Stuff You Should Know - We Are Running Out of Sand and That Actually Matters

Episode Date: September 24, 2019

Sand, we’re beginning to realize, is a non-renewable resource - and we are consuming it at a voracious pace. We use it in every construction project around the world and to create new land. And we��re wrecking the ecosystems we mine sand from. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, and this Wednesday, October 2nd, I'm going to be in beautiful Austin, Texas to do the live version of My End of the World with Josh Clark Show.

I'll be at the North Door, and you can get tickets and info at ndvenue.com. Just search for the End of the World with Josh Clark. And there's a few tickets left for the Stuff You Should Know Live show in New Orleans on October 10th. For those tickets and more information, go to sysklive.com.

Tickets are going fast to both shows, and we'll see you in October, everybody. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. ["How Stuff Works"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.

And like, saying through the hourglass, these are the podcasts of our lives. I love that beginning, so much that I just made an homage to it. Didn't even realize I loved it until it was coming out of my mouth. Really? And I was thinking, God, this is so good.

You know, we live in a cancel culture. We might get canceled for that one. For what, the days of our lives reference? Yeah. Just because it was so bad? Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's an odd time to be alive, isn't it?

That's right. We're in the transition. But in true Stuff You Should Know fashion, we are doing an episode on sand after, about what, a month or so after an episode on sand dunes. Right, and this is technically not even necessarily the sand episode. It may be, we're gonna put it-

It better be. We're gonna put it together like it is, but there may come a time, 50, 60 years down the road. Okay. When life extension has really kicked in, and we're still doing this, where we're like, we gotta do just sand now. Yeah, except by then,

the episode may be titled, What Was Sand? That's right, man. Because boy, this episode is depressing. Yeah. And it could be titled, Sand Colon, yet another way humans are destroying our planet. Yeah. Oh, look, another ecological disaster added to the list.

But we need hotels and fake islands. Yeah, the fake islands kind of got me the most, you know? Yeah, we're spoiling this thing. Oh, sorry, sorry. So sand, there's a lot of it. So much so, the way back in the day, Archimedes, one of our favorite people, used it in a thought experiment called the sand reckoner.

And in the sand reckoner, he basically, he created this to start figuring out how to create numbers to express extraordinarily large values. Because that's what it's used for still. Yeah, just because there's so much of it. It depends, the world is divided into two types of people, Chuck. People who point to the stars as an enormous number,

an example of an enormous number, and people who point to sand. And then people like us that use Big Macs. That's right, that's true. That's size though, not number. It's size, it could be length, remember? We've stacked them to the moon before. Sure.

But so Archimedes came up with a base of 100 million. That's what he started with. And he figured out how to express numbers up to eight times 10 to the 63rd power with the sand reckoner thing. And the point of it is, is like, yes, there's a ton of sand, a lot of sand. So much so, I've seen that there's seven and a half

billion, billion grains of sand just on the world's beaches. That's from University of Hawaii. I saw another one from Chris Flynn from Tuorla Observatory in Finland. He estimated a million, billion, billion grains of sand just on the world's beaches. So I'm just gonna say a Kajillion, Jillian, Bazillion. Cause apparently you can just say whatever, yeah.

But there's a lot, but the point is this, there is a lot of sand, especially depending on the math and the grain size, that kind of stuff. But there's a finite amount of sand. And what's been going on behind the scenes for decades now is a very rapid depletion of the available sources of sand. So much so that it is literally being shuffled

from one part of the world to another, from poorer countries to wealthier countries sometimes, from some inland areas out to other areas, from the rural areas to the cities. There's a huge sand shuffle going on and it is proving pretty rough for the environment as a result. Yeah, I mean, first of all, I'm 48 years old

and this is the first I've really heard of this. Like, I don't know. I thought there was just enough sand for all of time. You would think so. I mean, look at a desert. That's a lot of sand. Right, but here's the deal. We use about 15 billion tons for just construction every year and they are mining worldwide

about 40 billion tons of sand a year. I think that's sand and gravel, but still. Well, I do know that it is, I think with gravel, there's a UN report called Sand and Sustainability. I love that report. From UNEP, United Nations Environment Program. So crushed rock sand and gravel account for the largest volume of extracted solid material worldwide.

Okay, so you're saying like more than oil, more than natural gas, more than any other. Is that solid material? Yeah, I think so. I'm not sure what they mean by that. Is oil a solid? I don't know. So I saw it also put as like,

as far as extractable raw material, sand and gravel is by far the most extensively mined, which is why I said that. And we'll get to it in detail, but the spoiler here is, although new sand is being made constantly by erosion, which we're also gonna cover, not nearly, nearly quickly enough,

our use is far, far out basing it. Yeah, which makes sand a non-renewable resource, technically, it's just like oil. Like, yeah, as if the environmental conditions are right, over time, new oil will be made, but we're talking over very long periods. Sand doesn't take nearly as long to form as oil does, but it still takes way longer to replenish itself

than we're using it up. That's right. So let's talk a little bit about sand. Yeah, so we get sand. Sand is the final product, I guess, I even hate calling it a product, but I don't mean it in the sense of something to be bought and sold, even though it is.

I understand, sure. But it's the final product of erosion from everything from water and wind, of course, to ice and land, like glaciers grinding against stone, that creates sand, and volcanic lava even, when that stuff chills and then shatters when it makes contact with air,

that's how you get lava sand. Like the black sand in Hawaii. Yeah, and that stuff's really good as a soil emender, apparently. Yeah, cause it's like a locked in carbon, I believe, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure it's, add that to the red clay here in Georgia. Sure.

And you're cooking. Yeah, you're cooking with volcanic ash. That's right. There's also rain, the mild bit of like acid that is in rain still, even though we beat acid rain, beat it bad. There's still some in there always, and it weathers rocks,

so that helps erode rocks and create sand too. And then you've got geological sources of sand, which is just straight up rocks. You also have biological sources of sand, things like coral, forminera, I believe. Okay. Forminera, no, forminifera. I got it, I got it.

Very, very, very tiny shelled creatures that produce like white or pink sand sometimes. And then there's also, we get sand from the poop of the parrotfish. Did you hear about that? Yeah, we talked about that before. Did we, it didn't strike me, it didn't ring a bell at all.

Yeah, it was either, I don't think it was in dunes. I feel like it was further. It must have been coral reefs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. Because they actually eat parts of the coral reef accidentally while they're eating food, and then there's guts grind up the reef, and then they poop out pure, beautiful white sand.

Like hundreds of pounds of white sand a year. Yeah, but when you really are talking about sand that most of us think of as sand, we're thinking wind and water, generally. Oceans, rivers, and then in the desert, of course, wind. Right, and then the desert, we must have talked about this in sand dunes, that the deserts are just ancient beaches

from old sea beds and things like that, riverbeds sometimes. That's right, and as far as what sand is, literally, it's parts of rock, 70%, the hardest parts of rock, 70% of sand is quartz, but you've also got gypsum in there. You got limestone. We already talked about lava. There are other compositions,

and it really depends on what kind of sand you're gonna have on, obviously, what kind of rock it came from, like where you are in the world. Right, and then if you're an engineer or somebody who makes use of sand, they typically don't classify it or categorize it by composition.

They more are interested in the size. So sand is, and there's not one universal definition, which I found kind of surprising, but depending on who you ask, it is, civil engineering today says it's a small grain of rock, finer than gravel, coarser than silt. The American Society for Testing and Materials,

they produce their standard practice for classification of soils for engineering purposes, unified soil classification system. That's all one title. They say that sand is particles of soil between 75 microns and 4.75 millimeters in size. That's a big piece of sand, and that it comes in coarse, medium, and fine.

And this is extraordinarily boring. I understand that fully, but it points out the fact that sand is still a rock. It's just a very, very tiny size rock, right? Like there's gravel, there's silt, there's sand in between, but it's still a rock. It's just a different size as far as engineers and construction people are concerned.

Right, and depending on, again, what kind of rock it came from and what it's made of and where you get it and how it was formed, the shape is gonna be different. It can be very rough, it can be very smooth around. The river sand, which is what's mainly used in construction, is irregular, and they need that irregular shape

for that kind of construction, because the middle sort of sand, which is the smoother ocean sand, isn't as good, and desert sand, which is the creme de la creme of sand, very polished, very uniform and smooth and round, turns out is not good at all for construction. No, so the three types of sand

that we find on earth are river, which is irregularly shaped, ocean, which is smooth, and desert, which is Billy D. Williams. Sorry for that. Wow, I was like, did Josh just pass out because I just said all that stuff? Right, right, I know,

I just had to rebuild it though for the joke. I understand. Okay, so you said that, well, hey, should we take a break now and come back and talk about how we use sand? I think saying this is really boring, let's take a break, is a perfect opportunity for people to leave

and not come back, so let's do that. I'm thrilled. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's vapor, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast

and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, as we were saying, I'm thrilled by this, because I know what we're building up to, the big payoff. You know? Sam did it in the parlor with the rope.

Oh, I was going to say the candlestick. I always go to the candlestick for some reason. Oh, yeah? I think the idea of just hitting someone over the head with the candlestick really resonates with me. Wow. Not like I want to do it or whatever. I just am like, jeez, it's got a hoit.

I'm going to watch my back next time we're candle shopping. That's right. That's why I always take you candle shopping. I'm always right there on the edge. You're just trying to work up the courage. Yeah, or just I'm like, just say the wrong thing, Chuck, right now. And then I always turn around and you go, oh, this one's pretty.

Right. Cut crystal, Chuck, look. So speaking of cut crystal, sand is not made. It used to make cut crystal. Oh, is that right? No, it's not. But sand is used to make glass. And we did a great episode on mirrors years ago.

Yeah, that was a good one. Where we talked a little bit about this. And then, of course, silicon microchips are made from silica sand. It's also used in plastic. I know we plan to do one on plastic at some point. So that'll figure in again. Cosmetics, cleaners, grit in the cleaner sometimes.

Yeah, I mean, if you use something like soft scrub or something like that, that grit's got to come from somewhere and you can bet it's probably sand. Because again, sand is just very tiny rock. It's not going to break down or anything over time. And we've been using sand for industrial purposes, specifically glass making for at least 5,500 years. I believe they used it back in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

They used it in Egypt for construction, for sure. Did they as well? Well, they used it for glass, too. So I mean, we figured out that sand's pretty useful. We also now today use it for fracking. We did an episode on fracking. Remember that? Our world is getting smaller.

And when you inject water and slurry, part of the slurry is sand to use it to break up rock to release natural gas. But just far and away, the biggest use of sand today by human beings is to make concrete. That's right. And I'll say it again. We said it before, 15 billion tons of sand every year by the construction industry alone.

And here's a few stats for you. A typical house, I'm not sure what that means. What does that mean? Three bedroom, two baths, 1,700 square feet. Sure. I guess made entirely of concrete. I guess. I don't know what's difficult these days.

200 tons of sand, a larger building, like a school, maybe about 3,000 tons of sand, a nuclear power plant, about 12 million tons of sand. And we just did an episode on the US interstate system. Sure. Remember all those roads? Yeah. Think about 30,000 tons of sand per kilometer.

Yeah. So I did the math and I converted about 200,000 miles because there's like 48,000 miles of interstate and about 150,000 miles of highway. OK, fair enough. Converted that to kilometers. I no longer remember what it converts to. Sure.

But times 30,000 tons a kilometer, that's 9,656 million tons of sand, locked into the highways just in the US alone. That are constantly being redone. They are. Yeah, and also apparently it's used in asphalt too. So just surface streets too. And that's a big point. I used a really important word just now, locked.

Like when we use sand for concrete in construction, it stays put. That's the point of it. When you use sand in concrete, it's part of the aggregate. It's also part of the binder because it's used in cement too. So when you use a bunch of sand and you create something out of concrete, that sand is staying put. And because it's not a non-renewable resource,

you just used up some sand. You're no longer shuffling around from place to place. It's in construction now. It's locked in. That's right. And as I mentioned before, it's locked together. Mainly that river sand that's really irregular in its shape locks together better.

That if you think about it, it kind of makes sense, that really smooth, round desert sand. It's like put a bunch of ping pong balls in a bag. That's not going to lock together. That's a good analogy. I would have said more like putting a bunch of Billy Dee Williams in a bag together. They're not going to lock.

Hey, man. Add some Schlitz-Mott Looker and you've got a party. Yeah. Wait, was that the one he used to? No, he did Colt 45. Colt 45, right. Sure. How could I forget?

He never made Colt 45 taste any better. Which was the one with the, oh, I guess it was Schlitz that had the bull that would charge into the bar. Sure. And Billy Dee Williams wrestled that bull in one. Can you imagine working on those commercials back in the day? Yeah, I'm sure everybody was really drunk on Malt Looker. It's like we're going to build a big set here on stage,

a bar set, and we're going to release a live bull and film it. And see what happens. Wouldn't you have to be drunk on Malt Looker to do that? I guess so. What about Aero Morris directing all those Miller Light commercials? Those are great. Miller Heavy.

Oh, was it? I thought it was, are you sure I'm almost positive it's light? I think those are Miller High Life. OK, so here's the thing. I like Aero Morris. I like his work. I think Thin Blue Lion is arguably the best documentary ever made. It's certainly up there.

It's not my favorite, but I respect it. But I'm not like a junkie for his work. I just love the fact that he just does whatever project appeals to him at the time. Yeah, I mean, he directs a lot of commercials. That's where the money is. There's not money in documentaries. Oh, OK.

So he's not doing it because he's like, there's some neat philosophical bent that he has toward Miller at that moment. So he's going to go do, oh. He's just hired, and I'm sure they hire him for his unique purview. OK. Not purview, but point of view.

Sure. But yeah, he's a commercial director for money, and that affords him the ability to go making no money on documentaries. I may love him even more now. He's great. OK. So we were talking about Maltlick or what

was before that, Billy Dee Williams. Oh, yeah. Hey, hold on, though. This all comes full circle because Errol Morris directed a great documentary called Vern in Florida. And one of the elderly couples in Vern in Florida, there was a whole thing about this jar of sand that they had. And they talked about the fact that the sand they collected,

I think, from the desert in New Mexico is actually growing. Nice. So I brought it back. I'm glad you picked up on that because that is why I brought up Billy Dee Williams again. So we could get to that point. Oh, man. Nice job, Chuck.

So you said that the river sand is really the only kind you can use for construction. That's right. OK, which is true. And we're using a lot of it. It's so much so that every time a city gets bigger, they build a new high rise or something like that, somewhere in the world, a river is scraped of its sand,

a river, a lake, maybe a dam, but some inland system of water, because really, river sand, from what I can tell, is just beach sand that hasn't happened yet. Yeah, I mean, that's where it all wants to go there. Right. It's on the road. And then once it gets down to the beach, it's really broken down to its most constituent hardest

parts that aren't going to wash away. But so it's still irregular. It's not smooth or polished yet. So construction is an enormous consumer of sand. I saw that China, either in three years or every three years, uses an amount of sand that's greater than the entire amount of sand the United States consumed in the 20th century. Yeah, and we'll talk more about this,

but a lot of this is, well, not in China, but in some of these vacation destinations building these fake islands. No, China's doing that too. Oh, are they doing that? They're using it for every possible idea you can think of. Well, fake islands and then just adding land to the shoreline. Yeah, you want to talk a little bit about beach nourishment

here? Sure. So there's something called beach nourishment or beach replenishment or beach filling. And it is basically like people are saying, hey, our beach is wearing away. We really like this incredibly valuable coastal real estate. I paid a lot for this plot.

Let's get the beach back. So they will go and get some sand. Sometimes they import it. Sometimes they go out offshore and actually literally vacuum the stuff up, or they'll use huge buckets to dredge it up. And then they dump it on shore. And then they run over it with some heavy equipment. And they have extended the beach significantly,

depending on the size of the project. It can replenish an enormous beach for a very long stretch. And that's beach nourishment. That's a huge use of sand right now, in addition to construction for river sand. But as far as sea sand and coastal sand, beach nourishment is a big use of it. And then like you were saying, building artificial islands

is a huge use. Like islands that just were never there. It's not replenishing an island. It's, hey, let's build an island here where there really wasn't one. Yeah, and the irony there is, they're islands that are disappearing because the sand is being taken away to build islands shaped like palm trees off

the coast. Yeah, literally, that's what those islands. So like I think in Indonesia, at least 24 islands have literally vanished because they were mined for their sand. And it was moved over to, I guess, Dubai. Is that where it went? I think Dubai. Dubai or Singapore, one of the two.

Singapore, they're both doing a lot of that. Singapore, I think, has created about 50 square miles of land and grown by 20 to 25% as a country, like physically grown because of adding sand. Yeah, but it's just shuffling sand from one part of the globe to another. And the one hand, it's like, that's terrible. Like that sand was meant to be there in Indonesia.

But Indonesia also has like 1700 uninhabited islands that are just basically made up of sand and who said that they had to be there? I think it's, there's also something to be said about human ingenuity to say, hey, let's move this island over here and make this other island bigger. Yeah. Can we do it?

Yeah, we can do it. It's neat, watch. So as far as this nourishment goes though, it's called a soft armoring technique as opposed to hard armoring, like building a seawall. But here's the thing with beach nourishment is, I mean, it sounds great. Like, hey, the beach is eroding,

let's just add a bunch of sand and now the beach is back. But think about everything on that beach, just dumping tons of sand on the beach is, I mean, they use a word like nourishment, I think very purposefully to make it sound like, oh, this is so good, we're nourishing something. But when you dump thousands of tons of sand on something, you're gonna kill a lot of stuff underneath it.

Yes, so they're figuring out that beach nourishment in particular, if you're going to do it, it's preferable to building a seawall. They're saying like everyone agrees with that. And the reason why is because once you build a seawall, you're actually preventing erosion so that the beach can never replenish itself. Right.

And you're not necessarily affecting your own beach, you're affecting beaches down the coast where your beach is being moved down to that beach. And now that beach is not being replenished because you build a seawall. So bringing in imported sand is preferable to building a seawall. But the problem is, is like you were saying,

you're dumping a bunch of sand in a place where it wasn't before, so you're killing everything in there. And then we humans tend to think of beaches as just a deposit of sand. That's absolutely not correct. There is a lot of life and ecosystems going on in the sand that we can't see,

just because we can't see it doesn't mean it's not there, that are really vital to an area. And it has a chain reaction when you dump an enormous amount of sand onto a beach in that it kills the stuff that was already there, which means that higher and higher up the food chain, that the chain is broken or the food web is broken. And so you have a lot of animals

that just move out of the area because you've just created a literal food desert in that area by dumping this stuff. So they figured out that there's best practices on how to nourish a beach. And part of it is to do it in smaller incremental projects rather than one huge project that just kills everything off.

That's a big step one to doing it, right? Sure, they also say, maybe do it at a time of the year where there are maybe fewer seabirds and because this has a ripple effect on everything. It's not just the creatures you're dumping the sand on. It's birds that feed on the things down there because all of a sudden they're going to different parts of the beach.

It affects the, if they're dredging it from the ocean, you're not just scooping sand and everything's fine. You're creating like these big mud zones offshore that it's going to affect the sea life out there. You're creating construction projects on the beach, which is never fun. Never good. So they're saying maybe do it at a time of year

where there are less like seabirds around, use sand that has a similar composition to the natural sand, like try and match like sand with like sand at least. Yeah, because again, like we think, well, sand is sand. That is utterly incorrect. Like it really depends on the size, the composition. A lot of different factors are involved.

And when you introduce a different sand into a native sand area, you've just utterly changed the habitat and that has a huge effect too. So they say you need to sample what your borrow source sand is going to be before you use it to make sure it matches what you're putting on shore.

And it's all, they say to plow it afterward because that helps, but here's the thing, like none of this is some kind of permanent solution anyway because you're not stopping the erosion process. It's just a stop gap measure, I guess, that over time is just wasted time and money really. Well, it depends. I think they're figuring out

that there might be a useful, least harmful way to do this. And it seems like going out and getting the sand that you put back that was washed out to sea last time and bringing it back is probably the best way to do it. Although even, no matter when you do it, every time it's going to have some sort of impact just from the dumping, the introduction of all this new sand. Yeah.

And I wonder how much of this has to do with the fact that generally like wealthier people own this beachfront property. Right. And they, you know, they're not having it. So we got to do something about it. That's a huge, huge part of it. So there's a third option to building seawalls

and replenishing the beach. It's called managed retreat, which is basically saying, don't develop up on the beach. Like give it way more space than we give it and let the beach handle itself. And everyone just laughs at whatever ecologist brings that up every time. Yeah, when I go to Isle of Palms,

their houses, some people I think don't like it because the houses don't sit on the sand. They're way back. They're like, you know, a couple of hundred yards back. Yeah. Which makes them a little bit safer obviously from tropical storms and hurricanes, but other beaches along the coastline, you know,

some of them have water splashing up onto the porches. You know, they're so close. Right. And yeah, you want to build behind the dunes, but the thing is, if you remember from the sand dunes episode, sand dunes move further and further inland. So eventually you're going to be in front of the dunes even though you built way behind the dunes.

So that managed retreat is saying like, dude, build even further back than that. Like you have to basically drive to the beach from what I gather. Yeah. And most of the ones that I've seen that are, have the waves splashing up on you are behind big rock and wood sea walls.

Right. Which is not good for the coast down coast. That's right. You want to take another break? Yeah, let's do it. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, hey dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh god.

Seriously, I swear, and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, um, we talked about Chuck, like when you go out and get sand and replenish your beach

or nourish, sorry, um, your beach, um, the, you're actually going out and vacuuming it up. That's one form of what's called dredging. You also have huge things with enormous buckets, um, that go out and scoop the sand up just like a vacuum would, um, or the vacuum dredges would. And then you also have like really low-fi versions too, where people just take buckets and shovels and start digging up the beach. And if you get enough people working and enough, um, dump trucks in a line that are just getting filled up by hand, you can have the same effect as using a really fancy, you know, trailing suction

hopper dredge. Yeah, uh, about half or more of this stuff is usually illegally mined. So, when you see, uh, humans, um, diving, which they will do, uh, that's, you know, I think in Morocco, about half the sand is illegal from the coastline. And when you see these boats, there's a great article in Wired called the Deadly Global War for Sand, uh, written by Vince Besir in 2015. I highly recommend people read this one, uh, because they get into the black market for sand and the illegal sand trade and the fact that, you know, there's this one farming village

where this man was straight up murdered because for 10 years he'd been campaigning to authorities to get what's called the sand mafia shut down. So they will straight up murder people in India. The sand mafia has killed hundreds of people. Yeah, including like cops. Oh yeah, government officials, uh, the bribes, I think in 2010, dozens of Malaysian officials, um, were charged with accepting bribes, sexual favors. Um, even if you have a permit, I think in some of these places, I think, um, Bali, for instance,

70% of sand mines have no permits. And even if you do have a legal permit, you're using bribes and kickbacks to dig deeper and wider. So there are at least a dozen countries where illegal smuggling is just perpetually going on. Right, like sand, we're talking sand here. We didn't accidentally traipse into like heroin. We're talking about sand. Yeah. That's how much of a demand there is for it.

And what's crazy is it's still relatively cheap. I saw as low as $10 a ton. Um, Ed has in here up to, I think, has $20 to $40 a ton. And granted, sand is very, very heavy. So like a ton is something like a cubic yard, I believe. Yeah. But still that's a lot of work and a lot of murder for something that you sell for $10 a ton. A lot of murder.

But even at that price point, that's still something like a 700% increase in the price of that commodity since the 1970s. And the reason why it's been skyrocketing in value is because we're using so much of it and locking so much of it up in construction projects and using it also to create artificial islands. Yeah, this one article, though, I think it was the wired one that was talking about Morocco. They said, you know, parts of Morocco now look like the surface of the moon. Whereas years ago, there were, you know, sandy beaches and now they're rocky.

So the irony is they're, you know, they don't have any more beaches because they're taking all the sand to use to build hotels and fake islands to attract people to beaches. Right. So it's just basically a shuffling of sand around the globe in that sense. Yeah. But river sand, that's different. And no matter how you extract sand or where you extract it from, you are deeply impacting the local ecosystem. Like turning a beautiful beach of Morocco into the surface of the moon

is going to have some negative effects. Same thing goes for river dredging as well. The biggest sand mine in the world is Poyong Poyng P-O-I-N-G Lake, which is south of Shanghai, which is helping fuel Shanghai's enormous construction boom right now. And there's also sand mining basically everywhere you, everywhere there's a river. There's probably somebody mining it, including in the U.S. there's sand mines. There's one along the San Jacinto River. Is that how you say that?

San Jacinto? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think so. And it's one of the problems aside from just impacting the local wildlife that the sand, this silt and sand is part of like the ecosystem is when you take out part of the river bed, you expand that river's potential for flow.

Oh yeah. And they think that Hurricane Harvey in Houston was really exacerbated from this sand mining along the San Jacinto River that allowed way more flood and storm water to flow through it way more quickly. Yeah. And here's the other thing is, we've talked about besides the fact that we are naturally, sand isn't being produced nearly enough to account for what we're stealing and locking in, but 60% of the world's rivers are interrupted by dams. So even if it were in an ideal case like producing enough sand to kind of be equal,

it's not getting down to the mouth of the river where it all wants to eventually go. No, but I did see that one thing you can do is like if you're a sand mining company, you'd be very smart to make a contract with a dam operator and say, you need the sand out of your dam, right? I can get it out. Just let me take it for free. And you've solved two problems, right? But because we're consuming sand at about double the rate of production for river sand,

about half of that sand you get out of a dam should be brought back up to the river and basically spread through like the head of the river. But they're not going to do that because they can sell it instead. But yeah, as it puts like our ecological disasters are creating problems for our other ecological disasters. Yeah. And going back to the ocean sand, which can be illegally mined from the ocean floor by people diving, they're also exploiting people and workers because I looked up, I was trying to get a pay rate and this one guy, 41 years old, dives 200 times a day.

This is from that Wired article and he makes $16 a day and like their families are all at work and they're literally diving off of boats with buckets and then swimming back to the top like John Steinbeck style and putting sand in a boat. Right. With a bucket of sand, which is not exactly light, that's a really dangerous thing to do. Yeah. In India, where I think it's got the worst problems, they're trying to do stuff. But from what I've gathered, it's sort of, a lot of it is for show. Like anytime someone new is elected or there's a new person in power, they make a big show about stopping the sand wars and the sand trade.

Right. But it's a country of a billion people and it has got hundreds or probably thousands of illegal operations going on and you shut one down and other like 10 more pop up and it's so corrupt and violent that it's looking pretty grim as far as like, hey, let's really stop this from happening. Yeah. But also don't forget the fact that these mafia have proven that they will murder people, including government officials. So that's a really intractable problem, it seems like over there. People in smaller villages are doing, they'll block off roads with cars or with trees to stop the cars and trucks, but then they will get attacked. So it's really grim and this is sand. Right. It is sand. So if you wanted to address this, you have to think of it

in just the same way that you think of something like anytime there's an organized crime involved, you have to think of it just like you're dealing with say like the flow of cocaine. Sure. Do you go after the farmers who produce the cocaine? Do you go after the cartels who are smuggling the cocaine or do you try to keep the end user from wanting it? Do you affect demand? And there's some proposals that seem to say, well, we're not going to be able to do anything about production. Let's try to see what we can do about demand. And one of the first things to do is to say, don't use so much concrete. Like let's figure out some other materials that we can use for smaller construction projects that really don't necessarily need concrete. And we'll use

those instead and save concrete for the stuff where it is really needed. Yeah. Like if you're building a nuclear power plant, you need that concrete, but if you're building an average home, there are probably ways to get around this. Sure. You can use things like panda claws or condor feathers as building materials rather than precious sand. Well, there is glass and, you know, we talked earlier about sand as is glass to a certain degree. And why don't you just crush that down, grind it up again. There is also artificial sand because, you know, sand is just rock. You can technically, you can grind down rocks down to sand. But all of that stuff is, I mean, no one's going to do that because it's so expensive. For now. For now. But that's the whole

idea is to get these kind of, get these things in place. And the more scarce real sand becomes, then people, you know, the equal, the cost might equal out and people might turn to artificial sand. Right. But the unfortunate thing is, is that implies that we need to keep waiting and just abide this kind of ecological disaster that is sand mining until sand becomes so scarce, that artificial sand becomes a viable alternative, which sucks. Yeah. I mean, hopefully this falls under the, under the umbrella of people who want to have best practices for the environment. Put this is on the radar now, you know, along with like solar power and everything else. Yep. We need somebody to come along and figure out how to create artificial sand from

gravel very easily. Although gravel extraction is not exactly environmental impact free. We need to figure out how to turn trash into vastly superior river sand. That would be great. Okay. Can someone get on that? Yeah. Can we divert one of our multiple ventriloquists who are apparently not doing anything useful in Chuck's opinion to figuring out how to convert trash into river sand. You know what? We didn't get one angry letter from a ventriloquist. I was surprised. No. As a matter of fact, you seem to have a, you enjoy wide support in your opinion of ventriloquists. You really do. Most people don't like them apparently. Yeah. So, you got anything else about ventriloquists or sand? No. I don't think so. I think this is a good one

to put on people's radar during, well, I guess this is sort of the tail end of summer beach season, but when you're out there with the sand and you're just look around and think about a little bit, I know that ocean sand isn't what they're using for construction, but next time you go to a lake or a river, just kind of keep this in the back of your head. Yeah. Really let it depress your experience. And watch your back in case Josh is nearby with a candlestick. Right. Well, I think that's it for sand for now. If you want to know more about sand and sand depletion, go check it out. There's a lot of ink that's been spilled over it. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. That's right. Before Listener Mail, though, we want to do a couple

of things. I know we had at the onset of this show, we probably had a little, little pre-roll for our upcoming shows, but we're just a couple of weeks out by my math from being in New Orleans and Orlando for live shows. Yeah. So we'd love to just encourage people to go out there. We're going to be in Orlando at Plaza Live on October 9th and New Orleans the next night on October 10th. And I don't know if tickets are going to be around. So hopefully you can still get them at this point. Yes. I would skedaddle over to the internet and try to get your hands on some right now. And then our friends at Coed, the Cooperative for Education, many years ago, they took us down along with Jerry to Guatemala and we went on one of their tours and it was great.

Yes, it was. The stuff you should know, Guatemala and Adventure, parts one and two. You can still go listen to those. And they want to encourage people to come out again for some tours. They've had stuff you should know. Members, members? Army members, I guess. Yeah, Army members. Listeners, go down for these tours because of us mentioning on the show and it's really life-changing. They're still doing this kind of work down there. They're breaking the cycle of poverty in Guatemala through education and they are still hosting people just like they did us on these week-long trips. It's a lot of fun. It's very eye-opening. It's very meaningful. It's all these things put together. You're going to make some lifelong friends. I guarantee it. And we

just can't encourage you enough to go on one of these tours. Yeah, Co-Ed really knows how to take care of their guests too. They really get across what they're doing and they take you to the places that are being helped. But they also, I mean, it is a lot of fun as well and they take you to some very beautiful spots. Sure, it's all these great things wrapped up into one great opportunity. Coming up in November and February, you can learn more about these tours at cooperative4education.org slash tours. Nice, Chuck. And now finally, a listener mail. All right, lay it on us, Chuck. Because speaking of live shows, we just finished up our shows in Boston, Portland, Maine, and they were great. And this is from an attendee. Okay. I wanted to write in

to tell you guys how much fun your live show in Portland was. I am from Connecticut, but my sister just started as a freshman at the University of New England in Bideford, which is just south of Portland. I was already planning on coming up to visit her after her first week in school, and I was listening, heard you were coming to Portland, and it couldn't have been more perfect timing-wise. Coming to one of your shows was a bucket list item for me, and it's cool that I got to explore a new place, even though I myself was never big into topic redacted. You guys always know how to make all of the topics so interesting and reach different audiences. Plus, it was really cool just to be around so many stuff you should know fans. Even better,

my wife, who is not even a listener, was a great sport, came to the show. It was amazed to see how many people were there and had a lot of fun. Although you hear it all the time, I want to say again, thank you. What you and the other podcasters out there do to cultivate learning and creativity for all ages and communities is awesome. And that is from Alex, and thank you, Boston and Portland, Maine. Great, great time on those shows. Yeah, that was an amazing time. And driving between Boston and Portland was really awesome, too. It was wonderful. Emily and my daughter came up and we spent the weekend in Portland and went out to Kenabunkport and Cape Elizabeth and Peaks Island, and it is a pretty magical place there in the summertime. It really is. It's crazy. It was

wonderful. Yeah, so thanks everybody for having us out. We'll see you again soon. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, you can go on to Stuff You Should Know and follow us on our social stuff. And then you can also just send us a good old-fashioned email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll

never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.