But not just any sand. For making concrete you need sand with pointy corners. Meaning all the sand in sand deserts, that has been blowing around and grinding those corners off, is pretty much useless.
Resulting in such posts as:
"A World Built on Sand and Oil"But now, patient and long-suffering reader, now those days may be over.
We too have experienced the allure of sand.
Usually at the beach but on the blog as well....
"Inside the deadly world of India’s sand mining mafia"
Sand, more interesting than one might suspect....
The World Is Running Out of Sand (Elon Musk to the rescue!)
From Asia Times:
Sand could be the next bonanza for desert countries
For centuries, the vast desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula were, at best, an uncomfortable fact of life, an everyday exercise in extreme survival for the tribes that once clung tenaciously to life in arid, inhospitable areas such as the Empty Quarter.....MUCH MORE
Now, however, 80 years after the seemingly barren sands gave up the black gold that would transform the fortunes of all the Arab Gulf states, the deserts may hold the key to the next economic miracle poised to transform the region. However, unlike the vast oilfields that lay unseen deep beneath the sand in eastern Saudi Arabia until 1938, this bounty has been hiding in plain sight all along: the desert sand itself.
As impossible as it might seem, the world is running out of sand – not desert sand, but the stuff found on beaches and riverbeds and under the sea. Grains of rock or shell eroded over time by the movement of water are perfectly shaped for bonding together to make strong concrete. Smooth, wind-sculpted sand, however, is useless for this purpose. As Vince Beiser explains in his new book The World in a Grain, sand “is to cities what flour is to bread, what cells are to our bodies: the invisible but fundamental ingredient that makes up the bulk of the built environment in which most of us live,” and this unsustainable resource has never been more in demand.
As the single most important vital component in every building and road, to say nothing of its starring role in every pane of window glass and the silicon chips of our phones and computers, the world is using more than 50 billion metric tons of sand every year – and rising. In 2017, a paper in the journal Science spelled out what the authors called the “looming tragedy of the sand commons,” a reference to the fact that because of the difficulties in regulating exploitation, “common-pool” resources such as sand “are prone to tragedies of the commons, as people may selfishly extract them without considering long-term consequences.”
Over the course of the 20th century, the volume of sand and gravel used in creating the rapidly growing cities of the world increased more than 20 times, and today sand is the single most exploited natural resource. The amount of sand dredged from the rivers, seas and coasts of the world to create our ever-expanding conurbations is greater than the amount of fossil fuels extracted from the earth. Scientists with the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research say that even where sand mining is regulated, “scarcity is an emerging issue with major sociopolitical, economic and environmental implications.”
One has only to gaze up at the ever-evolving skylines of cities such as Dubai to gain a rough idea of how much concrete went into their creation – and then, perhaps, to wonder where all the sand came from that went into making it. The answer is: not from the surrounding desert. Trying to make concrete from the round grains of desert sand, says Vince Beiser, is like “trying to build something out of a stack of marbles instead of out of a stack of little bricks.”
Staring out across the desert from the top of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, sand is pretty much all that the eye can see. But much of the sand that it took to create the 400,000 cubic meters of concrete used in the construction of the world’s tallest building was imported from Australia, a fantastically costly and inefficient comment on the environmentally profligate times in which we live.
Unsurprisingly, the search is on for an alternative – and a team of four researchers at Imperial College London believe they have found it....
