We Are Running Out of Sand and That Actually Matters

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. 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 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. 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 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

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, 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 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, 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 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

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 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

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, 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 let's do that. I'm thrilled, alright, Chuck is we're saying 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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.

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,

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 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, 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, 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,

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,

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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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, let's do it. So. Um we talked about chuck, Like 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. 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 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.

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 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. 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 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 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

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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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

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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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.