“Sand is the second most consumed natural resource, after water. The construction-building industry is by far the largest consumer of this finite resource. The traditional building of one average-sized house requires 200 tons of sand; a hospital requires 3,000 tons of sand; each kilometer of highway built requires 30,000 tons of sand… A nuclear plant, a staggering 12 million tons of sand…” Captions and Photograph by © Denis Delestrac
Excerpts;
The new building material could transform polluting emissions into a valuable resource…
A team of interdisciplinary researchers at UCLA has been working on a unique solution that may help eliminate these sources of greenhouse gases. Their plan would be to create a closed-loop process: capturing carbon from power plant smokestacks and using it to create a new building material — CO2NCRETE — that would be fabricated using 3D printers. That’s “up cycling…”
Read Full Article, UCLA Newsroom
A UN Report On Sand Mining: “Sand, Rarer Than One Thinks;” UNEP, GEA-March-2014
Sand Wars, An Investigation Documentary, By Award-Winning Filmmaker Denis Delestrac (©2013)