People depend on sand in unexpected ways. It is used to build houses, from the foundation to the windows, and pave our roads. It's in toothpaste and shampoo and used to make the band of your underwear. It's even used to make your cell phone.
"Today, your life depends on sand. You may not realize it but sand is there making the way you live possible, in almost every minute of your day. We live in it, travel on it, communicate with it, surround ourself with it," Vince Beiser writes in his new book, "The World In A Grain: The Story of Sand and How it Transformed Civilization."
Beiser says it’s getting harder to find the huge amounts of sand we need to keep our beaches beautiful and our cities growing.
He joins Midday Edition on Wednesday to discuss the importance of this natural resource.
The question has been asked for centuries which is greater the number of stars in the sky or the number of grains of sand. Well right now it seems that astrophysicists believe there are more stars in our expanding universe than sand and as it turns out it's getting harder to find the huge amounts of sand we need to keep our beaches beautiful and our cities growing the myriad ways humans have used sand for centuries is the subject of a new book The World in a grain. The story of sand and how a transformed civilization. And joining me is author Vince Beiser. Vince welcome to the show. Thanks great to be here. Now you tell us in the world in a grain that we depend on sand in unexpected ways. Can you tell us how sand makes many of the things that we use in our daily lives possible. So sand is the thing that our cities are made of. I mean you look at just about any building in the modern world. The building that you're sitting in lets you listen to this the office that you work in the shopping mall that you shop in. They're all made out of concrete and concrete is nothing but sand and gravel that's been stuck together with cement. The roads you drive on to get in between all those buildings also made of sand and gravel that's been stuck together. The windows in all of those buildings are made of glass and glass is really just melted down sand the silicon chips that power your computer and your cell phone also made from sand. Sand is in so many other products it's kind of mind boggling sand is used to make wine it's used in toothpaste it's used in cosmetics. In fact right now you probably also have sand in your underwear. Why. Because that's silicon. The silicone elastic is also made from sand. Now you talk about also the cultural significance of sand how it's become part of our myths and metaphors. Yeah absolutely. I mean from from time immemorial we've been fascinated by. You can see it reflected in our language. We draw lines in the sand. We bury our head in the sand the sands of time are running out in the in the creation myths of many civilizations. The world was created from sand. You know it's just it's something that sort of permeates our our consciousness and all kinds of ways because it's it's such an elemental and basic part of the world around us almost anywhere you are in the world. Sand is there the vast sand dunes we have in places like Imperial County would make you think we have an unlimited amount of sand. But according to your book that's not the case is it. No it's not. There is an awful lot of sand in the world of course it's actually the most abundant thing on the planet but at the end of the day it's a finite resource like anything else there's only a certain amount of it and we are using far more than we've ever used before. In fact it's it's the natural resource that we use the most of after air and water. Now there's different kinds of sand apparently the sand in the desert is not as usable as the sand you find other places. Yeah unfortunately all that sand the desert is basically useless completely. The number one thing that we use sand for by far is for concrete okay and desert sand is no help when it comes to making concrete. The reason is it's the wrong shape because desert sand has been eroded by wind rather than water like beach sand or river sand and as a result of being eroded by wind the grains are a lot smoother and rounder than your marine sands and those things those rounded Greens just don't lock together to form a stable structure so it's like the difference between trying to build something out of a stack of marbles as opposed to trying to build something out of a stack of little tiny bricks and that's sand that's used for building has it's become very competitive to get enough of it and it's even something organized crime has gotten involved in. Tell us about that. Sure so what's happening is all over the developing world especially in China India Indonesia places like that. Cities are growing at an incredible pace. People are moving out of the countryside and pouring into into cities by the millions just like they did in this country 100 years ago. Right. But the scale and the pace of it is just way beyond anything that's ever happened before. We're currently building adding the equivalent of eight New York cities to the planet every single year. And that has created so much demand for sand that in a lot of places organized crime has actually gotten involved in the trade and they do what organized crime does everywhere. They pay off police they'll pay off judges and government officials to look the other way. If you really get in their way they will kill you hundreds of people have been murdered over sand in the last few years. You know Vince for most people sand is something you have to get out of your shoes. It's overlooked and it's taken for granted what got you interested in writing about sand you know to be honest I just stumbled cross an article in a little environmental magazine called the Aurora website called eagled which just had a briefing sort of that kind of touched on those main points that I just said that sand is the number one natural resource that we consume. So that right away kind of made me sit up and take notice and that it's in so much demand that people are getting killed over it. And I had the same reaction that pretty much everybody does which was which is sand that I never even thought about it. Who knew but come to find out it turns out to be you know literally the most important solid substance in the world without sand. We couldn't have modern civilization. What was the most surprising thing you discovered in writing this book. Do you think you know there's definitely a lot of a lot of things that really surprised me because I knew nothing about it going in but I think one of the things that's really stuck with me is how new the world that we take for granted is. I mean if you take concrete for instance we don't nobody ever thinks about concrete. It's just all around us. It just seems like part of the world that you just take for granted. But 120 years ago there were practically no concrete buildings on earth at all and it was only really want a San Francisco architect named Ernest Ransome really perfected what we now call reinforced concrete that's the concrete with steel rods running through it and kind of convinced builders to start using it. That's when it really came into and just took off and really took over the world. And the same with glass and glass used to be a very expensive difficult to produce luxury item. And around the same time you know shortly after the Industrial Revolution is when we figured out how to really mass manufacture it and that they had the ability to mass produce bottles again out of sand because they're made of glass. How that completely changed what we eat and drink because all of a sudden it became possible for a brewer to bottle his beer and send it out on trucks all over the country or for ketchup maker to put their ketchup in bottles and distribute it much further than it had ever been before. So a lot of the consumer products that are just everywhere now Heinz Ketchup Skippy peanut butter you know Budweiser beer you could only get those things in a very few places 120 years ago just because it took the invention of the bottle the mass manufactured bottle to get those things out you know on a global scale. I've been speaking with Vince Beiser author of the world in a grain the story of sand and how it transformed civilization. Vince thank you very much. Thanks for having me. A lot of fun.
