September 24, 2019 • 45 mins
Sand, we’re beginning to realize, is a non-renewable resource - and we are consuming it at a voracious pace. We use it in every construction project around the world and to create new land. And we’re wrecking the ecosystems we mine sand from.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's me Josh and this Wednesday, October two,
I'm going to be in beautiful Austin, Texas to do
the live version of my End of the World with
Josh Clark show. I'll be at the North Door and
you can get tickets in info at n D venue
dot com. Just search for the End of the World
with Josh Clark and there's a few tickets left for
(00:23):
the Stuff You Should Know live show in New Orleans
on October tent For those tickets and more information, go
to s y s K live dot com. Tickets are
going fast to both shows, and we'll see you in October. Everybody.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:50):
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, there's
Jerry over there, and uh like Staying through the Hourglass.
These are the uh podcasts of our lives. I love
that and that that beginning so much that I just
made an homage to it. I didn't even realize I
(01:11):
loved it until it was coming out of my mouth
and I was thinking, God, this is so good. You know,
we live in a cancel culture, we might get canceled
for that one for what the Days of Our Lives reference? Yeah,
just because it was so bad. Okay, yeah, yeah, we
we It's an odd time to be alive, isn't it.
(01:31):
That's right, we're in the transition. But in true stuff
you should know fashion we are doing an episode on
sand after about what a month or so after an
episode on sand dunes? Right, and this is technically not
even necessarily the sand episode. It may be we're gonna better,
we're gonna put it together like it is, but there
(01:52):
may come a time fifty sixty years down the road
when life extension is really kicked in and we're still
doing this where we're like, we gotta do just saying
it now. Yeah, except by then, the episode maybe titled
what was sand? That's right, man, because boy, this episode
is depressing. Yeah, and it could be titled sand colon
(02:16):
yet another way humans are destroying our planet. Yeah, oh look,
another ecological disaster added to the list. But we need
hotels in fake islands. Yeah, the fake islands kind of
got me the most, you know. Yeah, but we're spoiling
this thing. Oh sorry, sorry, So sand, there's a lot
of it so much so. The way back in the day, Archimedes,
(02:40):
one of our favorite people, UM used it in a
thought experiment called the sand reckon Er. And in the
sand Reckoner, he basically he created this to to start
figuring out how to how to create numbers to express
extraordinarily large values, because that's what it's used for. Still, yeah,
just because there's so much of it. It's either it
(03:02):
depends there's the world is divided into two types of people, Chuck,
people who point to the stars as an enormous number,
example of am enormous number, and people who point to sand,
and then people like us that use big max. That's right,
that's true. That's size, though not number, it's size. It
could be length member we've stacked him to the moon before, Um,
(03:25):
but so our comedies came up with a base of
one million. That's what he started with, and he figured
out how to how to express numbers up to eight
times ten to the sixty three power with the sand
reckon or thing. And the point of it is is like, yes,
there's a ton of sand, a lot of sand, so
much so I've seen um that there's seven and a
(03:45):
half billion billion grains of sand just on the world's beaches.
That's from University Hawaii. I saw another one from Chris
Flynn from Tour Observatory in Finland. He estimated a mill allion,
billion billion grains of sand just on the world's beaches.
So I'm just gonna say a jillion jillian bazillion because
(04:08):
apparently you can say whatever. Yeah, but there's a lot.
But the point is this, there is a lot of sand,
especially depending on the math and the grain of the
grain size, that kind of stuff. But there's a finite
amount of sand. And what's been going on behind the
scenes for decades now is a very um rapid depletion
(04:33):
of the available sources of sand, so much so that
it is literally being shuffled from one part of the
world to another, from poorer countries to wealthier countries, sometimes
from uh some inland areas out to other areas, from
the rural areas to the cities. Um, there's a huge
sand shuffle going on, and it is proving pretty rough
(04:56):
for the environment as a result. Yeah. I mean, first all,
I'm forty eight years old and this is the first
I've really heard of this. Like, I don't know, I
thought there was just enough sand for all of time,
you would think. So, I mean, look at a desert.
That's a lot of sand, right, But here's the deal.
We use about fifteen billion tons for just construction every year,
(05:20):
and they are mining worldwide about forty billion tons of
sandy year. I think that's sand and gravel. But still, well,
I do know that it is. I think with gravel.
There's a u N report called Sand and Sustainability. That
report from UNIP United Nations Environment Program. So crushed rock,
sand and gravel account for the largest volume of extracted
(05:42):
solid material worldwide. Okay, so you're saying, like more than oil,
more than natural gas, more than any other Is that
solid material? Yeah? Okay, I think so. I'm not sure
what they mean by that is, look, is oil is solid?
I I don't know. So I saw it also. Put
as like um as are as extractable raw material, sand
(06:02):
and gravel is by far the most um extensively mind,
which is why I said that, and we'll get to
it in detail. But the spoiler here is although new
sand is being made constantly by erosion, which are also
also going to cover not nearly nearly quickly enough. Um,
you know, our use is far far out basing it, yeah,
(06:24):
which makes sand and non renewable resource. Technically, it's just
like oil like yeahs as if you know the environmental
conditions are right, over time, new oil will be made,
but we're talking over very long periods. Sand doesn't take
nearly as long to form as oil does, but it
still takes way longer to replenish itself than than we're
using it up. That's right. So, um, let's talk a
(06:46):
little bit about sand. Yeah, so we get sand. Um.
Sand is the final product. I guess I even hate
calling it a product, but I don't mean it in
the sense of something to be bought and sold, even
though it is. But it's the final product of erosion
from everything from water and wind of course, to ice
and land like glaciers. Grinding against stone creates sand and
(07:11):
volcanic lava. Even when that stuff chills and then shatters
when it makes contact with air. That's how you get
lava sand like the black sand in Hawaii. Yeah, and
that stuff's really good. Is a soil a mender apparently? Yeah,
because it's like a locked in carbon, I believe, right, Yeah,
I mean, I'm sure it's add that some to the
red clay here in Georgia and you're cooking, Yeah, you're
(07:34):
cooking with volcanic ash um. There's also rain, the mild
bit of um like acid that is in rain. Still
even though we we beat acid, rain beat it bad um.
There there's still some in there always. And it weathers rocks,
so that helps the road rocks and create sand to um.
And you've got geological sources of sand, which is just
(07:56):
straight up rocks. You also have biological sources of sand,
things like coral um for minera I believe, for a minieria, No,
for a menifera. I got it. I got it, very
very very tiny shelled creatures um that that produced like
white or pink sand sometimes. And then there's also we
(08:19):
get sand from the poop of the parrot fish. Did
you did you hear about that? Yeah, we talked about
that before, did we. It didn't strike me. It didn't
ring a bell at all. Yeah, it was either I
don't think it was in dunes. I feel like it
was further, it must have been coral reefs. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's it because they actually eat parts of the coral
reef accidentally while they're eating food, and then there's guts
grind up the reef and then they poop out pure
(08:41):
beautiful white sand, like hundreds of pounds of white sand
a year. Yeah. But when you really are talking about
sand that most of us think of a sand, we're
thinking wind and water generally oceans, rivers, and then in
the desert of course wind right and then the desert.
We must have talked about this in sandy, is that
the deserts are just ancient beaches from old like seabeds
(09:05):
and things like that, riverbeds sometimes that's right. And as
far as what sand is literally, you know, it's parts
of rock, uh se. The hardest parts of rock of
sand is quartz, but you've also got gypsum in there,
you've got limestone. Um. We already talked about lava like
there are other compositions, and it really depends on what
(09:27):
kind of sand you're gonna have on obviously what kind
of rock it came from, like where you are in
the world, right. And then if you're an engineer or um,
somebody who makes use of sand, um, they typically don't
classify it or categorize it by composition. They more interested
in the size. Um. So sand is there's and there's
(09:49):
not one universal definition, which I found kind of surprising.
But um, depending on who you ask, uh it is. UH.
Civil engineering today says it's a small gray of rock,
finer than gravel, coarser than silt. The American Society for
Testing and Materials they produced their Standard Practice for Classification
(10:11):
of Soils for Engineering Purposes, Unified Soil Classification System. That's
all one title. They say that sand is particles of
soil between seventy five microns and four point seven five
millimeters in size. That's a big piece of sand. And
then it comes in course medium and fine. And this
is extraordinarily boring. I understand that fully, but it points
(10:34):
out the fact that sand is still a rock. It's
just a very very tiny size rock. Right Like there's gravel,
there's silt. They're stand in between, but it's still a rock.
It's just a different size as far as like engineers
and construction people are concerned. Right, And depending on again
what kind of rocket came from and what it's made
of and where you get it and how it was formed,
(10:57):
the shape is going to be different. It can be
very rough, it can be very smoother. Around the river sand,
which is what's mainly used in construction is irregular, and
they need that irregular shape for that kind of construction
because the middle sort of sand, which is the smoother
ocean sand, isn't as good. And desert sand, which is
(11:19):
the crime Dela crime of sand, very polished, very uniform
and smooth and round turns out is not good at
all for construction. No. So, so the three types of
sand that we find on Earth, our river which is
a regularly shaped ocean, which is smooth, and desert which
is Billy D Williams Sorry for that. I was like,
(11:42):
did Josh just pass out because I just said all that? Right? Right?
I know, I just had to rebuild it though for
the joke, I understand. So um you said that, Uh well, hey,
should we take a break now and come back and
talk about how we use sand? I think saying this
is really boring. Let's take a break is a perfect
opportunity for people to leave and not come back. So
(12:02):
let's do that. I'm thrilled, alright, Chuck is we're saying
(12:30):
I'm thrilled by this because I know we're building up
to the big payoff. You know, San did it in
the parlor. I was going to say the candlestick. I
always go to the candlestick For some reason. I think
the idea of just hitting someone over the head with
the candlestick really resonates with me. Wow, you know, not
(12:51):
like I want to do it or whatever. I just
I'm like, geez, you know, it's gotta hoit. I'm gonna
watch my back next time we're candle shopping. It's right,
That's why I always take your candle shopping. I'm always
always right there on the end. You're just trying to
work up the courage. Yeah, or just I'm like, just say,
just say the wrong thing, chick right now. And then
(13:12):
I always turned around, you go, this one's pretty right.
Cut crystal, chuck. Look, So, speaking of cut crystal, sand
is not made used to make cut crystal. Oh is
that right? No, it's not. But sand is used to
make glass. And we did a great episode on was
it glad Mirrors years ago, Yeah, where we talked a
(13:35):
little bit about this, and then of course silicon microchips
are made from silica sand. It's also used in plastic.
We should I know, we planned to do one on
plastic at some point, so that'll figure in again. Cosmetics, cleaners,
grit and the cleaner sometimes. Yeah, I mean, like, um,
if you use something like soft scrub or something like that,
(13:56):
like that, grit's got to come from somewhere, and you
can bet it's probably sand because again sand, it's just
very tiny rock. It's not gonna like break down or
anything over time. Um. And we've been using sand for
industrial purposes, specifically glassmaking, for at least years. I believe
they used it back in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Used in
(14:16):
Egypt for construction for sure, did they as well? Well,
they use it for glass too, So I mean we've
figured out that sands pretty pretty useful. We also now
today use it for fracking. We did an episode on fracking.
Remember that our world is getting smaller, and like you,
when you inject like water and slurry, um, part of
the slurry is sand to kind of use it to
(14:38):
break up rock to release natural gas. But just far
and away, the biggest use of sand today by human
beings is to make concrete. That's right, and I'll say
it again we said it before. Fifteen billion tons of
sand every year by the construction industry alone. Um. And
here's a few stats for you. UM, A typical house
(14:59):
that's with that means that three bedroom, two bass feet
I guess made entirely of concrete. I guess. I don't
know what's typical these days. Two hundred tons of sand. Um,
A larger building like a school, maybe about three thousand
tons of sand. A nuclear power plant about twelve million
(15:20):
tons of sand. And we just did an episode on
the US high interstate system. Remember all those roads, Yeah,
think about thirty thousand tons of sand per kilometer. Yeah,
So I did the math, and I converted about two
hundred thousand miles, because there's like forty eight thousand miles
of interstate and about a hundred and fifty thousand miles
(15:42):
of highway. Fair enough. Converted that to kilometers. I no
longer remember what it converts to. But times thirty thousand
tons of a kilometer, that's nine billion, six hundred and
fifty six million tons of sand locked into the highways,
just in the U S alone, that are constantly being
re redone and they are you know. Yeah. And also
(16:05):
apparently it's used in asphalt too, so just surface streets too.
And that's a that's a big point. I used a
really important word just now. Locked, Like when we use
sand for concrete in construction. Um, it stays put. That's
the point of it. When you use sand in in concrete,
it's part of the aggregate. It's also part of the
(16:26):
binder because it's used in cement too. So when you
use a bunch of sand and you create something out
of concrete, that sand is staying put. And because it's
not a non renewable resource, it's you just used up
some sand and you're no longer shuffling around from place
to place. It's it's in construction now, it's locked in.
That's right. And as I mentioned before, it's locked together
(16:49):
mainly that river sand that's really irregular, uh, and its
shape locks together better that if you think about it, it
it kind of makes sense that really smooth round desert sand.
It's like, uh, put a bunch of ping pong balls
in a bag that's not gonna lock together. That's a
good analogy. I would have said, more like putting a
bunch of Billy d Williams in a bag together. They're
(17:10):
not going to lock Hey man, that's some schlitzmalt locker
and you've got a party. Yeah. Wait, was that the
one he used to know? He did? Cult? Right? How
could I forget he never made Cult forty five taste
any better? Which was the one with the Oh I
guess it was Slits that had the bowl that wouldn't
charge into the bar and Billy d Williams wrestled that
(17:31):
bowl in one again. Can you imagine working on those
commercials back in the day. Yeah, I'm sure everybody was
really drunk on malt liquor. It's like, we're gonna build
a big set here on stage, a bar set, and
we're going to release a live bull and film it.
See what half it? Wouldn't you have to be drunk
on malt liquor to do that? I guess. So what
(17:52):
about Errol Morris directing all those Miller like commercials? Those
are great Miller heavy? Oh was it? I thought? Was?
Are you sure? Almost positive as light? I think were?
Those are Miller high life. Okay, So here's the thing
I like. I like Carol Morris. I like his work.
I think Thin Blue Line is arguably the best documentary
ever made. It's certainly up there. Um It's not my favorite,
(18:13):
but I respect it. But I'm not like a junkie
for his work. I just love the fact that he
just does whatever project appeals to him at the time. Yeah,
I mean, he directs a lot of commercials. That's that's
where the money is. There's not money in documentaries. Okay,
so he's not doing it because he's like there's some
you know, neat philosophical bent that he has toward Miller
(18:33):
at that moment, and so he's gonna go do. Oh
he's just hired. And I'm sure they hire him for
his unique perview Okay, not per view but point of view.
But yeah, he's he's a commercial director for money, and
that affords him the ability to go um making no
money on documentaries. I may love him even more now.
He's great. Okay, so we're talking about malt Lak or
(18:57):
what was before that, Billy Do? But oh yeah, hey done. Though,
there's this all comes full circle because Errol Morris directed
a great documentary called Vernon, Florida and one of the
elderly couples in Vernon, Florida that was a whole thing
about the star of sand that they had and they
talked about the fact that the sand they collected I
think from the desert in New Mexico is actually growing nice.
(19:20):
So I'm glad you picked up on that, because that
is why I brought up Billy D Williams again so
we could get to that point. Man. Nice job, Chuck.
So um, you said that the river sand is really
the only kind you can use for construction. That's right, okay,
which is is true, and we're using a lot of it,
so much so that every time a city gets bigger
(19:42):
they build a new high rise or something like that.
Somewhere in the world a river is scraped of its sand.
A river, a lake, maybe a dam, but some inland
system of water because really river sand, from what I
can tell, is just beach sand that hasn't happened yet. Yeah,
I mean that's where it's all, but it all wants
(20:03):
to go there. It's all down the road and then
once it gets down to the beach, it's really broken
down to like it's it's most you know, constituent, hardest
parts that aren't going to wash away. Um, but it
it's so it's still a regular it's not it's not
smooth or polished yet. So construction is an enormous consumer
of sand. I saw that China in either in three
(20:25):
years or every three years uses the more the an
amount of sand that's greater than the entire amount of
sand the United States consumed in the twentieth century. Yeah,
and you know, we'll talk more about this, but a
lot of this is um well, not in China, but
in some of these vacation destinations, building these fake islands.
(20:48):
No China is doing that too, Oh are they doing that?
They're using it for every possible idea you can think of, well,
fake islands and then just adding you know, adding land
to the shoreline. Yeah, you want to talk a little
bit about beach nourishment here. So there's a there's something
called beach nourishment or beach replenishment or beach filling, and
(21:08):
it is basically like um, people are saying, Hey, are
our beaches wearing away? We really like this incredibly valuable
coastal real estate, this plot, let's get the beach back.
So they will go and get some sand. Sometimes they
import it. Sometimes they go out offshore and actually literally
(21:29):
vacuum the stuff up, or they'll use huge buckets to
dredge it up and then they dump it on shore
and then they run over it with some heavy equipment
and they have extended the beach significantly. Depending on the
size of the project. It can. It can replenish an
enormous beach for a very long stretch. Um. And that's
(21:52):
that's beach nourishment. That's a huge use of sand right now.
Um in addition to construction for river sand, but as
far as like sea sand and coastal sand, beach nourishment
is a big use of it. And then like you
were saying, building artificial islands is a is a huge use.
Like islands that just aren't were never there, They were
(22:12):
never It's not replenishing an island, it's hey, let's build
an island here where there really wasn't one. Yeah. And
the irony there is they're islands that are disappearing because
the sand is being taken away to build island shaped
like palm trees right off the coast. Yeah. Literally, that's
what those islands. So, like I think in Indonesia at
least twenty four islands have literally vanished because they were
(22:34):
mined for their sand and it was moved over to um.
I guess Dubai is that where it went. I think
Dubai Dubai or Singapore one of the Singapore those are
they're they're both doing a lot of that. Singapore, I
think is created about fifty square miles of land and
grown by twenty as a country, like physically grown because
of adding sand. Yeah, but it's just shuffling sand from
(22:57):
one part of the globe to another. And you know,
and the one hand, it's like that's terrible, like that
sand was meant to be there in Indonesia. Um. But
Indonesia also has like sev in habited islands that are
just basically made up of sand. Um. And who said
that they had to be there? I think it's there's
there's also something to be said about human ingenuity to say, hey,
(23:20):
let's move this island over here and make this other
island bigger. Yeah, can we do it? Yeah, we can
do it. It's neat much so as far as this
nourishment goes, though, it's called a soft soft armoring technique
as opposed to hard armoring like building a sea wall.
But here's the thing with beach nourishment is I mean
it sounds great, like, hey, the beach is eroding, let's
(23:41):
just add a bunch of sand and now the beach
is back. But think about everything on that beach. Just
dumping tons of sand on the beach, is I mean
they use a word like nourishment, I think, very purposefully
to make it sound like, oh, this is so good,
we're nourishing something. But which when you dump you know, tons,
you know, thousands of tons of sand on something, you're
(24:02):
gonna kill a lot of stuff underneath it. Yes, so
they're figuring out that beach nourishment in particular, if you're
going to do it, it's preferable to building a sea wall.
They're saying, like everyone agrees with that, And the reason
why is because once you build a sea wall, you're
actually preventing erosion so that the beach can never replenish itself.
(24:22):
And you're not necessarily affecting your own beach. You're affecting
beaches down the coast where your beach is being moved
down to that beach, and now that beach is not
being replenished because you build a sea wall. So bringing
in imported sand is preferable to building a sea wall.
But the problem is, like you're saying, you're dumping a
bunch of sand h and a place where it wasn't before,
(24:44):
so you're killing everything in there. And then we humans
tend to think of beaches is just a deposit of sand.
That's absolutely not correct. There is a lot of life
and ecosystems going on in the sand that we can't see.
Just because we can't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
Um that are really vital to an area. And it
has a chain reaction when you dump an enormous amount
(25:07):
of sand onto a beach and that it kills the
stuff that was already there, which means that higher and
higher up the food chain, that the chain is broken
or the food web is broken, and so you have
a lot of animals that just move out of the
area because you've just created a literal food desert in
the area by by dumping this stuff. So they figured
out that there's best practices on how to nourish a beach,
(25:31):
and part of it is to do it in smaller,
incremental projects rather than one huge project that just kills
everything off. That's a big step one to doing it right. Sure,
they also say, you know, maybe do it at the
time of the year where there are um maybe fewer seabirds.
And because this is this has a ripple effect on everything.
It's not just the creatures you're dumping the sand on,
(25:52):
it's birds that feed on the things down there because
all of a sudden they're going to different parts of
the beach. It affects the you know, if they're dredging
it from the ocean, you're not just scooping sand and
everything's fine. You're you're creating like these big mud zones
offshore that it's going to affect the sea life out there,
creating construction projects on the beach, which is never fun,
(26:15):
never good. Um. So they're saying, maybe do it at
the time of year where they're are there are less
like seabirds around. Um, you sand that has a similar
composition to the natural sand, like try and match like
sand with like sand at least. Yeah, because again like
we think, well sand is sand, that is utterly incorrect.
Like it really depends on the size, the composition. Um,
(26:36):
A lot of different factors are involved. And when you
when you introduce a different sand into a native sand area,
you've just utterly changed the habitat and that has a
huge effect too. So they say, you need to sample, um,
what your borrow source sand is going to be before
you use it, to make sure it matches what you're
putting on shore. And it's all they say, to plow
it afterward because that helps. But here's the thing, like,
(26:59):
none of this is some kind of permanent solution anyway,
because you're not stopping the erosion process. It's just a
stop gap measure. I guess that over time is just
wasted time and money. Really, well, it depends. I think
they're figuring out that there might be a a useful
least harmful way to do this, and it seems like
(27:22):
going out and getting the sand that you put back
that was washed out to see last time and bringing
it back is probably the best way to do it.
Although even no matter when you do it, every time,
it's going to have some sort of impact just from
the dumping the introduction of all this new sand. Yeah,
and I wonder how much of this has to do
with the fact that um generally like wealthier people on
(27:45):
this beach front property and they you know, they're not
having it, so we got to do something about it.
That's a huge, huge part of it. So there's there's
a third option to building sea walls and replenishing the
beach um. It's called managed retreat, which is basically saying
don't develop up on the beach, like give it way
(28:06):
more space than we give it and let the beach
handle itself. And everyone just laughs at whatever. Ecologists brings
that up every time. Yeah, when I go to uh
Isle of Palms, their houses, some people I think don't
like it because the houses don't sit on the sand.
They're they're way back. They're like, you know, a couple
of hundred yards back, which makes them you know a
(28:28):
little bit safer obviously from from tropical storms and hurricanes.
But other beaches along the coastline, you know, some of
them have water splashing up onto the porches. You know,
they're so close, right, And yeah, you want to build
behind the dunes. But the thing is, if you remember
from the Sand Dunes episode, sand dudes move further and
further inland, so eventually you're going to be in front
of the dunes even though you built way behind the dunes.
(28:50):
So that managed retreat is saying like, dude, build even
further back than that, Like you have to basically drive
to the beach from what I gather. Yeah, and most
of the ones that I've seen that are have the
waves splashing up on you are behind big rock and
wood sea walls, right, which is not good for the
coast down coast, you want to take another break, Yeah,
(29:12):
let's do it. So. Um we talked about chuck, Like
(29:40):
when you go out and get sand and replenish your
beach or nurse sorry, um, your beach. Um, the you're
actually going out and vacuuming it up. That's one form
of what's called dredging. You also have huge things with
enormous buckets, um that go out and scoop the sand up,
just like a vacuum would, uh or the vacuum dredges would.
(30:02):
And then you also have like really low five versions
to where people just take buckets and shovels and start
digging up the beach. And if you get enough people
working and enough um dump trucks in a line that
are just getting filled up by hand, you can have
the same effect as using a really fancy you know,
trailing suction hopper dredge. Yeah. About half or more of
(30:28):
this stuff is usually illegally mined. So when you see
uh humans um diving, which they will do. Uh, that's
you know. I think in Morocco about half the sand
is illegal from the coastline, and when you see these boats.
There's a great article and Wired called the Deadly Global
War for Sand written by Vents Bassier in two thousand fifteen.
(30:54):
Highly recommend people read this one because they get into
the black market for sand and the illegue sand trade
and the fact that you know, there's this one farming
village where this man was straight up murdered because for
ten years he'd been campaigning to authorities to get what's
called the sand mafia shut down, so they will straight
up murder people. In India, the sand mafia is has
(31:16):
killed hundreds of people. Yeah, including like cops, Oh yeah,
government officials. The bribes. I think in two thousand ten,
dozens of Malaysian officials, Um, we're charged with accepting bribes,
sexual favors. Um. Even if you have a permit. I
think in some of these places, I think um Bali,
for instance, seven percent of sand mines have no permits.
(31:38):
And even if you do have a legal permit, you're
using bribes and kickbacks to dig deeper and wider. So
there are at least a dozen countries where illegal smuggling
is just perpetually going on. Right, like sand, we're talking
sand here. We didn't accidentally trapes into like heroin. We're
talking about sand. Yeah, that's how much of a demand
there is for it, and what's crazy is it's still
(32:00):
relatively cheap. I saw as low as ten dollars a
ton um ed has in here up to I think
has twenty a ton, And granted sand is very very heavy,
um so like a ton is something like a cubic yard,
I believe. But still that's a lot of work and
a lot of murder for something that you sell for
(32:21):
ten dollars a ton. But even at that price point,
that's still something like a seven increase in the price
of that commodity since the nineteen seventies. And the reason
why it's been skyrocketing and value is because we're using
so much of it and locking so much of it
up in construction projects and and using it also to
(32:45):
create artificial islands. Yeah. This one UM article though I
think it was a Wired one that was talking about Morocco.
They said, you know, parts of Morocco now looked like
the surface of the moon, whereas years ago there were
you know, sandy beaches, and now they're rocky. So the
irony is they're there, you know, they don't have any
more beaches because they're taking all the sand to use
(33:07):
to build hotels and fake islands to attract people to beaches, right,
So it's just basically a shuffling of sand around the
globe in that sense. But river sand that's different. And
no matter how you how you extract center where you
extract it from, you are deeply impacting the local ecosystem.
(33:30):
Like turning a beautiful beach of Morocco into the surface
of the Moon is going to have some negative effects.
Same thing goes for river dredging as well. Um, the
biggest sand mine in the world is uh Po young
Po p O y n G Lake, which is south
of Shanghai, which is helping fuel Shanghai's enormous construction boom
(33:52):
right now. And there's also sand mining basically everywhere you
everywhere there's a river, there's probably somebody mining it, including
in the u US there's sand mines. Um, there's one
and along the San Jacino River. Is that how you
say that san Jacinto? Yeah? Okay um. And it's the problem.
One of the problems, aside from just impacting the local wildlife,
(34:13):
that that the sand, this silt and sand is part
of like the the ecosystem. Is when you take out
part of the river bed, you expand that river's potential
for flow. And they think that Hurricane Harvey in Houston
was really exacerbated from this sand mining along the San
(34:35):
Jacino River that allowed way more flood and storm water
to flow through it, way more quickly. Yeah, and here's
the other thing is, you know we've talked about besides
the fact that we are you know, naturally sand isn't
being produced nearly enough to account for what we're um
stealing and locking in. But six of the world's rivers
are interrupted by dams. So even if we're in a
(35:00):
in an ideal case like producing enough sand to kind
of be equal, it's not getting down to the mouth
of the river where it all wants to eventually go. No,
but I did see that. One one thing you can
do is like, if you're a sand mining company, you'd
be very smart to make a contract with a dam
operator and say you need the sand like out of
(35:21):
your dam, Right, I can get it out, Just let
me take it for free, and you've you've solved two problems. Right.
But because we're consuming sand at about double the rate
of production for river sand, about half of that sand
you get out of a dam should be brought back
up to the river and basically spread through like the
head of the river. Um. But they're not going to
(35:44):
do that because they can sell it instead. But yeah,
as I puts, like our our ecological disasters are creating
problems for other ecological disasters. Yeah. And but going back
to the ocean sand, which is can be illegally mine
from the ocean floor by people diving, they're also exploiting
people and workers because there's I looked up. I was
(36:06):
trying to get a pay rate and this one guy
forty one years old dives two hundred times a day.
This is from that Wired article, and he makes sixteen
dollars a day. And like you know, their families are
all at work, and they're literally diving off of boats
with buckets and then swimming back to the top like
John Steinbeck style and putting sand in a boat right
(36:29):
with a bucket of sand, which is not exactly light.
It's a really dangerous thing to do. Yeah, in India,
you know where I think it's got the worst problems.
They're trying to do stuff. But from what I've gathered,
it's sort of a lot of it is for show,
Like anytime someone knew is elected or there's a new
person in power. They make a big show about stopping
(36:50):
the you know, the sand wars and the sand trade.
But it's a country of a billion people and it
is got hundreds or probably thousands of illegal operations going on.
And you shut one down, another pops like ten more
pop up, and it's so corrupt and violent that it's
you know, it's looking pretty grim as far as like, hey,
(37:11):
let's really stop this from happening. Yeah, but also don't
don't forget the fact that like these mafia have proven
that they will like murder people, including government officials. So
that's a really intractable problem. It seems like over there,
people in smaller villages are doing you know, they will
like block off roads with cars and stuff to stop
or with trees to stop the cars and trucks, but
(37:33):
then they will get attacked. So it's really grim. And
this is sand, right, it is sand. So if you
wanted to address this, you have to think of it
in just the same way that you think of something
like um, Like anytime there's an organized crime involved, you
have to think of it just like you're dealing with, say,
like the flow of cocaine. Do you go after the
(37:56):
farmers who produced the cocaine. Do you go after the
cartels who are smuggling the coke cane or do you
go do you try to um keep the end user
from wanting it? Do you do you affect demand? And
there's some proposals that seem to say, well, we're not
going to be able to do anything about production, let's
try to see what we can do about demand. And
(38:17):
one of the first things to do is to say,
don't use so much concrete, Like, let's figure out some
other materials that that that we can use for like
smaller construction projects that really don't necessarily need concrete, and
we'll we'll use those instead and save concrete for this
stuff where it is really needed. Yeah, like if you're
building a nuclear power plant, you need the concrete. But
(38:39):
if you're building an average home, there are probably ways
to get around this. Sure, you can use things like
panda claws or condor feathers as building materials rather than
precious sand. Well, there's glass, and you know we talked
earlier about sand as uh is glass to a certain degree,
and you why don't you just crush that down, grind
(39:00):
it up again. Um, there is also artificial sand because
you know, sand is just rock. You can technically, you
can grind down rocks down to sand, but all of
that stuff is I mean, no one's gonna do that
because it's so expensive for now, for now. But that's
the whole idea is is to get these kind of
get these things in place, and the more scarce real
(39:21):
sand becomes than people, you know, the equal the cost
might equal out and people might turn to artificial sand, right.
But the unfortunate thing is is that implies that we
need to keep waiting and just abide this kind of
ecological disaster that is sand mining, until sand becomes so
scarce that artificial sand becomes a viable alternative. Which sucks. Yeah,
(39:42):
I don't. I mean, hopefully this falls under the under
the umbrella of people who want to have best practices
for the environment. Put this is on the radar now,
you know, along with like solar power and everything else. Yeah,
we need somebody to come along and figure out how
to create artificial sand from gravel very easily, although gravel
(40:03):
extractions not exactly environmental impact free. We need to figure
out how to turn trash into vastly superior river sand.
That would be great. Okay, can someone get on that.
Can we divert one of our multiple ventriloquists who are
apparently not doing anything useful in Chuck's opinion, to figuring
(40:25):
out how to convert trash into river sand. You know what,
we didn't get one angry letter from a ventriloquist. As
a matter of fact, you seem to have a You
enjoy wide support in your opinion of ventriloquists, You really do.
Most people don't like them apparently. So, uh, are you
got anything else about ventriloquists or sand? No? I don't
(40:47):
think so. I think this is a good one to
put on people's radar during Well, I guess this is
sort of the tail end of summer beach season. But
you know, when you're out there with the sand and
you're just look around and think about a little bit.
I know that ocean sand isn't what they're using for construction.
But next time you go to a lake or a river,
just kind of keep this in the back of your head. Yeah, really,
(41:09):
let it like depress your experience and watch your back case.
Josh is nearby with a candlestick, right. Uh, Well, I
think that's it for sand for now. If you want
to know more about Sand and Sand to please and
go check it out. There's a lot of ink that's
been spilled over it. And since I said that it's
time for the listener mail, that's right before listener mail, though,
(41:34):
we want to do a couple of things. Um, I
know we had the at the onset of this show,
we probably had a little little pre role for our
upcoming shows. But we're just a couple of weeks out,
by my math from being in New Orleans and Orlando
for live shows. So we'd love to just encourage people
to go out there. We're gonna be in Orlando a
(41:56):
Plaza live on October night, in New Orleans the next
night on t Then I don't know if tickets are
going to be around, so you hopefully you can you
can still get him at this point, yes, I would
skidaddle over to the internet and try to get your
hands on some right now. And then our friends at
co ED, the Cooperative for Education many years ago, they
(42:18):
took us down along with Jerry to Guatemala and we
went on one of their tours and it was great. Yes,
it was. Um that the stuff you should know Guatemalan
Adventure Parts one and two you can still go listen
to those and they want to encourage people to come
out again for some tours. They've had stuff you should
know members members, Army members, I guess yeah, Army members,
(42:39):
listeners go down to these tours because of us mentioning
on the show, and it's really life changing. They're still
doing this kind of work down there. They're breaking the
cycle of poverty in Guatemala through education, and they're still
hosting people just like they did us on these week
long trips. Um, it's a lot of fun, it's very
eye opening, it's very meaningful. It's all the things put together. Um,
(43:01):
you're gonna make some lifelong friends, I guarantee it. And
there you know, we just can't encourage you to enough
to go on one of these tours. Yeah. Co Ide
really knows how to take care of their guests too,
Like they really get across what they're doing and they
take you to the places that are being helped. But
they also I mean it is a lot of fun
as well, and they take you some very beautiful spots. Sure,
it's all these great things wrapped up into one great
opportunity coming up in November. In February, you can learn
(43:26):
more about these tours at Cooperative for Education dot org
slash tours. Chuck. Now finally a listener mail. Alright, lay
it honest, Chuck, because speaking of live shows, we just
finished up our shows in Boston, Portland, Maine and they
were great. And this is from an attendee. Okay, I
wanted to write in to tell you guys how much
(43:46):
fun your live show in Portland was. I am from Connecticut,
but my sister just started as a freshman at the
University of New England and Biddeford, which is just south
of Portland. I was already planning on coming up to
visit her after her first week in school, and I
was listening heard you were coming to Portland and it
couldn't have been more perfect timing wise. Coming to one
(44:07):
of your shows was. It was a bucket list item
for me and it's cool that I got to explore
a new place, even though I myself was um never
big into topic redacted. You guys always know how to
make all of the topics so interesting and reach different audiences. Plus,
it was really cool just to be around so many
stuff you should know fans. Even better, my wife, who
(44:28):
was not even a listener. It was a great sport.
Came to the show. It was amazed to see how
many people were there and had a lot of fun.
Although you hear it all the time, I want to
say again thank you what you and the other podcasters
out there due uh to cultivate learning and creativity for
all ages and communities is awesome. And that is from
Alex and thank you. Boston and Portland, Maine. Great great
(44:49):
time on those shows. Yeah, but that was an amazing time.
And driving between Boston and Portland was really awesome too.
It was wonderful. Uh. Emily and my daughter came up
and we spent the weekend in Portland and I went
out to can A bunk Port and Cape Elizabeth and
Peaks Island and it is a pretty magical place there
(45:10):
in the summertime, it really is. It's crazy. Yeah, So
thanks everybody for having us out and we'll see you
again soon. Well, if you want to get in touch
with us, you can go on to Stuff you Should
Know and uh follow us on our social stuff, and
then you can also just send us a good old
fashioned email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom,
and send it off to Stuff Podcast at I Heeart
(45:32):
radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, it's me Josh and this Wednesday, October two,
I'm going to be in beautiful Austin, Texas to do
the live version of my End of the World with
Josh Clark show. I'll be at the North Door and
you can get tickets in info at n D venue
dot com. Just search for the End of the World
with Josh Clark and there's a few tickets left for
(00:23):
the Stuff You Should Know live show in New Orleans
on October tent For those tickets and more information, go
to s y s K live dot com. Tickets are
going fast to both shows, and we'll see you in October. Everybody.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:50):
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, there's
Jerry over there, and uh like Staying through the Hourglass.
These are the uh podcasts of our lives. I love
that and that that beginning so much that I just
made an homage to it. I didn't even realize I
(01:11):
loved it until it was coming out of my mouth
and I was thinking, God, this is so good. You know,
we live in a cancel culture, we might get canceled
for that one for what the Days of Our Lives reference? Yeah,
just because it was so bad. Okay, yeah, yeah, we
we It's an odd time to be alive, isn't it.
(01:31):
That's right, we're in the transition. But in true stuff
you should know fashion we are doing an episode on
sand after about what a month or so after an
episode on sand dunes? Right, and this is technically not
even necessarily the sand episode. It may be we're gonna better,
we're gonna put it together like it is, but there
(01:52):
may come a time fifty sixty years down the road
when life extension is really kicked in and we're still
doing this where we're like, we gotta do just saying
it now. Yeah, except by then, the episode maybe titled
what was sand? That's right, man, because boy, this episode
is depressing. Yeah, and it could be titled sand colon
(02:16):
yet another way humans are destroying our planet. Yeah, oh look,
another ecological disaster added to the list. But we need
hotels in fake islands. Yeah, the fake islands kind of
got me the most, you know. Yeah, but we're spoiling
this thing. Oh sorry, sorry, So sand, there's a lot
of it so much so. The way back in the day, Archimedes,
(02:40):
one of our favorite people, UM used it in a
thought experiment called the sand reckon Er. And in the
sand Reckoner, he basically he created this to to start
figuring out how to how to create numbers to express
extraordinarily large values, because that's what it's used for. Still, yeah,
just because there's so much of it. It's either it
(03:02):
depends there's the world is divided into two types of people, Chuck,
people who point to the stars as an enormous number,
example of am enormous number, and people who point to sand,
and then people like us that use big max. That's right,
that's true. That's size, though not number, it's size. It
could be length member we've stacked him to the moon before, Um,
(03:25):
but so our comedies came up with a base of
one million. That's what he started with, and he figured
out how to how to express numbers up to eight
times ten to the sixty three power with the sand
reckon or thing. And the point of it is is like, yes,
there's a ton of sand, a lot of sand, so
much so I've seen um that there's seven and a
(03:45):
half billion billion grains of sand just on the world's beaches.
That's from University Hawaii. I saw another one from Chris
Flynn from Tour Observatory in Finland. He estimated a mill allion,
billion billion grains of sand just on the world's beaches.
So I'm just gonna say a jillion jillian bazillion because
(04:08):
apparently you can say whatever. Yeah, but there's a lot.
But the point is this, there is a lot of sand,
especially depending on the math and the grain of the
grain size, that kind of stuff. But there's a finite
amount of sand. And what's been going on behind the
scenes for decades now is a very um rapid depletion
(04:33):
of the available sources of sand, so much so that
it is literally being shuffled from one part of the
world to another, from poorer countries to wealthier countries, sometimes
from uh some inland areas out to other areas, from
the rural areas to the cities. Um, there's a huge
sand shuffle going on, and it is proving pretty rough
(04:56):
for the environment as a result. Yeah. I mean, first all,
I'm forty eight years old and this is the first
I've really heard of this. Like, I don't know, I
thought there was just enough sand for all of time,
you would think. So, I mean, look at a desert.
That's a lot of sand, right, But here's the deal.
We use about fifteen billion tons for just construction every year,
(05:20):
and they are mining worldwide about forty billion tons of
sandy year. I think that's sand and gravel. But still, well,
I do know that it is. I think with gravel.
There's a u N report called Sand and Sustainability. That
report from UNIP United Nations Environment Program. So crushed rock,
sand and gravel account for the largest volume of extracted
(05:42):
solid material worldwide. Okay, so you're saying, like more than oil,
more than natural gas, more than any other Is that
solid material? Yeah? Okay, I think so. I'm not sure
what they mean by that is, look, is oil is solid?
I I don't know. So I saw it also. Put
as like um as are as extractable raw material, sand
(06:02):
and gravel is by far the most um extensively mind,
which is why I said that, and we'll get to
it in detail. But the spoiler here is although new
sand is being made constantly by erosion, which are also
also going to cover not nearly nearly quickly enough. Um,
you know, our use is far far out basing it, yeah,
(06:24):
which makes sand and non renewable resource. Technically, it's just
like oil like yeahs as if you know the environmental
conditions are right, over time, new oil will be made,
but we're talking over very long periods. Sand doesn't take
nearly as long to form as oil does, but it
still takes way longer to replenish itself than than we're
using it up. That's right. So, um, let's talk a
(06:46):
little bit about sand. Yeah, so we get sand. Um.
Sand is the final product. I guess I even hate
calling it a product, but I don't mean it in
the sense of something to be bought and sold, even
though it is. But it's the final product of erosion
from everything from water and wind of course, to ice
and land like glaciers. Grinding against stone creates sand and
(07:11):
volcanic lava. Even when that stuff chills and then shatters
when it makes contact with air. That's how you get
lava sand like the black sand in Hawaii. Yeah, and
that stuff's really good. Is a soil a mender apparently? Yeah,
because it's like a locked in carbon, I believe, right, Yeah,
I mean, I'm sure it's add that some to the
red clay here in Georgia and you're cooking, Yeah, you're
(07:34):
cooking with volcanic ash um. There's also rain, the mild
bit of um like acid that is in rain. Still
even though we we beat acid, rain beat it bad um.
There there's still some in there always. And it weathers rocks,
so that helps the road rocks and create sand to um.
And you've got geological sources of sand, which is just
(07:56):
straight up rocks. You also have biological sources of sand,
things like coral um for minera I believe, for a minieria, No,
for a menifera. I got it. I got it, very
very very tiny shelled creatures um that that produced like
white or pink sand sometimes. And then there's also we
(08:19):
get sand from the poop of the parrot fish. Did
you did you hear about that? Yeah, we talked about
that before, did we. It didn't strike me. It didn't
ring a bell at all. Yeah, it was either I
don't think it was in dunes. I feel like it
was further, it must have been coral reefs. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's it because they actually eat parts of the coral
reef accidentally while they're eating food, and then there's guts
grind up the reef and then they poop out pure
(08:41):
beautiful white sand, like hundreds of pounds of white sand
a year. Yeah. But when you really are talking about
sand that most of us think of a sand, we're
thinking wind and water generally oceans, rivers, and then in
the desert of course wind right and then the desert.
We must have talked about this in sandy, is that
the deserts are just ancient beaches from old like seabeds
(09:05):
and things like that, riverbeds sometimes that's right. And as
far as what sand is literally, you know, it's parts
of rock, uh se. The hardest parts of rock of
sand is quartz, but you've also got gypsum in there,
you've got limestone. Um. We already talked about lava like
there are other compositions, and it really depends on what
(09:27):
kind of sand you're gonna have on obviously what kind
of rock it came from, like where you are in
the world, right. And then if you're an engineer or um,
somebody who makes use of sand, um, they typically don't
classify it or categorize it by composition. They more interested
in the size. Um. So sand is there's and there's
(09:49):
not one universal definition, which I found kind of surprising.
But um, depending on who you ask, uh it is. UH.
Civil engineering today says it's a small gray of rock,
finer than gravel, coarser than silt. The American Society for
Testing and Materials they produced their Standard Practice for Classification
(10:11):
of Soils for Engineering Purposes, Unified Soil Classification System. That's
all one title. They say that sand is particles of
soil between seventy five microns and four point seven five
millimeters in size. That's a big piece of sand. And
then it comes in course medium and fine. And this
is extraordinarily boring. I understand that fully, but it points
(10:34):
out the fact that sand is still a rock. It's
just a very very tiny size rock. Right Like there's gravel,
there's silt. They're stand in between, but it's still a rock.
It's just a different size as far as like engineers
and construction people are concerned. Right, And depending on again
what kind of rocket came from and what it's made
of and where you get it and how it was formed,
(10:57):
the shape is going to be different. It can be
very rough, it can be very smoother. Around the river sand,
which is what's mainly used in construction is irregular, and
they need that irregular shape for that kind of construction
because the middle sort of sand, which is the smoother
ocean sand, isn't as good. And desert sand, which is
(11:19):
the crime Dela crime of sand, very polished, very uniform
and smooth and round turns out is not good at
all for construction. No. So, so the three types of
sand that we find on Earth, our river which is
a regularly shaped ocean, which is smooth, and desert which
is Billy D Williams Sorry for that. I was like,
(11:42):
did Josh just pass out because I just said all that? Right? Right?
I know, I just had to rebuild it though for
the joke, I understand. So um you said that, Uh well, hey,
should we take a break now and come back and
talk about how we use sand? I think saying this
is really boring. Let's take a break is a perfect
opportunity for people to leave and not come back. So
(12:02):
let's do that. I'm thrilled, alright, Chuck is we're saying
(12:30):
I'm thrilled by this because I know we're building up
to the big payoff. You know, San did it in
the parlor. I was going to say the candlestick. I
always go to the candlestick For some reason. I think
the idea of just hitting someone over the head with
the candlestick really resonates with me. Wow, you know, not
(12:51):
like I want to do it or whatever. I just
I'm like, geez, you know, it's gotta hoit. I'm gonna
watch my back next time we're candle shopping. It's right,
That's why I always take your candle shopping. I'm always
always right there on the end. You're just trying to
work up the courage. Yeah, or just I'm like, just say,
just say the wrong thing, chick right now. And then
(13:12):
I always turned around, you go, this one's pretty right.
Cut crystal, chuck. Look, So, speaking of cut crystal, sand
is not made used to make cut crystal. Oh is
that right? No, it's not. But sand is used to
make glass. And we did a great episode on was
it glad Mirrors years ago, Yeah, where we talked a
(13:35):
little bit about this, and then of course silicon microchips
are made from silica sand. It's also used in plastic.
We should I know, we planned to do one on
plastic at some point, so that'll figure in again. Cosmetics, cleaners,
grit and the cleaner sometimes. Yeah, I mean, like, um,
if you use something like soft scrub or something like that,
(13:56):
like that, grit's got to come from somewhere, and you
can bet it's probably sand because again sand, it's just
very tiny rock. It's not gonna like break down or
anything over time. Um. And we've been using sand for
industrial purposes, specifically glassmaking, for at least years. I believe
they used it back in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Used in
(14:16):
Egypt for construction for sure, did they as well? Well,
they use it for glass too, So I mean we've
figured out that sands pretty pretty useful. We also now
today use it for fracking. We did an episode on fracking.
Remember that our world is getting smaller, and like you,
when you inject like water and slurry, um, part of
the slurry is sand to kind of use it to
(14:38):
break up rock to release natural gas. But just far
and away, the biggest use of sand today by human
beings is to make concrete. That's right, and I'll say
it again we said it before. Fifteen billion tons of
sand every year by the construction industry alone. Um. And
here's a few stats for you. UM, A typical house
(14:59):
that's with that means that three bedroom, two bass feet
I guess made entirely of concrete. I guess. I don't
know what's typical these days. Two hundred tons of sand. Um,
A larger building like a school, maybe about three thousand
tons of sand. A nuclear power plant about twelve million
(15:20):
tons of sand. And we just did an episode on
the US high interstate system. Remember all those roads, Yeah,
think about thirty thousand tons of sand per kilometer. Yeah,
So I did the math, and I converted about two
hundred thousand miles, because there's like forty eight thousand miles
of interstate and about a hundred and fifty thousand miles
(15:42):
of highway. Fair enough. Converted that to kilometers. I no
longer remember what it converts to. But times thirty thousand
tons of a kilometer, that's nine billion, six hundred and
fifty six million tons of sand locked into the highways,
just in the U S alone, that are constantly being
re redone and they are you know. Yeah. And also
(16:05):
apparently it's used in asphalt too, so just surface streets too.
And that's a that's a big point. I used a
really important word just now. Locked, Like when we use
sand for concrete in construction. Um, it stays put. That's
the point of it. When you use sand in in concrete,
it's part of the aggregate. It's also part of the
(16:26):
binder because it's used in cement too. So when you
use a bunch of sand and you create something out
of concrete, that sand is staying put. And because it's
not a non renewable resource, it's you just used up
some sand and you're no longer shuffling around from place
to place. It's it's in construction now, it's locked in.
That's right. And as I mentioned before, it's locked together
(16:49):
mainly that river sand that's really irregular, uh, and its
shape locks together better that if you think about it, it
it kind of makes sense that really smooth round desert sand.
It's like, uh, put a bunch of ping pong balls
in a bag that's not gonna lock together. That's a
good analogy. I would have said, more like putting a
bunch of Billy d Williams in a bag together. They're
(17:10):
not going to lock Hey man, that's some schlitzmalt locker
and you've got a party. Yeah. Wait, was that the
one he used to know? He did? Cult? Right? How
could I forget he never made Cult forty five taste
any better? Which was the one with the Oh I
guess it was Slits that had the bowl that wouldn't
charge into the bar and Billy d Williams wrestled that
(17:31):
bowl in one again. Can you imagine working on those
commercials back in the day. Yeah, I'm sure everybody was
really drunk on malt liquor. It's like, we're gonna build
a big set here on stage, a bar set, and
we're going to release a live bull and film it.
See what half it? Wouldn't you have to be drunk
on malt liquor to do that? I guess. So what
(17:52):
about Errol Morris directing all those Miller like commercials? Those
are great Miller heavy? Oh was it? I thought? Was?
Are you sure? Almost positive as light? I think were?
Those are Miller high life. Okay, So here's the thing
I like. I like Carol Morris. I like his work.
I think Thin Blue Line is arguably the best documentary
ever made. It's certainly up there. Um It's not my favorite,
(18:13):
but I respect it. But I'm not like a junkie
for his work. I just love the fact that he
just does whatever project appeals to him at the time. Yeah,
I mean, he directs a lot of commercials. That's that's
where the money is. There's not money in documentaries. Okay,
so he's not doing it because he's like there's some
you know, neat philosophical bent that he has toward Miller
(18:33):
at that moment, and so he's gonna go do. Oh
he's just hired. And I'm sure they hire him for
his unique perview Okay, not per view but point of view.
But yeah, he's he's a commercial director for money, and
that affords him the ability to go um making no
money on documentaries. I may love him even more now.
He's great. Okay, so we're talking about malt Lak or
(18:57):
what was before that, Billy Do? But oh yeah, hey done. Though,
there's this all comes full circle because Errol Morris directed
a great documentary called Vernon, Florida and one of the
elderly couples in Vernon, Florida that was a whole thing
about the star of sand that they had and they
talked about the fact that the sand they collected I
think from the desert in New Mexico is actually growing nice.
(19:20):
So I'm glad you picked up on that, because that
is why I brought up Billy D Williams again so
we could get to that point. Man. Nice job, Chuck.
So um, you said that the river sand is really
the only kind you can use for construction. That's right, okay,
which is is true, and we're using a lot of it,
so much so that every time a city gets bigger
(19:42):
they build a new high rise or something like that.
Somewhere in the world a river is scraped of its sand.
A river, a lake, maybe a dam, but some inland
system of water because really river sand, from what I
can tell, is just beach sand that hasn't happened yet. Yeah,
I mean that's where it's all, but it all wants
(20:03):
to go there. It's all down the road and then
once it gets down to the beach, it's really broken
down to like it's it's most you know, constituent, hardest
parts that aren't going to wash away. Um, but it
it's so it's still a regular it's not it's not
smooth or polished yet. So construction is an enormous consumer
of sand. I saw that China in either in three
(20:25):
years or every three years uses the more the an
amount of sand that's greater than the entire amount of
sand the United States consumed in the twentieth century. Yeah,
and you know, we'll talk more about this, but a
lot of this is um well, not in China, but
in some of these vacation destinations, building these fake islands.
(20:48):
No China is doing that too, Oh are they doing that?
They're using it for every possible idea you can think of, well,
fake islands and then just adding you know, adding land
to the shoreline. Yeah, you want to talk a little
bit about beach nourishment here. So there's a there's something
called beach nourishment or beach replenishment or beach filling, and
(21:08):
it is basically like um, people are saying, Hey, are
our beaches wearing away? We really like this incredibly valuable
coastal real estate, this plot, let's get the beach back.
So they will go and get some sand. Sometimes they
import it. Sometimes they go out offshore and actually literally
(21:29):
vacuum the stuff up, or they'll use huge buckets to
dredge it up and then they dump it on shore
and then they run over it with some heavy equipment
and they have extended the beach significantly. Depending on the
size of the project. It can. It can replenish an
enormous beach for a very long stretch. Um. And that's
(21:52):
that's beach nourishment. That's a huge use of sand right now.
Um in addition to construction for river sand, but as
far as like sea sand and coastal sand, beach nourishment
is a big use of it. And then like you
were saying, building artificial islands is a is a huge use.
Like islands that just aren't were never there, They were
(22:12):
never It's not replenishing an island, it's hey, let's build
an island here where there really wasn't one. Yeah. And
the irony there is they're islands that are disappearing because
the sand is being taken away to build island shaped
like palm trees right off the coast. Yeah. Literally, that's
what those islands. So, like I think in Indonesia at
least twenty four islands have literally vanished because they were
(22:34):
mined for their sand and it was moved over to um.
I guess Dubai is that where it went. I think
Dubai Dubai or Singapore one of the Singapore those are
they're they're both doing a lot of that. Singapore, I
think is created about fifty square miles of land and
grown by twenty as a country, like physically grown because
of adding sand. Yeah, but it's just shuffling sand from
(22:57):
one part of the globe to another. And you know,
and the one hand, it's like that's terrible, like that
sand was meant to be there in Indonesia. Um. But
Indonesia also has like sev in habited islands that are
just basically made up of sand. Um. And who said
that they had to be there? I think it's there's
there's also something to be said about human ingenuity to say, hey,
(23:20):
let's move this island over here and make this other
island bigger. Yeah, can we do it? Yeah, we can
do it. It's neat much so as far as this
nourishment goes, though, it's called a soft soft armoring technique
as opposed to hard armoring like building a sea wall.
But here's the thing with beach nourishment is I mean
it sounds great, like, hey, the beach is eroding, let's
(23:41):
just add a bunch of sand and now the beach
is back. But think about everything on that beach. Just
dumping tons of sand on the beach, is I mean
they use a word like nourishment, I think, very purposefully
to make it sound like, oh, this is so good,
we're nourishing something. But which when you dump you know, tons,
you know, thousands of tons of sand on something, you're
(24:02):
gonna kill a lot of stuff underneath it. Yes, so
they're figuring out that beach nourishment in particular, if you're
going to do it, it's preferable to building a sea wall.
They're saying, like everyone agrees with that, And the reason
why is because once you build a sea wall, you're
actually preventing erosion so that the beach can never replenish itself.
(24:22):
And you're not necessarily affecting your own beach. You're affecting
beaches down the coast where your beach is being moved
down to that beach, and now that beach is not
being replenished because you build a sea wall. So bringing
in imported sand is preferable to building a sea wall.
But the problem is, like you're saying, you're dumping a
bunch of sand h and a place where it wasn't before,
(24:44):
so you're killing everything in there. And then we humans
tend to think of beaches is just a deposit of sand.
That's absolutely not correct. There is a lot of life
and ecosystems going on in the sand that we can't see.
Just because we can't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
Um that are really vital to an area. And it
has a chain reaction when you dump an enormous amount
(25:07):
of sand onto a beach and that it kills the
stuff that was already there, which means that higher and
higher up the food chain, that the chain is broken
or the food web is broken, and so you have
a lot of animals that just move out of the
area because you've just created a literal food desert in
the area by by dumping this stuff. So they figured
out that there's best practices on how to nourish a beach,
(25:31):
and part of it is to do it in smaller,
incremental projects rather than one huge project that just kills
everything off. That's a big step one to doing it right. Sure,
they also say, you know, maybe do it at the
time of the year where there are um maybe fewer seabirds.
And because this is this has a ripple effect on everything.
It's not just the creatures you're dumping the sand on,
(25:52):
it's birds that feed on the things down there because
all of a sudden they're going to different parts of
the beach. It affects the you know, if they're dredging
it from the ocean, you're not just scooping sand and
everything's fine. You're you're creating like these big mud zones
offshore that it's going to affect the sea life out there,
creating construction projects on the beach, which is never fun,
(26:15):
never good. Um. So they're saying, maybe do it at
the time of year where they're are there are less
like seabirds around. Um, you sand that has a similar
composition to the natural sand, like try and match like
sand with like sand at least. Yeah, because again like
we think, well sand is sand, that is utterly incorrect.
Like it really depends on the size, the composition. Um,
(26:36):
A lot of different factors are involved. And when you
when you introduce a different sand into a native sand area,
you've just utterly changed the habitat and that has a
huge effect too. So they say, you need to sample, um,
what your borrow source sand is going to be before
you use it, to make sure it matches what you're
putting on shore. And it's all they say, to plow
it afterward because that helps. But here's the thing, like,
(26:59):
none of this is some kind of permanent solution anyway,
because you're not stopping the erosion process. It's just a
stop gap measure. I guess that over time is just
wasted time and money. Really, well, it depends. I think
they're figuring out that there might be a a useful
least harmful way to do this, and it seems like
(27:22):
going out and getting the sand that you put back
that was washed out to see last time and bringing
it back is probably the best way to do it.
Although even no matter when you do it, every time,
it's going to have some sort of impact just from
the dumping the introduction of all this new sand. Yeah,
and I wonder how much of this has to do
with the fact that um generally like wealthier people on
(27:45):
this beach front property and they you know, they're not
having it, so we got to do something about it.
That's a huge, huge part of it. So there's there's
a third option to building sea walls and replenishing the
beach um. It's called managed retreat, which is basically saying
don't develop up on the beach, like give it way
(28:06):
more space than we give it and let the beach
handle itself. And everyone just laughs at whatever. Ecologists brings
that up every time. Yeah, when I go to uh
Isle of Palms, their houses, some people I think don't
like it because the houses don't sit on the sand.
They're they're way back. They're like, you know, a couple
of hundred yards back, which makes them you know a
(28:28):
little bit safer obviously from from tropical storms and hurricanes.
But other beaches along the coastline, you know, some of
them have water splashing up onto the porches. You know,
they're so close, right, And yeah, you want to build
behind the dunes. But the thing is, if you remember
from the Sand Dunes episode, sand dudes move further and
further inland, so eventually you're going to be in front
of the dunes even though you built way behind the dunes.
(28:50):
So that managed retreat is saying like, dude, build even
further back than that, Like you have to basically drive
to the beach from what I gather. Yeah, and most
of the ones that I've seen that are have the
waves splashing up on you are behind big rock and
wood sea walls, right, which is not good for the
coast down coast, you want to take another break, Yeah,
(29:12):
let's do it. So. Um we talked about chuck, Like
(29:40):
when you go out and get sand and replenish your
beach or nurse sorry, um, your beach. Um, the you're
actually going out and vacuuming it up. That's one form
of what's called dredging. You also have huge things with
enormous buckets, um that go out and scoop the sand up,
just like a vacuum would, uh or the vacuum dredges would.
(30:02):
And then you also have like really low five versions
to where people just take buckets and shovels and start
digging up the beach. And if you get enough people
working and enough um dump trucks in a line that
are just getting filled up by hand, you can have
the same effect as using a really fancy you know,
trailing suction hopper dredge. Yeah. About half or more of
(30:28):
this stuff is usually illegally mined. So when you see
uh humans um diving, which they will do. Uh, that's
you know. I think in Morocco about half the sand
is illegal from the coastline, and when you see these boats.
There's a great article and Wired called the Deadly Global
War for Sand written by Vents Bassier in two thousand fifteen.
(30:54):
Highly recommend people read this one because they get into
the black market for sand and the illegue sand trade
and the fact that you know, there's this one farming
village where this man was straight up murdered because for
ten years he'd been campaigning to authorities to get what's
called the sand mafia shut down, so they will straight
up murder people. In India, the sand mafia is has
(31:16):
killed hundreds of people. Yeah, including like cops, Oh yeah,
government officials. The bribes. I think in two thousand ten,
dozens of Malaysian officials, Um, we're charged with accepting bribes,
sexual favors. Um. Even if you have a permit. I
think in some of these places, I think um Bali,
for instance, seven percent of sand mines have no permits.
(31:38):
And even if you do have a legal permit, you're
using bribes and kickbacks to dig deeper and wider. So
there are at least a dozen countries where illegal smuggling
is just perpetually going on. Right, like sand, we're talking
sand here. We didn't accidentally trapes into like heroin. We're
talking about sand. Yeah, that's how much of a demand
there is for it, and what's crazy is it's still
(32:00):
relatively cheap. I saw as low as ten dollars a
ton um ed has in here up to I think
has twenty a ton, And granted sand is very very heavy,
um so like a ton is something like a cubic yard,
I believe. But still that's a lot of work and
a lot of murder for something that you sell for
(32:21):
ten dollars a ton. But even at that price point,
that's still something like a seven increase in the price
of that commodity since the nineteen seventies. And the reason
why it's been skyrocketing and value is because we're using
so much of it and locking so much of it
up in construction projects and and using it also to
(32:45):
create artificial islands. Yeah. This one UM article though I
think it was a Wired one that was talking about Morocco.
They said, you know, parts of Morocco now looked like
the surface of the moon, whereas years ago there were
you know, sandy beaches, and now they're rocky. So the
irony is they're there, you know, they don't have any
more beaches because they're taking all the sand to use
(33:07):
to build hotels and fake islands to attract people to beaches, right,
So it's just basically a shuffling of sand around the
globe in that sense. But river sand that's different. And
no matter how you how you extract center where you
extract it from, you are deeply impacting the local ecosystem.
(33:30):
Like turning a beautiful beach of Morocco into the surface
of the Moon is going to have some negative effects.
Same thing goes for river dredging as well. Um, the
biggest sand mine in the world is uh Po young
Po p O y n G Lake, which is south
of Shanghai, which is helping fuel Shanghai's enormous construction boom
(33:52):
right now. And there's also sand mining basically everywhere you
everywhere there's a river, there's probably somebody mining it, including
in the u US there's sand mines. Um, there's one
and along the San Jacino River. Is that how you
say that san Jacinto? Yeah? Okay um. And it's the problem.
One of the problems, aside from just impacting the local wildlife,
(34:13):
that that the sand, this silt and sand is part
of like the the ecosystem. Is when you take out
part of the river bed, you expand that river's potential
for flow. And they think that Hurricane Harvey in Houston
was really exacerbated from this sand mining along the San
(34:35):
Jacino River that allowed way more flood and storm water
to flow through it, way more quickly. Yeah, and here's
the other thing is, you know we've talked about besides
the fact that we are you know, naturally sand isn't
being produced nearly enough to account for what we're um
stealing and locking in. But six of the world's rivers
are interrupted by dams. So even if we're in a
(35:00):
in an ideal case like producing enough sand to kind
of be equal, it's not getting down to the mouth
of the river where it all wants to eventually go. No,
but I did see that. One one thing you can
do is like, if you're a sand mining company, you'd
be very smart to make a contract with a dam
operator and say you need the sand like out of
(35:21):
your dam, Right, I can get it out, Just let
me take it for free, and you've you've solved two problems. Right.
But because we're consuming sand at about double the rate
of production for river sand, about half of that sand
you get out of a dam should be brought back
up to the river and basically spread through like the
head of the river. Um. But they're not going to
(35:44):
do that because they can sell it instead. But yeah,
as I puts, like our our ecological disasters are creating
problems for other ecological disasters. Yeah. And but going back
to the ocean sand, which is can be illegally mine
from the ocean floor by people diving, they're also exploiting
people and workers because there's I looked up. I was
(36:06):
trying to get a pay rate and this one guy
forty one years old dives two hundred times a day.
This is from that Wired article, and he makes sixteen
dollars a day. And like you know, their families are
all at work, and they're literally diving off of boats
with buckets and then swimming back to the top like
John Steinbeck style and putting sand in a boat right
(36:29):
with a bucket of sand, which is not exactly light.
It's a really dangerous thing to do. Yeah, in India,
you know where I think it's got the worst problems.
They're trying to do stuff. But from what I've gathered,
it's sort of a lot of it is for show,
Like anytime someone knew is elected or there's a new
person in power. They make a big show about stopping
(36:50):
the you know, the sand wars and the sand trade.
But it's a country of a billion people and it
is got hundreds or probably thousands of illegal operations going on.
And you shut one down, another pops like ten more
pop up, and it's so corrupt and violent that it's
you know, it's looking pretty grim as far as like, hey,
(37:11):
let's really stop this from happening. Yeah, but also don't
don't forget the fact that like these mafia have proven
that they will like murder people, including government officials. So
that's a really intractable problem. It seems like over there,
people in smaller villages are doing you know, they will
like block off roads with cars and stuff to stop
or with trees to stop the cars and trucks, but
(37:33):
then they will get attacked. So it's really grim. And
this is sand, right, it is sand. So if you
wanted to address this, you have to think of it
in just the same way that you think of something
like um, Like anytime there's an organized crime involved, you
have to think of it just like you're dealing with, say,
like the flow of cocaine. Do you go after the
(37:56):
farmers who produced the cocaine. Do you go after the
cartels who are smuggling the coke cane or do you
go do you try to um keep the end user
from wanting it? Do you do you affect demand? And
there's some proposals that seem to say, well, we're not
going to be able to do anything about production, let's
try to see what we can do about demand. And
(38:17):
one of the first things to do is to say,
don't use so much concrete, Like, let's figure out some
other materials that that that we can use for like
smaller construction projects that really don't necessarily need concrete, and
we'll we'll use those instead and save concrete for this
stuff where it is really needed. Yeah, like if you're
building a nuclear power plant, you need the concrete. But
(38:39):
if you're building an average home, there are probably ways
to get around this. Sure, you can use things like
panda claws or condor feathers as building materials rather than
precious sand. Well, there's glass, and you know we talked
earlier about sand as uh is glass to a certain degree,
and you why don't you just crush that down, grind
(39:00):
it up again. Um, there is also artificial sand because
you know, sand is just rock. You can technically, you
can grind down rocks down to sand, but all of
that stuff is I mean, no one's gonna do that
because it's so expensive for now, for now. But that's
the whole idea is is to get these kind of
get these things in place, and the more scarce real
(39:21):
sand becomes than people, you know, the equal the cost
might equal out and people might turn to artificial sand, right.
But the unfortunate thing is is that implies that we
need to keep waiting and just abide this kind of
ecological disaster that is sand mining, until sand becomes so
scarce that artificial sand becomes a viable alternative. Which sucks. Yeah,
(39:42):
I don't. I mean, hopefully this falls under the under
the umbrella of people who want to have best practices
for the environment. Put this is on the radar now,
you know, along with like solar power and everything else. Yeah,
we need somebody to come along and figure out how
to create artificial sand from gravel very easily, although gravel
(40:03):
extractions not exactly environmental impact free. We need to figure
out how to turn trash into vastly superior river sand.
That would be great. Okay, can someone get on that.
Can we divert one of our multiple ventriloquists who are
apparently not doing anything useful in Chuck's opinion, to figuring
(40:25):
out how to convert trash into river sand. You know what,
we didn't get one angry letter from a ventriloquist. As
a matter of fact, you seem to have a You
enjoy wide support in your opinion of ventriloquists, You really do.
Most people don't like them apparently. So, uh, are you
got anything else about ventriloquists or sand? No? I don't
(40:47):
think so. I think this is a good one to
put on people's radar during Well, I guess this is
sort of the tail end of summer beach season. But
you know, when you're out there with the sand and
you're just look around and think about a little bit.
I know that ocean sand isn't what they're using for construction.
But next time you go to a lake or a river,
just kind of keep this in the back of your head. Yeah, really,
(41:09):
let it like depress your experience and watch your back case.
Josh is nearby with a candlestick, right. Uh, Well, I
think that's it for sand for now. If you want
to know more about Sand and Sand to please and
go check it out. There's a lot of ink that's
been spilled over it. And since I said that it's
time for the listener mail, that's right before listener mail, though,
(41:34):
we want to do a couple of things. Um, I
know we had the at the onset of this show,
we probably had a little little pre role for our
upcoming shows. But we're just a couple of weeks out,
by my math from being in New Orleans and Orlando
for live shows. So we'd love to just encourage people
to go out there. We're gonna be in Orlando a
(41:56):
Plaza live on October night, in New Orleans the next
night on t Then I don't know if tickets are
going to be around, so you hopefully you can you
can still get him at this point, yes, I would
skidaddle over to the internet and try to get your
hands on some right now. And then our friends at
co ED, the Cooperative for Education many years ago, they
(42:18):
took us down along with Jerry to Guatemala and we
went on one of their tours and it was great. Yes,
it was. Um that the stuff you should know Guatemalan
Adventure Parts one and two you can still go listen
to those and they want to encourage people to come
out again for some tours. They've had stuff you should
know members members, Army members, I guess yeah, Army members,
(42:39):
listeners go down to these tours because of us mentioning
on the show, and it's really life changing. They're still
doing this kind of work down there. They're breaking the
cycle of poverty in Guatemala through education, and they're still
hosting people just like they did us on these week
long trips. Um, it's a lot of fun, it's very
eye opening, it's very meaningful. It's all the things put together. Um,
(43:01):
you're gonna make some lifelong friends, I guarantee it. And
there you know, we just can't encourage you to enough
to go on one of these tours. Yeah. Co Ide
really knows how to take care of their guests too,
Like they really get across what they're doing and they
take you to the places that are being helped. But
they also I mean it is a lot of fun
as well, and they take you some very beautiful spots. Sure,
it's all these great things wrapped up into one great
opportunity coming up in November. In February, you can learn
(43:26):
more about these tours at Cooperative for Education dot org
slash tours. Chuck. Now finally a listener mail. Alright, lay
it honest, Chuck, because speaking of live shows, we just
finished up our shows in Boston, Portland, Maine and they
were great. And this is from an attendee. Okay, I
wanted to write in to tell you guys how much
(43:46):
fun your live show in Portland was. I am from Connecticut,
but my sister just started as a freshman at the
University of New England and Biddeford, which is just south
of Portland. I was already planning on coming up to
visit her after her first week in school, and I
was listening heard you were coming to Portland and it
couldn't have been more perfect timing wise. Coming to one
(44:07):
of your shows was. It was a bucket list item
for me and it's cool that I got to explore
a new place, even though I myself was um never
big into topic redacted. You guys always know how to
make all of the topics so interesting and reach different audiences. Plus,
it was really cool just to be around so many
stuff you should know fans. Even better, my wife, who
(44:28):
was not even a listener. It was a great sport.
Came to the show. It was amazed to see how
many people were there and had a lot of fun.
Although you hear it all the time, I want to
say again thank you what you and the other podcasters
out there due uh to cultivate learning and creativity for
all ages and communities is awesome. And that is from
Alex and thank you. Boston and Portland, Maine. Great great
(44:49):
time on those shows. Yeah, but that was an amazing time.
And driving between Boston and Portland was really awesome too.
It was wonderful. Uh. Emily and my daughter came up
and we spent the weekend in Portland and I went
out to can A bunk Port and Cape Elizabeth and
Peaks Island and it is a pretty magical place there
(45:10):
in the summertime, it really is. It's crazy. Yeah, So
thanks everybody for having us out and we'll see you
again soon. Well, if you want to get in touch
with us, you can go on to Stuff you Should
Know and uh follow us on our social stuff, and
then you can also just send us a good old
fashioned email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom,
and send it off to Stuff Podcast at I Heeart
(45:32):
radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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