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The world is running out of sand and there’s a violent black market (2018)
- notpeter 7y agoThis should have a (2018) on it.
- pier25 7y agoI recommend the documentary Sand Wars from 2013. Here's the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAPfwwb59uY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAPfwwb59uY I believe it's available on Prime.
- terminalhealth 7y agoAre there good alternative building materials? Perhaps wood? Edit: It seems I am shadow banned. I am going to take this as a deep insult.
- lwelyk 7y agoI can see your comments, I don't think you're shadowbanned.
- Scoundreller 7y agoWood works. There are some new methods to glue sheets together to make long structural beams and much taller buildings than before. Cross-Laminated timber or CLT. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-laminated_timber https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-laminated_timber 12 and 18 storey structures have been built. As far as fires go, yes, they will burn eventually, but they won’t weaken as quickly as steel. You get more time to evacuate.
- esotericn 7y agoAwesome. Outside of a few strange political situations like HK/Singapore we probably don't actually need to build structures higher than 12-18 stories as well - most examples I can think of are vanity projects. It strikes me that there might not be a replacement for concrete in other forms of building though - what about dams, bridges, etc?
- Scoundreller 7y agoThey’ve built bridges (or at least a bridge) with this kind of wood.
- xwdv 7y agoNo, it’s worse. You are not shadow banned, people just don’t care about what you have to say.
- terminalhealth 7y agoI think my comment has been vouched for.
- okcando 7y agoHarsh.
- xwdv 7y agoI agree, this is a harsh place.
- hanuman 7y agoHemp, yo! https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conbuildmat.2017.08.181 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conbuildmat.2017.08.181 Yeah, wood, too. https://www.wired.com/2017/05/wood-skyscrapers/ https://www.wired.com/2017/05/wood-skyscrapers/
- Jun8 7y agoThis is interesting, I didn’t know that desert countries were actually importing sand for construction! Here’s a relatively recent paper looking at the suitability of desert sand to replace the fine aggregate in cement: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0950061806001917 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09500..., concludes that it can be used in small percentages. Idea: It would be useful to have global competitions with hefty prizes, e.g > $1M, for process inventions that address scarcity problems like this to spur independent young researchers.
- dybber 7y agoLarge reserves of sand is getting accessible in Greenland: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/01/climate/greenland-glacier-melting-sand.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/01/climate/green...
- RenRav 7y agoCan we modify desert sand particles into more irregular shapes with heat or something?
- ivanhoe 7y agoIn Serbia local mafia is controlling river sand excavations ever since mid-90s, and the most of these sites work completely illegally all this time. Beside the obvious problem of exploiting natural resources, causing erosion of river banks, and destroying the river ecosystem, this also has a much wider negative influence on the society as it's creating a huge chain of corruption of government officials and police. And this is a serious business with a lot of money in the game, to the point that all drug lords there are also in the sand business.
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoSame in Romania, the local mafia is controlling all the legal and illegal tree cutting with help from the politicians and forest rangers since exporting it to Western countries is lucrative enough to grease the whole chain. The taxpayers then have to deal with the aftermath of deforestation.
- logfromblammo 7y agoI envision a machine that takes in desert dune sand, arranges four individual grains into a tetrad, and uses concentrated solar light to melt some sand into glass, to bind the tetrads together. Then it ejects the tiny glass-bound pyramid into a collection bin and repeats. Like a Spacechem/Opus Magnum puzzle that has a dune sand input and a construction sand output.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoSounds cool, but very expensive. Energy spent in essentially building sand. Instead of the current process of just finding it lying around and hauling it to where its needed. An, no, 'solar light' isn't free. There's a cost in collecting it. And even then, it's worth something as electricity. Probably worth more than the resulting sand is (currently) worth? Basic mining and minerals is all, entirely and totally about the cost of extraction. It has to pay.
- i_am_nomad 7y agoCreative thinking, I like it. Pyramidal sand might be even grippier than the standard, cubic version. Alternatively, I wonder if just splitting spherical sand in half would work?
- saalweachter 7y agoParticle size also matters. Even if your split sand didn't cross the threshold from "sand" to "silt", the coarser sand is still better for construction, IIRC.
- vardump 7y agoSo a pyramid building machine in the desert? Hmm... :) If that ever happens, history does rhyme.
- alan-crowe 7y agoLike a smaller version of this 3D printer https://www.3dprinter.net/solar-powered-sand-sintering https://www.3dprinter.net/solar-powered-sand-sintering
- OedipusRex 7y ago99% Invisible did an episode on Sand and it's black market: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-on-sand/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-on-sand/
- jihadjihad 7y agoOne thing I found interesting when visiting the Bahamas is that every few years some entrepreneurial locals pitch the idea of using the sand from the beaches to turn it into glass. Only problem with that: the "sand" is made up of crushed coral and seashells (probably some limestone in there, too), so it's not possible to furnish glass from it.
- ryanmercer 7y agoPlanet Money had a good episode on this about a year ago. Audio -> https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/13/628894815/episode-853-peak-sand https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/13/628894815/epis... Transcript -> https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=628890875 https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...