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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.
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.
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.
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