Comment by ikesau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ikesau | Hacker News Reader

> Luis Fernando Ramadon, a federal police specialist in Brazil who studies extractive industries, estimates that the global illegal sand trade ranges from $200 billion to $350 billion a year—more than illegal logging, gold mining and fishing combined. Buyers rarely check the provenance of sand; legal and black market sand look identical. Illegal mining rarely draws heat from law enforcement because it looks like legitimate mining—trucks, backhoes and shovels—there's no property owner lodging complaints, and officials may be profiting. For crime syndicates, it's easy money.

> The environmental impacts are substantial. Dredging rivers destroys estuaries and habitats and exacerbates flooding. Scraping coastal ecosystems churns up vegetation, soil and seabeds and disrupts marine life. In some countries, illegal mining makes up a large portion of the total activity, and its environmental impacts are often worse than those of legitimate operators, Beiser says, all to build cities on the cheap.

this sounds like a really hard problem to fix. i see there are researchers trying to estimate mining levels by counting ships[1], but even if we're able to get a heatmap of the problem, there'd need to be an enormous amount of cooperation between nations to certify sand provenance. damn.

https://eos.org/articles/satellites-spy-on-sand-mining-in-th...

I wonder if there is any r&d around using cheaper/abundant (finer desert sand) for construction. Or if the sand racket is preventing that (feels ridiculous to write that but all this about black market sand is new to me). Way outta my wheelhouse so I'm not even sure why it would be bad for construction in the first place.

Mechanically crushed rock can be used in concrete in place of river sand. There's no danger of stripping the rivers bare of sand (or running out of materials to make concrete) in places that have a modicum of environmental laws and law enforcement. Sand theft operations plague places with weak rule of law, where there's free money to be made by stealing from the commons even when responsible ways to make concrete are only modestly more expensive.

Crushing rock is very energy intensive (Griffith theory of fracture mechanics).

It's much better to let Mother Nature crush the rocks through stream action. (Sort of hydroelectric, without the electric parts.) Your suggestion would only replace one environmental cost with a different one.

TANSTAAFL.

So is digging it up and transporting it...

You would have to transport it regardless. Whether it's crushed rock or sand.

But how far?

If you use old concrete from a building project in the city, crush it, then truck it 10 Miles to the new build site.

If you get it from far away you could be trucking it thousands of Miles

Selling sand to the Arabs is a thing. Their sand is too fine if I remember correctly.

too smooth too. Windblown desert sand has smooth grains that won't adhere inside of the concrete mix. Sand grains from water have been slowed down by the water when hitting one another, so the grains have jagged parts. At least according to a thing I read about this years ago.

Fine weathered sand is great for drilling/fracking though.

And sandboxes for kids.

My understanding is that desert sand gets blown around by the wind, which (heh) sands it smooth. Smooth sand doesn't grip the concrete (I think), so it's not amenable for building.

When I first read that my question was whether a different concrete formula or amalgam could work with smooth(er) sand, or if that's a hard limit that cannot be overcome. Does anyone know?

Concrete strength is a function of several factors

Strength of Cement - portland cement is typically used. Fire limestone to get lime, add fly ash and other additives for increased strength. Ratio of Water to Cement is important to get a complete reaction, but dont add too much water.

Aggregate - angular aggregates provide the cement something to stick to and distribute the stresses evenly. You want a well graded aggregate, including sand particles up to larger chunks of rock.

In my part of the world the aggregate is typically crushed limestone. Add clean sand for different mixes.

There are other chemical additives that will increase strength, workability, and the speed of cure.

Since reaction of water to cement is exothermic - on the really high tech monolithic pours they're using technology to carry away the waste heat. You want the whole mass to be at the same temperature to reduce the internal stresses.

There are actually spherical glass orbs you can add to your concrete if you want it light-weight. Floating concrete is a thing. This comes at the expense of strength.

Adding to this, when making concrete, ‘sharp sand’ is preferable to ‘building sand’ as it’s chunkier. Building sand is more commonly used for mortar and gives a better finish. However this is a distant memory of what a brick layer was instructed me on when I was getting supplies for him a long time ago.

The below link seems to agree.

https://buildingadvice.co.uk/sharp-sand/

Yo it's cement + aggregate makes concrete. As in concrete is the sum of two or more products. Concrete doesn't grip anything. Cement binds and aggregate shape doesn't count for bugger all.

You use tie in rods of rebar to bind one slab to another, not the aggregate because the aggregate does sh*t all for structural strength. It's more for the compressive strength.

Tbh you can make a form or concrete out of perlite and cement. It's light af, great for ship hulls when reinforced with steel. Still concrete,just doesn't need any sand.

Thanks. Yeah, I've poured a few slabs and built a few walls, but construction engineering is waaay out of my normal competencies, so I appreciate the vocabulary corrections.

You say "aggregate shape doesn't count for bugger all". So why does river / crushed sand work, and desert sand doesn't? It sounds more like there are different aggregate mixes / types of aggregate material that work for particular applications (hadn't thought that through, but it makes perfect sense), and that "rough" sand is better for the most-common concrete use-cases. Do you know of specific types of concrete where "smooth" sand would be preferred?

Someone covers it further down. There's a whole bunch more to the strength of concrete than the aggregate.

Man last major concreting I did smooth sand would have been awesome. We were already trying to use the finest grade sand we could find. It was on mad max 4. Making concrete not look like concrete (think underwater caverns, cliffs, waterfalls). So smooth is awesome, makes it easy to texture to look like different types of weathered rock.

All the structural strength was from steel rebar with chook mesh wired to it. The crete and scratch coats were about 100mm thick at the most.

> Cement binds and aggregate shape doesn't count for bugger all.

This isn't true at all.

Using your example of rebar, this is why any piece of rebar has lugs down it; to bond better with the cement. If you use a smooth cylinder of steel, it won't bind to the cement as well and you wind up with a weaker finished product. The ribs of the rebar increase the surface area and make the rebar-cement bond stronger.

Same thing with desert sand. If you have rounded sand grains, you've got reduced surface area per unit volume, and thus reduce the strength of the bond between the aggregate and the cement. That weaker bond becomes a fracture point.

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

is the ultimate example of a technology suppressed by regulatory capture.

What are the regulatory burdens around this? Is it simply that building codes only recognize Portland cement, and anything else is treated like you're trying to build with mud?

Exactly.

From your link:

Generally, one of the main problems with geopolymer binder is its poor workability: Alkali-activated fly ash has a much greater plastic viscosity than ordinary Portland cement[31] and is prone to fast setting. In a matter of minutes, it can produce “highly viscous, unmanageable concrete mixtures”.[32]

These problems were faced with Portland cement as well, leading to the development of mix designs and admixtures that increase workability; to a limited extent, those techniques can be applied to geopolymer binder.

And in Roman times, concrete was laid in lifts like how foundation soil is handled today.

Yeah, it's more effort than just pouring a thick soup into a vibrating mould, but e.g. precast slabs could handle a non-pourable paste. The side effect of rapid hardening would also be rather easy to handle and even allows shorter mould cycle times (and thus afford more expensive moulds).

Another example would be railroad ties that could compression-mould. Those are produced in the millions per year.

I once was involved in project where 60M m3 of sand was pumped to the desert from the sea. It felt totally insane; all that sand was dredged from the sea, mixed with a ton of water and then pumped for some 5-15km using up to 6 5MW pumps in series. Look for Al Zout refinery in Kuwait

I worked on an Exxon project on Jurong Island in Singapore. Today, Jurong Island looks like one singular island but it used to be a series of islands that were reclaimed. It was amusing seeing an old ship cleat in middle of the plant, hundreds of meters from any nearby water.

The landmass of Singapore itself has grown by 40% since the 60's through reclamation. There's always been lots of rumors about how the sand was sourced from neighboring countries.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23527...

Is this an issue where its just too low on the priority list of enforcement agencies?

Maybe there is something aithorities can spread on sand that renders it useless for construction, something that reacts with concrete.

Well, that'd have to be something that reacts with concrete that doesn't react with water, or plants in any way, something that isn't harmful to the animal ecosystem in the sand, or even the bacterial ecosystem so no big ph swings, and then you have to evenly distribute this product into a near infinite volume of sand.

So on the one hand it's an impending ecological disaster, and on the other its an economic catastrophe

All fair points except the one about "evenly distribute into a near infinite volume of sand", which makes no sense since you would obviously target the zones being used by the crime rings themselves, of course you can't find them all but if the risk of mining useless sand becomes big enough it may stop being economically attractive for those criminals.

So to apply your solution, assuming there is such a product and it has zero negative impacts, we'd need first find an illegal mining operation with certainty and reach it with a lot of man power. Which is the bottleneck in enforcement in the first place.

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