Materials and Waste

Why the world is running out of sand – BBC Future

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Why the world is running out of sand – BBC Future

It may be little more than grains of weathered rock, and can be found in deserts and on beaches around the world, but sand is also the world’s second most consumed natural resource.

A South African entrepreneur shot dead in September. Two Indian villagers killed in a gun battle in August. A Mexican environmental activist murdered in June.

Though separated by thousands of miles, these killings share an unlikely cause. They are some of the latest casualties in a growing wave of violence sparked by the struggle for one of the 21st Century’s most important, but least appreciated, commodities: ordinary sand.

Trivial though it may seem, sand is a critical ingredient of our lives. It is the primary raw material that modern cities are made from. The concrete used to construct shopping malls, offices, and apartment blocks, along with the asphalt we use to build roads connecting them, are largely just sand and gravel glued together. The glass in every window, windshield, and smart phone screen is made of melted-down sand. And even the silicon chips inside our phones and computers – along with virtually every other piece of electronic equipment in your home – are made from sand.

Pack Your Bags.

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Pack your bags 👜 …

Tonight I fully expect the county legislature to adopt the 5 cent paper bag fee 🦆 as part of their post-Election Day lame duck session. For many of legislators — they truly are lame ducks — many long-standing progressive legislators are packing their bags. Many good people, some of them I worked on their campaigns not all that long ago. I don’t agree with every single issue, but it will be sad to see them go. I decided not to offer spoken public comment but I thought I’d write another blog post about it.

I am really not happy with the paper bag fee. 😤 While I always thought the plastic bag ban was kind of silly, after seeing how many litter the trees and the woods, I’ve largely come around. I’ve had plastic bags blow out of car windows, I’ve chased them blowing out of camp. They don’t really rot, they just get tangled further up in trees and in the woods. The low-value plastic market has collapsed with low oil prices and the China recycling embargo — probably most of the bags aren’t actually getting recycled. Though are an incredibly tiny source of solid waste from households compared to all the packaging that food and household supplies come in.

I don’t really see the big deal about paper bags. 🌲 As several months back when I wrote to my county legislator, I noted paper bags rot and don’t get caught in trees. They can be recycled with mixed paper, used for storing food waste for compost, or used as a fire starter in the wood-stove. They support healthy forests and help promote high prices for timber products, stimulating the market for more sustainable forests — and many contain recycled paper to boot. Paper bags are good for collecting paper for recycling too, especially if more places go back to dual stream recycling, which produces cleaner waste that is more salable.

I used to use reusable bags a lot more years ago, 🔥 but I got out of the habitat after they got worn, dirty, or I never had enough of them on hand when I was at the store. As I don’t drive every day, I often get home, shut-off the truck from my weekly shop, bring in the groceries, and don’t bother to bring them back out to my truck. Sometimes I’ll stop at the store mid-week on bus ride home to buy groceries. So I don’t always have the bags with me. But I guess I will have them with me more now. Plus, in the summer months, I always liked having the plastic bags to use for daily camp garbage and hauling supplies at camp — I can assure very little of them ever found their way into any landfill.

That said, I think the paper bag ban is kind of horseshit. 💩 I am not paying 5 cents to donate to the politicians so they can give out reusable bags at patronage events to their loyal supporters and while asking for votes in the upcoming elections. I will make the greenies happy, and bring my reusable bag!!! I actually have two set aside specifically for this use when the new law goes into effect. When I’m out shopping in freer counties without the surcharge, I’ll probably take advantage of the free paper bags. They’re versatile for re-use.

In the grand scheme of things, shopping bag bans are pretty silly. 🌎 The amount of waste in the shopping bags is much greater then the bags themselves. When I own land in a freer state, I’ll probably keep the reusable bags for hauling library books or other supplies, and go back to the disposable ones. The Earth, my land, and the old burn barrel out back off my off grid cabin, ain’t going to care one way or another if I leave the reusable bag home. That said, I’ll be pissed if roadside litter finds it way into my trees, or is eaten my livestock.

Star Wipers Makes the Rags That Clean Up All Your Messes

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Star Wipers Makes the Rags That Clean Up All Your Messes

The two-story cutting room at Star Wipers fills with a soft, mechanical hum. About 20 middle-aged women and a handful of men stand at workstations encircled by 6-foot-tall plastic bins full of used clothes and sheets. In the middle, Amity Bounds, one of the last professional American rag cutters, grabs a pink hoodie with a sparkly print across the front that reads justice love justice. Like her co-workers, she stands 6 inches from a tea-saucer-size blade that spins at chest level inside a metal guard with three small gaps. With a butcher’s precision, Bounds slips the hoodie into one of the gaps, cuts off the hood, then slices the garment twice so it lies flat. Next she cuts off the zipper and tosses it into a waste bin. Then she cuts off and tosses the sparkly print. (“It’s abrasive and no good for wiping anything.”) The remaining sweatshirt offers little resistance; she slices once, twice, three times, transforming it from a garment to rags.