The world is running out of sand

Wyatt earp

Diamond Member
Apr 21, 2012
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Check out this interesting article in the New Yorker....

The World Is Running Out of Sand


Beach-volleyball promoters all over the world have to submit one-kilogram samples to Knapton for approval, and his office now contains hundreds of specimens. (He also vets beach-soccer sand for fifa.) Hutcheson doesn’t ship its own sand to events overseas, but Knapton and his colleagues often create courts in other countries, after sourcing sand where they can. He took off his hard hat and showed me the underside of the brim, on which he had recorded, in black Sharpie, the names and dates of big events they’ve handled, among them the Olympic Games in Sydney, Athens, Beijing, and London. (The sand for London came from Redhill, in Surrey; the sand for Athens came from Belgium.) The company’s biggest recent challenge was the first European Games, which were held in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 2015. Baku has beaches—it’s on a peninsula on the western shore of the Caspian Sea—but the sand is barely suitable for sunbathing, much less for volleyball. Knapton’s crew searched the region and found a large deposit with the ideal mixture of particle sizes, in a family-owned mine in the Nur Mountains, in southern Turkey, eight hundred miles to the west


*snip*



Sand covers so much of the earth’s surface that shipping it across borders—even uncontested ones—seems extreme. But sand isn’t just sand, it turns out. In the industrial world, it’s “aggregate,” a category that includes gravel, crushed stone, and various recycled materials. Natural aggregate is the world’s second most heavily exploited natural resource, next to water.



*snip*

Pascal Peduzzi, a Swiss scientist and the director of one of the U.N.’s environmental groups, told the BBC last May that China’s swift development had consumed more sand in the previous four years than the United States used in the past century. In India, commercially useful sand is now so scarce that markets for it are dominated by “sand mafias”—criminal enterprises that sell material taken illegally from rivers and other sources, sometimes killing to safeguard their deposits. In the United States, the fastest-growing uses include the fortification of shorelines eroded by rising sea levels and more and more powerful ocean storms—efforts that, like many attempts to address environmental challenges, create environmental challenges of their own.




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More.. You can't recycle good sand much can you? Once it's used its gone...


Windowpanes, wineglasses, and cell-phone screens are made from melted sand. Sand is used for filtration in water-treatment facilities, septic systems, and swimming pools. Oil and gas drillers inject large quantities of hard, round sand into fracked rock formations in order to hold the cracks open, like shoving a foot in the door. Railroad locomotives drop angular sand onto the rails in front of their wheels as they brake, to improve traction. Australia and India are major exporters of garnet sand, which is crushed to make an abrasive material used in sandblasting and by water-jet cutters. Foundries use sand to form the molds for iron bolts, manhole covers, engine blocks, and other cast-metal objects. I once visited a foundry in Arizona whose products included parts for airplanes, cruise missiles, and artificial hip joints, and I watched a worker pouring molten stainless steel into a mold that had been made by repeatedly dipping a wax pattern into a ceramic slurry and then into sand. The work area was so hot that I nervously checked my arm, because I thought my shirt was on fire. Factories that produce plate glass—by pouring thin layers of molten silica onto baths of molten tin—can be hotter.

In some applications, natural aggregate can be replaced by or supplemented with recycled materials, but the possibilities are limited.



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More.. You can't recycle good sand much can you? Once it's used its gone...


Windowpanes, wineglasses, and cell-phone screens are made from melted sand. Sand is used for filtration in water-treatment facilities, septic systems, and swimming pools. Oil and gas drillers inject large quantities of hard, round sand into fracked rock formations in order to hold the cracks open, like shoving a foot in the door. Railroad locomotives drop angular sand onto the rails in front of their wheels as they brake, to improve traction. Australia and India are major exporters of garnet sand, which is crushed to make an abrasive material used in sandblasting and by water-jet cutters. Foundries use sand to form the molds for iron bolts, manhole covers, engine blocks, and other cast-metal objects. I once visited a foundry in Arizona whose products included parts for airplanes, cruise missiles, and artificial hip joints, and I watched a worker pouring molten stainless steel into a mold that had been made by repeatedly dipping a wax pattern into a ceramic slurry and then into sand. The work area was so hot that I nervously checked my arm, because I thought my shirt was on fire. Factories that produce plate glass—by pouring thin layers of molten silica onto baths of molten tin—can be hotter.

In some applications, natural aggregate can be replaced by or supplemented with recycled materials, but the possibilities are limited.



.



Interesting.


I'm seeing a good way to use felons in prison......




Here's a whole bunch with experience using sledge hammers...


 
More.. You can't recycle good sand much can you? Once it's used its gone...


Windowpanes, wineglasses, and cell-phone screens are made from melted sand. Sand is used for filtration in water-treatment facilities, septic systems, and swimming pools. Oil and gas drillers inject large quantities of hard, round sand into fracked rock formations in order to hold the cracks open, like shoving a foot in the door. Railroad locomotives drop angular sand onto the rails in front of their wheels as they brake, to improve traction. Australia and India are major exporters of garnet sand, which is crushed to make an abrasive material used in sandblasting and by water-jet cutters. Foundries use sand to form the molds for iron bolts, manhole covers, engine blocks, and other cast-metal objects. I once visited a foundry in Arizona whose products included parts for airplanes, cruise missiles, and artificial hip joints, and I watched a worker pouring molten stainless steel into a mold that had been made by repeatedly dipping a wax pattern into a ceramic slurry and then into sand. The work area was so hot that I nervously checked my arm, because I thought my shirt was on fire. Factories that produce plate glass—by pouring thin layers of molten silica onto baths of molten tin—can be hotter.

In some applications, natural aggregate can be replaced by or supplemented with recycled materials, but the possibilities are limited.



.



Interesting.


I'm seeing a good way to use felons in prison......




Here's a whole bunch with experience using sledge hammers...




Yea it is interesting..

Because if you think about , high quality sand can't be replaced easily in nature..

High quality sand makes solar panels..


Oops



From Sand To Silicon - The Emergence Of A New Solar Giant




.
 
More.. You can't recycle good sand much can you? Once it's used its gone...


Windowpanes, wineglasses, and cell-phone screens are made from melted sand. Sand is used for filtration in water-treatment facilities, septic systems, and swimming pools. Oil and gas drillers inject large quantities of hard, round sand into fracked rock formations in order to hold the cracks open, like shoving a foot in the door. Railroad locomotives drop angular sand onto the rails in front of their wheels as they brake, to improve traction. Australia and India are major exporters of garnet sand, which is crushed to make an abrasive material used in sandblasting and by water-jet cutters. Foundries use sand to form the molds for iron bolts, manhole covers, engine blocks, and other cast-metal objects. I once visited a foundry in Arizona whose products included parts for airplanes, cruise missiles, and artificial hip joints, and I watched a worker pouring molten stainless steel into a mold that had been made by repeatedly dipping a wax pattern into a ceramic slurry and then into sand. The work area was so hot that I nervously checked my arm, because I thought my shirt was on fire. Factories that produce plate glass—by pouring thin layers of molten silica onto baths of molten tin—can be hotter.

In some applications, natural aggregate can be replaced by or supplemented with recycled materials, but the possibilities are limited.



.



Interesting.


I'm seeing a good way to use felons in prison......




Here's a whole bunch with experience using sledge hammers...




Yea it is interesting..

Because if you think about , high quality sand can't be replaced easily in nature..

High quality sand makes solar panels..


Oops



From Sand To Silicon - The Emergence Of A New Solar Giant




.




Sooo...ya' like my plan?
Get the Leftist rioters smashing rocks instead of universities?


And, y'know....striped uniforms represent social justice.....
 
Thinking about this more high quality sand is like a boiled egg, once you use cook it , you can never reverse it..

No wonder why it's becoming valuable.

.
 
Thinking about this more high quality sand is like a boiled egg, once you use cook it , you can never reverse it..

No wonder why it's becoming valuable.

.



In a way, I feel responsible.

I mean, I have often told Obama to pound sand......
 
Thinking about this more high quality sand is like a boiled egg, once you use cook it , you can never reverse it..

No wonder why it's becoming valuable.

.

It can be reversed via filtering and sifting, but that costs $$, and right now even with shortages it's still easier just to buy new sand.

Once the cost of newer sand goes up, you will probably see improvements in the sand filtering/reclamation process, much like you have seen frackers improve their "floor price" when it comes to oil production.
 
Thinking about this more high quality sand is like a boiled egg, once you use cook it , you can never reverse it..

No wonder why it's becoming valuable.

.

It can be reversed via filtering and sifting, but that costs $$, and right now even with shortages it's still easier just to buy new sand.

Once the cost of newer sand goes up, you will probably see improvements in the sand filtering/reclamation process, much like you have seen frackers improve their "floor price" when it comes to oil production.


Thank you for your reply, that makes sense, once the natural supply is depleted we could always make more ..


.
 
Thinking about this more high quality sand is like a boiled egg, once you use cook it , you can never reverse it..

No wonder why it's becoming valuable.

.

It can be reversed via filtering and sifting, but that costs $$, and right now even with shortages it's still easier just to buy new sand.

Once the cost of newer sand goes up, you will probably see improvements in the sand filtering/reclamation process, much like you have seen frackers improve their "floor price" when it comes to oil production.


Thank you for your reply, that makes sense, once the natural supply is depleted we could always make more ..


.

Kind of, again it would be very expensive.
 
Thinking about this more high quality sand is like a boiled egg, once you use cook it , you can never reverse it..

No wonder why it's becoming valuable.

.

It can be reversed via filtering and sifting, but that costs $$, and right now even with shortages it's still easier just to buy new sand.

Once the cost of newer sand goes up, you will probably see improvements in the sand filtering/reclamation process, much like you have seen frackers improve their "floor price" when it comes to oil production.


Thank you for your reply, that makes sense, once the natural supply is depleted we could always make more ..


.

Kind of, again it would be very expensive.


My OP and your post remind me of the oil scare of the 70s and 80s that the world was running out of oil...

I remember sitting around a bar up in Chicago and happened to run into a chemist from Amoco ...I started to babble about the world running out of oil...and he started to explain to me about fracking and such told me we will never run out...



I get what your saying...



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