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19187
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: The Sand Mafia - Humanity is running out of SAND and it is a Huge Pro
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The Sand Mafia - Humanity is running out of SAND and it is a Huge Problem | ENDEVR Documentary (52 minutes) From Mumbai to Brittany, Dubai, Tangier, or the Maldives, this fascinating ecological investigation unveils a global emergency: the threat to sand. Sand is a vital resource, and pillaging has intensified the need for concrete construction.The main consequence of this is the erosion of coastlines. Many countries resort to illegal measures to satisfy their demand for sand. For example, Singapore has been accused of sand smuggling, and sand trafficking has even led to the disappearance of islands in neighboring countries. Severe environmental concerns are associated with the extraction of sand from both land and sea, including the destruction of habitats, loss of biodiversity, and the physical erosion of coastlines and islands. This has broader societal impacts, with communities that rely on these habitats for their livelihoods being significantly affected. |
19192
From: mitra, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Sand Mafia - Humanity is running out of SAND and it is a...
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This is important especially because glad may have to replace plastic products. Hmm. Wonder if basalt could substitute? Will look into it. |
19195
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Sand Mafia - Humanity is running out of SAND and it is a...
URL: https://www.sandstories.org/stories/2016/20/10-ways-you-use-sand-everyday
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At June 03, 2024 at 16:40:44, mitra wrote: This is important especially because glad may have to replace plastic products. Hmm. Wonder if basalt could substitute? Will look into it. EXCERPT: 7 ways you use sand every day Considering that you and I have probably never met, I'm quite aware that I'm making a pretty bold claim here. But I have reason to believe that if you are reading this blog, there are dozens of ways you use sand every day just as I do. Most of this is not because you and I chose to use sand. It is because it seems to be embedded in the very fabric of our modern lives. For the moment, I will focus on just seven. With these seven, I hope to encourage you to take a closer look at the things you use and how they are made. Here are 7 ways you and I use sand every single day. Sand is required in order to make: Computers Mobile phones Credit/Debit cards Bottles Houses Roads Metal objects + mirrors, ceramics, commercial buildings, cameras, plastics - I could go on! Computer CPUs (Central Processing Unit) require very high grade silica sand (quartz). Don't forget the glass screens on laptops, monitors, TV screens, mobile phones. Microchips made from sand power not only all our financial transactions through our debit and credit cards but also most of our electronics. Glass bottles would be impossible without sand. Think of all the sauces, condiments, conserves, jams, syrups, perfumes, beverages we use, and the convenience glass affords us. Although sand is not used in metal objects directly, it is essential for an industrial process called sand casting which allows products to be mass manufactured cheaply. Think car doors and frames, lamp stands, window frames, metal furniture, cookware, taps, pipes and more. With concrete being the building material of choice in this century, most buildings (residential or commercial) and infrastructure such as roads, parking lots and airports would not be, were it not for sand. If you haven't yet seen the video detailing how we use sand, please do. We simply would not enjoy the lifestyle and freedom we do today, were it not for the invisible yet not insignificant role that sand plays in the production of each of these things. Sand is truly the forgotten foundation of modernity. |
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19193
From: mitra, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Sand Mafia - Humanity is running out of SAND and it is a...
URL: https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/basalt-fibers-alternative-to-glass
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Basalt Fibers: Alternative to Glass? High-temperature performance and superior strength properties may make this late-comer a better choice in some applications. |
19194
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Sand Mafia - Humanity is running out of SAND and it is a...
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Did you view the entire video? I have yet to finish it all myself so I posted to remind myself to finish it. IMO all the damage has been done already in terms of displacing sand, can't undo that...plus it continues nonstop round the clock...(prophetical earth bobbing to and fro like a drunkard scenario). The Saudi Arabian man made islands sand displacement is astounding I did not know about the ramifications till I viewed the clip. Not just the palm tree island but they made this other group of islands called "The World". |
19196
From: mitra, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Sand Mafia - Humanity is running out of SAND and it is a...
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No, I often am not able to access videos, but I did today. Certainly did not mean to suggest that basalt could replace all sand, but construction, and other uses, harvesting from a living ocean is ******* stupid. |
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[19198]
19198
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Sand Mafia - Humanity is running out of SAND and it is a...
URL: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is-running-out-of-sand
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Understood, thank you. After reading your post I had a thought to query the topic "the sand mafia-humanity if running out of sand" and a lot of links came up....I am sharing one of those here (with an excerpt) for myself and for others who prefer text over videos or who cannot access videos, etc. ~Eve ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- image captionIt might not look like much, but sand is the world's second most used natural resource (Credit: Getty Images) Why the world is running out of sand 17 November 2019 By Vince Beiser, Features correspondent It may be little more than grains of weathered rock, and can be found in deserts and on beaches around the world, but sand is also the world’s second most consumed natural resource. A South African entrepreneur shot dead in September. Two Indian villagers killed in a gun battle in August. A Mexican environmental activist murdered in June. Though separated by thousands of miles, these killings share an unlikely cause. They are some of the latest casualties in a growing wave of violence sparked by the struggle for one of the 21st Century’s most important, but least appreciated, commodities: ordinary sand. Trivial though it may seem, sand is a critical ingredient of our lives. It is the primary raw material that modern cities are made from. The concrete used to construct shopping malls, offices, and apartment blocks, along with the asphalt we use to build roads connecting them, are largely just sand and gravel glued together. The glass in every window, windshield, and smart phone screen is made of melted-down sand. And even the silicon chips inside our phones and computers – along with virtually every other piece of electronic equipment in your home – are made from sand. And where is the problem with that, you might ask? Our planet is covered in it. Huge deserts from the Sahara to Arizona have billowing dunes of the stuff. Beaches on coastlines around the world are lined with sand. We can even buy bags of it at our local hardware shop for a fistful of small change. But believe it or not, the world is facing a shortage of sand. How can we possibly be running low on a substance found in virtually every country on earth and that seems essentially limitless? Sand, however, is the most-consumed natural resource on the planet besides water. People use some 50 billion tonnes of “aggregate” – the industry term for sand and gravel, which tend to be found together – every year. That’s more than enough to blanket the entire United Kingdom. The number of people living in urban areas has more than quadrupled since 1950 to some 4.2 billion today, and the United Nations predicts another 2.5 billion will join them in the next three decades. That’s the equivalent of adding eight cities the size of New York every single year. Creating buildings to house all those people, along with the roads to knit them together, requires prodigious quantities of sand. In India, the amount of construction sand used annually has more than tripled since 2000, and is still rising fast. China alone has likely used more sand this decade than the United States did in the entire 20th Century. There is so much demand for certain types of construction sand that Dubai, which sits on the edge of an enormous desert, imports sand from Australia. That’s right: exporters in Australia are literally selling sand to Arabs. But sand isn’t only used for buildings and infrastructure – increasingly, it is also used to manufacture the very land beneath their feet. From California to Hong Kong, ever-larger and more powerful dredging ships vacuum up millions of tonnes of sand from the sea floor each year, piling it up in coastal areas to create land where there was none before. Dubai’s palm-tree shaped islands are perhaps the most famous artificial land masses that have been built from scratch in recent years, but they have plenty of company. Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria, is adding a 2,400-acre (9.7 sq km) urban extension to its Atlantic shoreline. China, the fourth-largest nation on Earth in terms of naturally occurring land, has added hundreds of miles to its coast, and built entire islands to host luxury resorts. The problem lies in the type of sand we are using. Desert sand is largely useless to us. The overwhelming bulk of the sand we harvest goes to make concrete, and for that purpose, desert sand grains are the wrong shape. Eroded by wind rather than water, they are too smooth and rounded to lock together to form stable concrete. We cannot extract 50 billion tonnes per year of any material without leading to massive impacts on the planet and thus on people’s lives - Pascal Peduzzi The sand we need is the more angular stuff found in the beds, banks, and floodplains of rivers, as well as in lakes and on the seashore. The demand for that material is so intense that around the world, riverbeds and beaches are being stripped bare, and farmlands and forests torn up to get at the precious grains. And in a growing number of countries, criminal gangs have moved in to the trade, spawning an often lethal black market in sand. “The issue of sand comes as a surprise to many, but it shouldn’t,” says Pascal Peduzzi, a researcher with the United Nations Environment Programme. “We cannot extract 50 billion tonnes per year of any material without leading to massive impacts on the planet and thus on people’s lives.” The main driver of this crisis is breakneck urbanisation. Every year there are more and more people on the planet, with an ever growing number of them moving from the rural countryside into cities, especially in the developing world. Across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, cities are expanding at a pace and on a scale far greater than any time in human history. River sand mining is also contributing to the slow-motion disappearance of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta This new real estate is valuable, but it often incurs steep costs. Ocean dredging has damaged coral reefs in Kenya, the Persian Gulf and Florida. It tears up marine habitat and muddies waters with sand plumes that can affect aquatic life far from the original site. Fishermen in Malaysia and Cambodia have seen their livelihoods decimated by dredging. In China, land reclamation has wiped out coastal wetlands, annihilated habitats for fish and shorebirds, and increased water pollution. And then there’s Singapore, a world leader in land reclamation. To create more space for its nearly six million residents, the jam-packed city-state has built out its territory with an additional 50 sq miles (130 sq km) of land over the past 40 years, almost all of it with sand imported from other countries. The collateral environmental damage has been so extreme that neighbouring Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia have all restricted exports of sand to Singapore. All told, according to a Dutch research group, human beings since 1985 have added 5,237 sq miles (13,563 sq km) of artificial land to the world’s coasts – an area about as big as the nation of Jamaica. Most of it built with gargantuan amounts of sand. ---Article continued a link provided--- |
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