Sand

06-09-23 00 / episode: 233

Script

Sand.

Wow.

What a simple thing, you might say, what, how can you make a podcast about sand? You'd be amazed.

Where do we use sand? Well, to begin with, some people use sand for beaches.

People have spent lots millions of dollars exporting sand and importing it to their own private beach.

Another place we use sand is in the garden.

If your soil has too much clay, you can add sand to it that can make it better for the plants to grow in and you can have decorative sand, you can make a sand garden and you know, put glass pots full of sand, of different colors that have shapes in them.

They're beautiful, but most sand in the world today is used to make concrete.

And that's a big problem because we're using more concrete than ever before.

We're building more than ever before and we're running out of sand big time.

This is gonna be a problem.

A lot of the attention in the world today is going to climate, environment problems, social problems, wars and those are really, really important.

Um I'm not saying sand is anywhere near as important to those as those on the other hand, sand is being forgotten and it's going to create a problem because we're gonna run out of things to build with.

We won't have the sand to make the buildings that we want to make.

Then we got to make new solutions and there aren't enough trees to make all our buildings out of trees yet.

Of course, we could go and make, get rock out of the ground and crush it and make sand.

But that's really expensive and time consuming.

And who's gonna say yes to taking the rock out of the ground? Historically, mines are terrible.

They destroy the environment and nobody wants a mine near their town.

So what's gonna happen in the next 20 or 30 years on the sand? Horizon? I'm curious to find out.