Did you heard about this issue before?
Here's a link for those who don't want to choose between turning off their ad-blocker or paying $1:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/world-facing-global-sand-crisis-180964815/
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I think its not nearly as informative as the one I posted, but I guess it works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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It's not, but it's a starting point -- anyone interested can use Google to find out more information. And it's better than turning off your ad-blocker or paying $1. :)
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I would not worry about running out of sand. We will be out of other more vital resources long before the sand is gone.. like crude oil, fresh water, agriculture food sources, and maybe even the air we breathe.
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One that surprises a lot of people is that we're very quickly running out of helium. That sucks because we're just hitting the point where we can use it for high power generating/transmitting applications. Some of the most abundant sources are the moon and asteroids, so mining helium from the moon or asteroids is one of the more attractive "space mining" things being worked out.
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Depends on where you live. If you live near a river where sand mining happens, your house could be under the river in a few years. I have heard stories of houses built hundreds of meters away from the river many years ago is now very close to the river and at risk of collapse due to the river, now having less sand in the river bed, eating into the bank.
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Running out isn't really the problem, but the rate at which sand is "stolen" from the rivers and oceans is destroying a lot of the ecosystem which is contributing to a lot of other problems.
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Sounds very familiar to me, but I wasn't aware that it's a worldwide problem.
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The sand it's not just some rocks. It contains a lot of minerals, fish remains, algaes, microrganisms commonly found in the ocean and so on. Replicating the exact composition of sand is not possible as the process requires decades.
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I suspect that would be monumentally uneconomical for most types of sand, as in, crushing rocks into sand takes a huge amount of energy and would need additional filtering afterwards. The sand we have now was produced by weathering over geological time spans. It's a bit like asking if we can't just make more petroleum by fossilizing some plankton (though not as extreme as that).
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I can't say I'd miss it. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.
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I read a little.
In the case of a sand shortage problem for concrete and environmental destruction, it was a topic in my country.
It was a long time ago.
technology to crush the old concrete to a certain size and reuse it is established.
However, depending on the country, there is a tendency to use all the sand at hand.
And steal the sand ... the environment becomes rough, the economy collapses, the number of criminals increases, the number of refugees increases.
But not recently, it was a problem from 2.30 years ago.
Well, sand also on the PC. Sand also on concrete. Sand also on glass. It has many uses.
In any case, when the environment is broken and the cost goes up, it will be supplemented with recycling.
For countries that have not taken measures, the future is dark.
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If only. Unfortunately desert sand's kind of useless for any purpose other than getting lost in. Dubai had to have sand imported from Australia for their building projects, and they all but destroyed their maritime environment dredging up the sand there.
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If someone can come up with a way that desert sand can be used in lieu of beach sand, that someone would stand to make a LOT of money.
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You'd think with all the technology they could find a way to make that sand usefull.
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Techniques to recycle existing concrete or produce usable sand from other rocky-but-not-quite-sand material are under active development, and those are much more promising than the comparatively far more difficult task of making desert sand useful. But if things get desperate enough, who knows.
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Apparently there was a wave of articles on this topic about 2 months ago, but since:
I've decided to create this thread.
The source I'm linking to has a great 8 minute video about it as well as a transcript version
LINK
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