Recycling’s great but you do have to have something to recycle
Apparently there’s a shortage of sand:
Abooming demand for concrete has resulted in sand and gravel being extracted from riverbeds faster than nature can replenish it. A study published in Reviews of Geophysics shows that the demand for sand and gravel has more than doubled in the last two decades, with overextraction leading to weaker riverbanks, lower groundwater levels, coastal salt intrusion and poorer water quality.
We tend not to believe this. On the grounds that they’re not actually, right here, claiming a shortage of sand, rather that there’s an opportunity cost to using the sand there is. Which is obviously true, there’s an opportunity cost to everything.
There are those claiming that absolute shortage of sand though. Our assumption being that they do so because Limits to Growth, Blueprint for Survival and the Club of Rome predictions all fail if we don’t run out of something. As it’s not happening about food, or metals, or fuels, then there’re ever more desperate attempts to insist that there must be something we’re running out of. But then we’re realists about political and religious movements.
This though:
The researchers suggest that satellite imaging and river mapping can be used to better manage sand and gravel mining, helping to minimise negative impacts. And demand can be reduced by using materials more efficiently, plus developing alternatives such as processed construction waste, recycled glass and treated bottom ash from waste incineration.
Yes, great. But this runs into one of the limitations about recycling. You have to have something to recycle. Which, if you’re building Civilisation 1.0, you don’t. It’s only when you’re building Civ 2.0, or 3.0, when you tear down the previous one and now have a pile of something that can be recycled to build the next version.
The currently rich nations - US, UK, say - require very little virgin steel and actually export considerable amounts of scrap steel from those previous versions now being torn down. We’ve not checked the numbers but would certainly be willing to believe that demand for primary copper in both places is pretty minimal given the abundance of secondary. It’s places building out an urban environment for the first time - recently China, likely soon India, say - that require vast amounts of the new stuff. Simply because there isn’t any of the old to recycle. The same will be true of old concrete that can be ground down for aggregate to be used in the new.
Sorry, this is just one of those things. You cannot build the initial society by recycling because in order to recycle you must be tearing down one version to recycle it into the new one. So, as urban civilsation reaches ever more of the global population - a good thing, more escape that gross poverty of the peasant lifestyle - there simply will be more use of virgin resources. That treading more lightly only happens when society gets its upgrades, not the first time around.
Tim Worstall