Sources: Elhacham et al. (2020), Hackney et al. (2021), UNEP (2022)
Humanity consumes 18 kilograms of sand per person per day
Since I started following a low-sand diet I now consume at most a few spoonfuls per day (mostly during breakfast). Every little thing counts.
Since the graphic claims microchips are made out of “sand”, I will call silica “sand”. To get a spoon full of “sand”, some random internet sources suggests that it would weigh about 33g, and apparently oats is quite dense in “sand”, so youd need about 176 kg of oats, or about 27,000 spoonfulls of oats to satisfy your diet of “sand”. Impressive!
(Or maybe you just eat it raw as a anti-caking agent?)
spoonful
anything but the metric system
I was using a metric tablespoon for my calculations (15ml)
using volumes for dry powders is unacceptable
It’s okayish if they’re really dry.
Interesting, but they neglect to mention why desert sand is unusable.
Only some sands are suitable for the construction industry, for example for making concrete. Grains of desert sand are rounded by being blown in the wind, and for this reason do not produce solid concrete, unlike the rough sand from the sea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand#Resources_and_environmental_concerns
This recent video by Business Insider talks about it and shows how it’s mined. It comes down to the shape.
Problem is sand is being dredged from poor areas that rely on shallow water environments for survival, aka fishing. Companies come in, take all the sand, destroy the environment in the process by deepening these shallow water environments and driving away all the fish - leaving the local population destitute as the local government recieves the payout without them seeing a cent.
They stole a whole beach in Jamaica.
Locals went to bed with a beach and woke up to the sand missing in the morning.
“Now, we are running out”
Uh, elaborate?
Much of the problem lies in the type of sand needed for construction, with desert sand “largely useless to us” as its grains are the wrong shape. “Eroded by wind rather than water, they are too smooth and rounded to lock together to form stable concrete,” explained the BBC. “The sand we need is the more angular stuff found in the beds, banks, and floodplains of rivers, as well as in lakes and on the seashore.”
Fascinating. I wonder if the rounded desert grains could be processed in such a way as to make them angular, say by crushing?
I have no idea what I’m talking about but could the angular sand extracted from rivers be replaced by round sand from the desert? Over time, that might be shaped into the way we like it, right?
I think that might be possible but costly?
