. They get all worked up and make a lot of noise hoping to get idiot politicians to support their cause and pass a law that forces things back or provides them with a subsidy, in other words steal money out of your pocket to put it into theirs.
The only thing that has run out since then is my patience. Socialism and crony capitalism needs to be once and for all labeled the environmental toxin that it is and steps taken to get rid of it. We could treat it like we do any other toxic waste, load it up on ships and dump it in the 3rd world.
Somalia would be perfect.
Mix the sand with some good binder or epoxy. Yes, it will cost more, that's life.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
You're not very bright are you?
All those countries you listed produce more pollution because they are bigger countries with more people.
Person for person, no one comes close to the resources used by a first world country and America uses much more than most.
Are you sure you aren't WindBourne? This is the same 'argument' he tries to use all the time.
How about the US half it's CO2 per person to get down to China's level? Or decrease it even more than that to the even lower levels of India Brasil etc.
They're surrounded by a metric fuckton of worthless shit.
For reference that's about 1.102 imperial fuckloads (or 0.98 long fuckloads).
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Seriously, how are people dying because sand has to be imported into Saudi Arabia? Makes no sense, the summary doesn't support the headline, so why bother reading the arrival?
I mean come in - three big paragraph 'summary' that doesn't even support the most dramatic claim in the headline... and by the way being forced to import sand isn't by itself, proof we are "running out of sand", it is proof it isn't conveniently located where we need it. See Sam Kineson's comments on starving people in Africa (spoiler alert - "MOVE to where the food is!").
Ken
This is how economics works: in a capitalist society you'll never run out of a mineral resource because it will get priced out of practicality, leaving you with plenty of that commodity still in the ground that you just can't use. This has three consequences: (1) people try to get more efficient at using the resource; (2) people look for alternatives; (3) the rising price of the commodity fosters conflict and crime, until the first two consequences succeed in reducing the demand.
You mean like gold, oil and diamonds? Once the price goes up, it's more economically feasible to invest in getting the stuff out of the ground. Which in turn increases supply, which in turn reduces price. That's why fracking is a thing.
Sand is basically finely ground rock. That doesn't seem like an insurmountable technical problem by today's standards.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Not really. Sand is a tiny fraction of cost of concrete. Crushed rock can't be all that much more expensive, seeing how it's used for concrete TODAY according to the story itself. It's just more expensive enough to use sand at this point in time.
Like I noted above, your knee jerk reaction is completely in line with how this kind of propaganda works. It primes you to think among the certain lines, catastrophising a tiny problem.
They found that out during the Biosphere 2 project: as concrete sets over years it sucks in and fixes Oxygen. Would be better if we could come up with a concrete formula which fixes CO or CO2 instead.
If crushed rock were economical to use in Dubai concrete, they wouldn't ship sand from Australia. They'd crush rock from a local quarries. It would make sense to set up a crushing plant because Dubai uses a huge amount of concrete and has plenty of rock.
Sand commodity costs represent 2% of the finished price of concrete. That means it represents a bit more than 2% of the input costs, but we can reasonably conclude it's not a limiting factor in concrete use *at present*. But remember we're talking about a future scenario in which sand is sufficiently expensive that we produce aggregates by a method which anybody could, but which nobody currently finds profitable.
Which is not to say concrete will disappear, only that it will be more expensive, and even modest increases in concrete production costs will have big economic effects... and count those impacts on tarmac as well. Now if we *could* switch to crushed rock before the price of sand rises that would be a good thing, because of the ecological and social impact of mining river sand. But it would make practically all the infrastructure and commercial building we do more expensive.
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False, that type of sand already used. Just adds some percent to cost of concrete and commercial buildings recoup their construction costs many times over. There is no problem, no cause for panic. The world will not run out of sand for construction, that is a lie and soundbite for someone with agenda to profit
We are sucking everything of any value out of our planet, soon only a lifeless husk will remain.
Exactly this. It's not that there's actual risk with sand. It's that economic opportunism by organised criminal networks can cause significant impact.
This applies to everything from stealing cabling for scrap metal to dumping toxic waste. Italian mafia for example is well known for doing the latter for profit.
Crushed rock is pieces of rock the size of driveway gravel. Its used today but you need much smaller pieces of rock (i.e. sand) to fill in the space to keep the amount of cement reasonable. You could crush rock further into sand, but that would presumably take a lot more energy than it takes to make the gravel sized crushed rock.
There’s a gazillion tons of sand. If the sand is too smooth and round, all you have to do is come up with a cost and energy efficient way to process the sand into something with lots of jagged edges, and two birds are killed with one stone: the problem of there not being enough good, usable sand, and two, the problem with you’re not being rich yet.
The obvious approach, I think, is put the sand in a machine that fires it at high speed into a hard, flat surface, causing the round, smooth grains to shatter into lots of jagged pieces. Then after they strike the surface, you have them fall into a selecting sieve that sends jagged pieces in one direction, (towards the bags where they will be packaged for sale,) and on the other hand towards a recycling loop that sends it to smash into the target again.
That’s just one idea. Here’s another: take the cheap and unusable sand, melt it, then pulverize it. Yes, these both require energy but I’m sure each one can be done, with a little scientific and engineering wizardry, in a way that ends up being so efficient that the devices that are used pay for themselves.
Hell, you can probably pulverize them AND purify them, extracting impurities all in a single process, if it’s designed right.
Engineers and scientists... get on it! There’s fortunes to be made! Oxides of silicon are the twenty first century’s OIL! Just need to work out how to refine it!
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
It's total pollution output per country not per-capita. Countries which have drastically reduced pollution levels in major cities - the US and Europe - should do little or nothing compared to what 2/3rds of the people on the planet getting a free ride without significantly reducing their pollution levels to near the US and Europe's level as *measured by air quality in the top 10 major cities*.
Spoken like the truly ignorant person you must be.
WindBourne is it? Or at least an equally delusional American.
50 years ago those places were producing close to zero, some still are because they weren't (as) developed. Your kind tries to claim only already developed countries are allowed to pollute at such high levels because {insert completely stupid and illogical reasons}.
The US has been leading by example for 50 years? So why is it still so much higher than all the other Western countries? Why are they still so much higher than developing countries?
Countries are just lines on a map, add more lines make more countries. It's the people that make the pollution. Person for person people in America are the most polluting.
America worse than Europe worse than China worse than Brasil worse than India.
America is the worst and would need to cut more than half to be anywhere near the world average for CO2.
Its crazy toxic. For the most part Cyanide is used for extracting metals out of sands, although there are others used depending on the type of sand mining, such as Arsenic for gold extraction. Some of its just dumped into the soil (Cyanide over time hopefully gets reacted out into saner compounds, Arsenic is elemental so it hangs about) some into the water table. Its not good.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Running out of time! Gets wasted by stupid stuff. Like rambling forum posts;)
Stan Lee died this morning.
'Nuff said.
No brain, no pain.
"Sand mafias" are groups of criminals that illegally dredge sand from areas where extraction is prohibited. Since they're not following laws, all environmental protocols are ignored. Often rivers are illegally mined, destroying the habitat for fish and fishermen. Sometimes land from private villages is even taken over by these mafias. If they're confronted, violence often results.
But do they come back in greater numbers?