The World Is Running Out of Sand | Hacker News Reader

The World Is Running Out of Sand

smithsonianmag.com

214 pointslaktak134 comments

I've had a weird front row seat to sand in Minnesota. We have a popular local renaissance festival southwest of the Twin Cities. Its location is typical for such things - a plot of otherwise unused land near a riverbed, too sandy for typical Minnesota farming, thanks to the meanderings of the nearby Minnesota River.

The sandy soil, it turns out, is like a hundred feet deep, and perfect for fracking operations in the kinda-nearby North Dakota gas fields. A few years back, the owners started aggressively strip-mining it, leaving gaping holes where the festival parking lots once were. Eventually, they ended the lease with the festival, in order to strip-mine the land it sits on.

Imagine that... mere "sand", so valuable that it's worth giving up a substantial commercial lease that has run for decades and should have been able to run for decades into the future (and provides hundreds of local jobs), just for the one-time use.

It makes sense if you think about it... let’s say that sand sells for $10 per cubic yard. If there’s a substantial area with sand down to 100ft you’re talking millions upon millions of dollars worth of sand!

Yeah, I assume the value of the sand is on par with at least a decade or two of the lease value, for the land owners. It still strikes me as a poor decision for the city, though. The renaissance festival employs hundreds of locals every summer, has for decades, would for decades. It also supports a caste of roaming professional performers who live there for a few months every year, spending money in town. That's a lot of economic activity! Instead, it'll be exchanged for money to go to a probably out-of-town mining operation, and the land will be permanently worthless after that - just a big hole in the ground, filling up with water.

People also have to work at the sand mine too. Unlike festival jobs these aren't seasonal and the pay is actually livable and something you can raise a family on.

I understand losing your festival isn't fun, in fact I remember you writing this on hn previously when there were articles about sand mining but you have to understand that this happens in all cities. Some old theatre gets torn down to make way for a new high rise condo, or a tech company decides to move in and tears down a factory to make way for a shiny new office building.

Additionally, if the festival promotors really cared for the festival and the long tradition of it, wouldn't they just ya know move to a different field to host it?

Moving a large festival with hundreds of workers and thousands of attendees to a new, stable location isn't as easy as it sounds. And yes, they are doing that, but it took a couple of years of looking for a viable new location.

As for sand mining as a "not seasonal" job - that mine will be played out in a year or two. The fest jobs are more long-term viable, by far. There are a number of local small businesses that make much of their annual income in the couple of months that the festival is open every summer/fall.

It sounds like those local businesses should be pooling together to find the festival permanent home. I realize that it may not be easy to find a spot- all the more reason to try to find something the festival can own... maybe the businesses could pool their money and buy some land, put it in a trust to be used for the festival grounds. The grounds could be used for other events when the festival isn't happening.

While I'm sure it's more profitable, I can't imagine a sand mine employs anywhere near the number of people a popular festival would on the same acreage. We're not talking a highly sophisticated mineral mining operation here...pretty sure it's just a handful of guys going out with front-end loaders and dump trucks.

I'm just surprised that there is a lack of space in Minnesota.

It's not just "space", just as sand is not just "sand". It needs good highway access, as attendance is in the thousands every weekend for months. It needs water, power, and some sanitation facilities (the old festival location used porta-potties). It needs a campground. It needs to be within an hour's drive of most of the sprawling Twin Cities metro. It needs to be reasonably dry and safe in the vagaries of Minnesota summer weather. It needs cooperative zoning and regulation from the local government. It needs to be not too expensive to get into shape. It needs to be land that won't suddenly find a "more valuable" purpose anytime soon (like, say, strip mining, or building a new subdivision). Likewise, it can't really have any current residences on it, or those will need to be bought out.

It's really, really complicated and difficult. They can't just plop it down anywhere.

As an approximation, anything that isn't near the big cities and that isn't unusable due to periodic flooding is going to be fertile for farming or too far away.

> but you have to understand that this happens in all cities. Some old theatre gets torn down to make way for a new high rise condo, or a tech company decides to move in and tears down a factory to make way for a shiny new office building.

I'm trying to understand the point you are making. Is it just that sometimes things change so don't get too attached to how things are? That doesn't change the fact that community government has influence over land use and its development.

There is a difference between building a shiny office building and tearing up the land to extract resources. In the latter case, once the resources are extracted, the land will be useless unless someone pays for an expensive reclamation effort.

In nearby Winona County, they've outlawed frac sand mining due to health and environmental concerns (the silica sands from these areas are useful but unnecessary for fracking). Perhaps Scott County isn't strong enough or doesn't care enough to intervene. I'm sure their hoity toity neighbor Eden Prairie isn't too pleased.

I can't imagine it takes that long to exhaust the sand.

Plus who knows what kind of festivals will be drawn to the area by the sudden availability of a giant pit!

This is interesting to me because the Renaissance festival that has come to my home town for decades has been staffed exclusively by Minnesota natives. It's probably the same festival. I wonder if this decision cost the entire Midwest and Northeast their opportunity to have a Ren Fest.

As a Minnesotan, I'm not that worried. The festival held at the sand quarry in question was able to renew it's lease for the venue for at least the next couple years. I also don't doubt their ability to find another suitable venue in the neighborhood if and when the time comes.

tldr; greed trumps all else. Very sad but unsurprising to read your story :(

I learned about the importance of sand (and other media) this year when setting up a saltwater tank for my s.o.; I really had no idea beforehand.

Sand provides a huge amount of surface area for colonies of bacteria responsible for converting ammonia into nitrites and nitrites into nitrates, which can then be taken up by plants or algae and converted into other chemicals that are less harmful to aquatic species.

Dredging sand from rivers and beaches is likely going to be seen as a massive ecological disaster in the next couple of decades.

One of my favorite factoids is that in many deserts, the most common plant life by weight is algae. It grows in tiny drops of dew on the underside of grains of sand.

Wait, so the most common plant life by weight isn't algae, then? What is it actually?

Factoid has two almost opposite meanings

1. an insignificant or trivial fact.

2. something fictitious or unsubstantiated that is presented as fact, devised especially to gain publicity and accepted because of constant repetition.

Ah, the second definition isn't one I've ever seen used? A factoid may be used inappropriately to support an unrelated argument, ("the last pirates were seen in the 1800s, right as climate change started") but they're still _true_.

That's actually the original meaning. "Factoids... that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority."

The meaning has since mutated, and of course there's no reason we should be constrained to the original.

It's the original and etymologically, it makes more sense, since "-oid" means "resembling." "Humanoids" are not human, for instance. But of course appeals to etymology are not a good way to determine what a word means.

Interesting. Are there any other words in the English language with two contradicting definitions?

Lots!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym

There are literally millions of them.

Some people object when a word means its opposite, but I could care less.

I can't sanction your response.

"Flammable" and "inflammable" mean the same thing. (Not quite what you were asking, but it's in the spirit of the question, I think).

"Literally" is often used for emphasis, even when something is figuratively but not literally true.

"Enjoin" means both to proscribe and to prescribe.

"Sanction" is similar; it's either a penalty for breaking a rule, or official approval of something.

"Dust" (as a verb) means both to clean dust off of something or to spread dust onto it.

"Fast" means fixed in one place or moving quickly.

"Oversight" means watching over something carefully, but also a mistake caused by a missed detail.

"Cleave" means both to cling/adhere and to split/sever.

"Hold up" can mean support or hinder.

This list can keep going. It's just the point that I got tired of finding more listicles to pull the best bits out of.

So, uh, factoids collectively were the fake news of their day?

To my mind, the connotation of factoid is that it's not false, but it's too simplified or stripped of context to be wholly accurate.

Consider, "Did you know that squids have eyes as big as bicycle tires?" That's not completely made up (squid do have the largest eyes of any animal) but to make it strictly accurate you'd need to change "squid" to "giant squid", "have" to "can have", and "bicycle tire" to "child's bicycle tire".

Why do you say that? I don't see how that follows from beat's comment...

The -oid suffix means "similar to" or "resembling."

For example: a humanoid is something resembling a human, but not a human.

So, traditionally, a factoid is something resembling, but not, a fact.

However, it has been misused for so long, it's now considered by many ok to use "factoid" to mean a trivial, related fact.

> considered by many

It's the first definition in the dictionary.

There is no "the" dictionary. And in most respected dictionaries, it isn't the first definition.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/factoid

Some dictionaries order senses by age and others by usage (which may be somehow measured or may just be up to the instincts of the editors), so this isn't a useful metric without knowing the standard of the dictionary we are talking about.

Which dictionary do you mean? Do you mean that highly inaccurate one that you get when typing a word into Google.com?

Like the draining of the Aral sea... but on a planet-wide scale.

http://www.ciesin.org/docs/006-238/006-238.html

We have issues with people dredging sand in Memphis on our Wolf river. Awful stuff. The philanthropic community has been working on buying up most of the land next through a conservancy.

Memphis is built on a thin layer of clay on top of sand. Which is actually great, we have one of the largest freshwater aquifers in the country under us. The only problem, we don't know all the locations that the aquifer gets refilled. :(

One of my favorite bits of trivia is that Australia sells sand (and camels!) to Saudi Arabia [1]. In fact, the Arab countries import most of the sand used for construction because their own sand is not well suited to that purpose.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Saudi-Arabia-imports-s...

And US sells chop sticks to China :)

I was surprised to find that the US also grows most of the world's cotton for clothing. I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't produce a lot of wood products, too.

Yes, but not as much as I originally thought, in relative terms: https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/money-does-grow-trees-us-fores...

  As the world’s fourth-largest exporter of forest products
  (behind the European Union, China, and Canada), the United
  States maintains a steady share of the growing global market
  at just over 10 percent.

Probably because we use so much of it ourselves for housing and stuff.

Lumber was originally one of the chief exports of North America; if you read Common Sense there is quite a long discourse about lumber for ship-building.

Only somewhat related, I recently was in Malibu and needing to relieve myself my wife and I stopped into an open house for a beachfront home. Nice house, private beach access. Anyway, the agent tells me that just down the road the residents there lost their private beach. Work was done to a harbor a couple miles north and it changed the tidal dynamics and in just a couple of days all the sand was washed away.

I had never heard of that before. Hard to feel too bad about people losing their private beach but interesting nevertheless.

The house had nice facilities, 10/10 would use again.

This happens all the time, due to the natural causes. In Hawaii, some beaches are seasonal. It is funny to read the mixed reviews of nearby properties on AirBnb - some people praise the beach, and some people cannot find it.

Sounds like something the hosts should clearly state in their description.

Reminds me of magic sands beach in Kona. It looked like an awesome beach in pictures so we went. There was no sand. It was all gone. Had to check 3 or 4 times that we actually had the right beach. Turns out seasonal hydrology removes the sand in the winter, but puts it all back in the summer.

Side note about Malibu: those beaches aren't private, but homeowners illegally block access. (with cooperation from the sherriff's dept, who know where their bread is buttered)

Similar battle in Naples, Florida: http://www.naplesnews.com/story/news/special-reports/2017/11...

The agent was clear that the beach wasn't private, but the beach _access_ is on private property. Somebody can walk to it during low tide but the only land-route off the beach during high tide is thru a locked gate on private property.

Is that correct or an over-simplification?

Was the access on private property? Isn't it true that beach access isn't required by law but beach ownership is guaranteed by law? I don't live there.

Was it Warren and Henny?

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-headlines-coastal-f...

According to Google autocomplete, the world is also running out of antivenom, bees, cocoa, doctors, energy, fish, gravity, helium, ip addresses, jobs, lithium, magnets, nutella, oil, phosphorus, rice, scotch, topsoil, vanilla and water.

I'm definitely most concerned about the scotch.

Couldn’t read until that cause the Nutella shortage made me cry...

I was blown away at gravity shortage

I suppose that's exhibit A for the gravity shortage.

If we run out of all of this other stuff, I'm going to be really worried about the scotch shortage too...

Oh shit.

Soon trampolines and bouncy castles will be illegal, because they're using up all our gravity.

Is it supposed to be impossible for us to be running out of multiple resources at a time or something?

The developed world is not running out of sand. It's making sand by crushing rock. Here's a typical sand-making plant in China, with old, beat-up equipment making sand in high quantity.[1] There are lots of sand-making machine videos on Youtube, some from China, some from India, and some from the US. They all work about the same; first there's a rock-crusher, then some screening, then a cone crusher which crushes gravel against gravel until it's sand, then a washing and screening stage. All the plants look similar - lots of conveyors and trucks, few people. It's not even that energy intensive. Look at the motor sizes on the equipment. The trucks are probably using more energy than the crushers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07WTDgO-K-k

I thought it was crushed _coral_, not rock?

Checking wikipedia, it looks like silica-based sands are the most common type. Most rocks are composed heavily from silicate compounds -- I'm guessing this is why sand manufacturing is possible. Calcium carbonate, which is crushed coral and shellfish, is the second most common type of sand.

I'm curious about the differences between these two types of sand and how it affects their use cases. I also wonder if manufactured silica-based sands are any different from the naturally occurring variety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_(geology)

The article also mentions a shortage of gravel. I'd certainly be surprised if there were a shortage of both sand and gravel but rock were in abundance.

I would venture a guess to say that we can always make sand but it is easier to just dig it out of the ground instead of crushing it all up.

From a certain perspective the entire perspective is a very big sand crusher. The humans are picking up the surplus.

This is a big problem in India too. Many of the rivers in Kerala state have been impacted by illegal sand mining. We had rarely used property next to the river which we sold to a relative who had a house next to ours. They fell on hard times and sold it to someone else who discovered the sand and started mining the land ($$$$). That land, the house, the large jackfruit and coffee trees are no more; in its place is a huge indentation in the landscape where the river would fill if there was enough water. The rest of the river has very little sand in it as a result of mining. Natural flooding is now very rare. It has been reduced to a sliver of its former self.

This article on the same topic is worth reading: How the demand for sand is killing rivers http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-41123284

Interesting comment on article: Isn't this better stated as "some areas of the world are running out of sand"? The Sahara is 9.2E12 meters squared and one estimate puts the average depth of sand at 150m, giving 1.38E15 m^3 of sand. The earth's land area is 5.1E14 m^2, meaning the sand in the Sahara alone is enough to cover earth's land area in 2.7m (9ft) of sand

Sahara sand is not suitable for construction or island building because it is too spherical, desirable sand is jagged because it clumps together better.

Seems like an opportunity to use sun and sand to construct 3D-printing oases in the middle of nowhere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptUj8JRAYu8

Wonder why this isn't working out as the "new construction technique" hit success that it seems, with a little optimisation, it could be?

> Wonder why this isn't working out as the "new construction technique" hit success that it seems, with a little optimisation, it could be?

Well, it's incredibly dangerous to set up an array of solar concentrating fresnel lenses and/or mirrors anywhere near human beings. Concentrating radiation on things which are becoming more and more shiny and/or refractive as you go can go very wrong, as you start having to manage the caustics of even the cloudy glass you end up making.

Sand is not just sand. It's not a fungible thing. Different kinds of sand have different mineral compositions, different sizes and shapes for the grains, different consistencies, etc. The sand used to make an iPhone screen is different from the sand used to peel paint, but both are highly specific.

It's not just sand that's running out. It's specific kinds of sand, or sand that is readily available (because sand is expensive and annoying to transport).

Sand =! Industrial usable Sand. Not all kind of "Sand" is suited for the industry(today). Most desert/dune sand is to fine grained and has a smooth surface, so that it is unusable to create strong material. There are some projects/studies already that use "desert sand + X" to create "strong" material.

http://www.resourcepanel.org/reports/global-material-flows-a...

https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/GEAS_Mar2014_Sand_Mini...

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/amse/2016/2158706/

http://maxwellsci.com/print/rjees/v4-1071-1078.pdf

> Sand =! Industrial usable Sand. Not all kind of "Sand" is suited for the industry(today). Most desert/dune sand is to fine grained and has a smooth surface

That's why you mine it to the East, closer to where it erodes, rather than to the West, where it is fine enough to be considered dust.

We're just an oxygen atom away from turning the CO2 from coal, natural gas, and oil power plants into CO3.

http://www.sfgate.com/green/article/Green-cement-may-set-CO2...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4Unt7MRsV4&t=267s

I can't help but wonder if an Oxygen shortage is our next major challenge.

Along with a silicon shortage then?;-)

For anyone wondering: a lot of "rock" and "sand" is silica AKA silicon dioxide.

When it comes to oxygen we also have water which contains oxygen.

Do you mean Carbon Trioxide (CO3), or Carbonate (CO3(2-))?

What's stopping us from making new sand with a giant solar powered grinder?

We should have plenty of rocks...

"Running out of" should, as always, come with the qualifier "at a reasonable price". Rock-crushing is quite energy intensive compared to just dredging.

Generally in the West you'll find substitutes like crushed concrete or pulverised fly ash being added to the mix (although PFA itself will be in short supply as it's a coal-fired power station by product)

IIRC, in structural concretes flyash is used as an admixture to reduce portland cement usage, and enhance some properties like permeability, but not as a replacement for sand.

And/or the qualifier "we are now causing a lot of damage getting resource X because our preferred source is running dry".

Rivers can afford to lose some sand, but not all.

Convenient oil Wells cause very little damage compared to clear-cutting and surface mining tar sand.

Crushing rocks to sand already happens. Animats posted some interesting links the last time sand shortages were discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15208432

"running out of sand" parallels "running out of oil". It's not that there isn't any left, it's just not cost effective.

There are different kinds of sands, and the better kinds are more desired and presumably more expensive to manufacture.

Sarasota has sand that feels like a fine powder. It’s wonderful, and also quite limited. In fact there was a recent expensive reconstruction of a beach that was blown away quite quickly because the city didn’t believe the engineers saying it needed more support. Millions of dollars of prime sand lost.

Cape Cod has sand that feels like rocks (and the water is ALWAYS cold, even in July!). Nobody would buy that.

I'm not sure why they didn't get the Yangtze juxtaposition to line up, but you can put this in the Chrome debugger to get a lined-up juxtaposition:

    $('.jx-left > img').style = 'margin-left: 5px'

Homilies that didn't age well :

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand." - Milton Friedman

The world is running out of cheap sand. Time to breed swarms of parrotfish?

You need a healthy coral reef to do that and us humans have done a pretty good job at running out of those too.

Reminds me of:

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20160502-even-desert-city-d...

I worry about this sometimes with all sorts of raw materials and waste products. We seem to take for granted that we can make as many cars, computers, buildings, etc. as the market demands. But there must be some kind of eventual limit to how much steel, rubber, plastic, glass, etc. we can manufacture before we've used it all up. It fills me with vague anxiety that I don't have any sense for how many of these raw materials are left. And I also wonder whose job it is to think about such things, and if they are thinking ahead or just building for the now.

As materials become scarce their prices are raised, acting as a natural brake on their use. Environmental concerns may still be an issue however.

With the caveat of Jevan's Paradox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

At some point the price is high enough that we can no longer afford to just throw away the material. It becomes profitable to recycle. Copper is a good example.

That doesn’t really agree with the conservation of mass:

> The law implies that mass can neither be created nor destroyed, although it may be rearranged in space, or the entities associated with it may be changed in form . . .

-Wikipedia

There's an interesting documentary about this 'Sand Wars' here's the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAPfwwb59uY

This exactly same titled youtube video documentary seems to precede the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMLYLcniXIc

I wonder if we should start dumping crushed glass into the oceans again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_glass

Why aren't the companies required to replace the sand with Sahara desert sand, say? They are capable of transporting sand so it would seem straightforward.

if they start taking the sahara sand it'll turn into a lake.

And?

- Extract lots of sand

- Fill it with water

Maybe it will compensate for the increased ocean levels if the hole is big enough

It's more complicated, and someone thought about a similar project with a different objective: "Qattara Depression Project "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project

Edit: Also see "Flood Death Valley" https://what-if.xkcd.com/152/

That much evaporation is going to increase rainfall downwind. If the Sahara keeps spreading we might have to do that project for several reasons.

Edit: aaand it’s full of cheetahs and gazelles. Damnit.

- Extract lots of sand [from the desert]

- Fill it with water

- Run solar distillation

- Create additional freshwater source for region (at expense of creating a high-salinity lake)

it won't need filling, it'll come in from the nile or mediterranean or make the mediterranean larger but shallower.

Good solution for desertification: just remove the desert.

Unfortunately not all sand is created equally. Different sand has different purposes.

That doesn't answer the question with any sufficient detail.

Sahara sand is not as good for construction, but for filling in "standing pools of water" or alligator habitats it could be just fine!

After all, if it's not being used for concrete and chemical bonds are not being formed for construction, then fine round sand can probably do just as good a job of lying there as larger square grains.

But I suppose construction is far larger than other uses and that wouldn't lower the issue enough.

There is far more sand in deserts than is used for construction.

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20160502-even-desert-city-d...

Pretty good article:

    http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-canadian-gravel-20171104-htmlstory.html

In the US, the federal government spends obscene amounts of money ($1 billion over 30 years in NJ alone, apparently[0]) replenishing sand on beaches so that rich people can keep their nice homes there. And even if they do lose the houses, they can write off taxes to the value of their investments[1]

[0]http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2015/10/jersey_shore_beach_...

[1]http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/06/hurricane-san...

I was under the impression that there were legitimate, erosion-based reasons for doing this. Basically, by building a gradual, sloped shore it causes waves to break smaller and over a longer distance, reducing shoreline erosion. Sure they dump the sand in front of the nice houses first because people want it there, but they would still dredge the beaches even if they were abandoned. Or that's the theory at least.

But I only remember reading it somewhere, not where I read it; so I don't know if it's BS pseudoscience. Does anyone who actually knows something about the science behind shoreline erosion have an opinion?

It really depends on the kind of shore, in some places the dredged sand would just be dragged all the way to the seafloor.

IANAMG (I Am Not A Marine Geologist)

I feel like the comment is misleading in so many ways. The first article even has a video showing the 'rich people' filed a lawsuit because they already have a wall protecting them from the 1800's, which is the height of the dune the government is building up. Not to mention the build-up was to protect residents further inland. Beaches are pretty much public property. Private owners have sued to claim newly created beaches up against their properties due to replenishment. I have not read a lawsuit where the government has lost its right to make it public land.

If it's as bad as it sounds, Saudi prayers for an economy after oil have just been answered.

Not really, Desert sand is very smooth and fine to use in construction. From what I read, Dubai actually imports sand for use in construction

This is also ruining beaches (sand should go to the sea)

Grinding limestone ??

Thank your local fracker!

In these articles I keep on seeing the phrase "illegal mining", and yet I see no reason why legality would effect the environment. Is it somehow better for the environment if the government gets paid for the resource extraction? I don't think so.

I know that illegal miners may violate mining regulations which are intended to protect the environment, but as far as I can tell, legal third world mining is not regulated in any ecological way making that point moot.

I would think it would be more about "managing" the resource, than income to a government, but I could be wrong.

Here’s something to think about: how much CO2 has been released into the atmosphere just from crypto currency mining alone? One of the main reasons I’ve avoided getting into bitcoin mining is because my town is powered by a coal plant and I simply cannot justify burning coal to acquire make-believe money.

Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful.

Do you consider gold and silver similarly perverse? Literal mining is messy.

How is that not just whataboutism?

It's not as if we are all forced to choose between either bitcoin or gold...

Besides, those metals are real and have industrial uses, whereas cryptos are just a series of bits that the market collectively agrees holds a value.

Most economies use representative currency. In many places, notes and coins are largely worthless.

Cryptocurrencies differ mainly by being virtual. Given that notes are usually used to represent the larger sums of money, the virtual aspect becomes mostly semantic. Given that most people store their money in banks, who don't have all that money on hand at any point in time (hence why they collapse), then the virtual factor begins to matter even less.

I don't use bitcoin (or equivalent) for pragmatic reasons. Your point however seems to be about its collective abstraction. If you were being consistent, you would have to be against most mainstream currencies as well. This is not a pragmatic or scalable method of commerce. It very quickly become tedious to trade with items that are of only concrete, immediate value to both parties. Try to imagine how online purchases, or warehouses, would function. There's a good reason why virtually every civilisation swapped to representative currency after reaching a certain size.

It happens in America. This mine finally closed down this year but the economics only worked because the mining operation were not paying anywhere close to enough to mitigate the effects / cost of the resource to sell a 50 pound back of sand at Lowe's for a couple of bucks.

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/article/NE/20170328/NEWS/17...

How can you "tell" that no third-world country regulates sand mining for ecological reasons? How could they begin to do this if miners are already operating outside of government control?

Because illegal miners can take sand from public beaches from rivers, from deltas, etc. Doing so destroys beaches and damages ecosystems, and many governments want to maintain these systems because they are a public good used by many.

The bigger, obvious issue is destruction of soils near either thriving biomes or human settlements. Destroying rivers, beaches, forests and areas around where people live is just dumb.

There’s always two reasonable alternatives. One, use the essentially lifeless interior, vast deserts of parts of Australia, Africa and South America. Or two, ban concrete as a top CO2 emitter and switch to a renewable carbon sequestration material.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com