Just saw a piece on the national news that there is now a concern for a shortage of sand. Immediately I thought that is absurd, but desert sand cannot be used for construction/concrete because the wind blowing makes the particles round. We use 40-50 billion tons of sand every year. So now we have a shortage of food, clean air clean water, green lands, and now sand.
What we're short of is cheap sand for aggregate. There's artificial or manufactured sand that can be readily made for aggregate materials but it's more expensive do to the processing involved.
I have often wondered why crushed glass cannot be used for this. There is so much glass that goes into landfills and will never break down, but it seems it could be crushed and used in construction. No real knowledge though, just wondering about it.
Here are the things I understand can be used instead of sand in concrete or aggregate: M-Sand (Manufactured Sand) Construction and Demolition Waste. Ground Granulated Blast Furnace Slag. (GGBS) ... Washed Bottom Ash. Sheet Glass Powder. ..... Quarry Dust.
Recycled Glass in Concrete -- Concrete Ideas Partial Replacement of Sand with Waste Glass in Concrete Production -- Structville The latter cautions that the use of waste glass in concrete production is still uncommon due to the alkali-silica reaction, which reduces concrete durability and strength.
I wonder if those might be a functional solution, but require that thousands of local building codes be modified in order to use them.
Crushed glass is a good substitute, but it can't meet the demands because the world has turned to plastic used to pollute our oceans and kill off the coral reefs and all aquatic life. Ain't we smart?!
It's not "we," Kemosabe, it's the idiots who believe themselves to be smarter than the masses. When THEY took away our paper bags and gave us plastic because it was "photo-degradable," my very first thought was "You're not gonna stake them out on the ground for 100 years so they don't blow away as they rot...you're gonna bury them in a landfill. There ain't no photo underground." On the other hand, the masses do think themselves to be virtuous when they recycle all those Deer Park bottles they're suckling off of (when did we as a nation get so thirsty?), rather than filtering their tap water and using refillable bottles. Recycling is not better than reusing (or just not using) in the first place. So maybe I do agree with you.
As thee oil and gas get more expensive, what will happen to all the plastic that is used in supposedly eco-friendly items, such as electric cars. I think there is already a problem dealing with non-recyclable wind turbine blades. I long for the days of reusable glass bottles....
Yeh, there are vids of acres of replaced turbine blades being buried, never to decay (plastic or fiberglass, I forget which.) And I agree, I would still like to earn some spare change picking up empties along the side of the road (I wonder if I can find a used wagon?) "They" would need to revamp the returns process. I can still see the row of shopping carts at the local A&P, filled to the brim with funky mud-encased bottles.
Fiberglass is basically a mixture of plastic and glass bound together with resin. When I was a kid, we made a large bit of our spending money collecting bottles along the road. I did have to disobey my parents on that one, though. We weren't supposed to pick up beer bottles but it was simply uneconomical to leave them behind. We found more at the town dump than along the road, though.
The boat man speaketh! Regarding beer bottles: I don't recall getting deposit money from beer bottles in either Indiana or Virginia. But I can't imagine them being exempt from the same rules as soda bottles. Hmmmm.... This is gonna bother me. I do recall picking up the old man's Rolling Rock bottles so he wouldn't run over them with the lawn mower...damned grass-green pony bottles.
We did in Michigan. If I ever get around to adding a slab of concrete to my compost pile this summer, I might try adding broken glass to it.
If you recycle plastic you would know only items with numbers 1 and 2 get recycled. This means only 5% of plastic gets recycled according to the watchdogs.