- [Baratunde] When
I think of sand, I think of beaches, riverbanks, maybe big old sand dunes. But it turns out we use sand
for just about everything. - I wish people understood that sand is literally
used in everything. Toothpaste, paint, coastal
restoration, your phone. Sand is everywhere,
whether you like it or not. And we're running out of it. - Now, if you're like
me, you're thinking, sand has a crisis? We have way too
many other crises for sand to try to
crowd in on the action. What is going on here? (bright music) To understand the
importance of sand, we need to travel to the mouth
of the Mississippi River, where the sand you expect along the coastline is disappearing. - Coastal Louisiana is eroding and disappearing more
rapidly than it should. - [Baratunde] The wetlands
along the Louisiana coastline are basically formed by
sediment, sand, clay, and silt that the Mississippi
River carries along and deposits when it
reaches the open ocean. And for thousands of years,
the river was pretty good at moving this sediment, growing the delta a few
square miles per year, until it was one of the
largest in the world. But because we humans have
tried to control the river and keep our community safe, sediment buildup in the Delta
has slowed dramatically, putting the coastline at
risk from rising sea levels. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has
lost over 2,000 square miles of land. That's an area about
the size of Delaware. - [Richard] One of
the main culprits is the flood protection system along the Mississippi River. What happened was as
those levees were built, they basically cut off
the source of sediment that was nourishing
our wetlands. - [Baratunde] This
is Barry Richard. He's the construction manager for the largest marsh
creation project in the state. - [Richard] Used to
be habitat for birds, fish, shrimp, crabs, things that you hunt or
fish for that provide for all the communities. - [Baratunde] While
there's no single solution to coastal erosion, experts like Barry are involved
in a number of projects to help restore the coastline. One of the fastest is
to literally rebuild the wetlands we've lost. - Just behind those
trees over there, that's the dredge or the machine
that's sucking up the dirt. And it's sucking it up and it's coming straight
from that dredge, and it'll come out of a pipe
that looks just like that. We've gone as long as 23 miles, and once it hits that
open water, it starts
to kind of stack on top of each other until
you get marsh vegetation growing back on
top of that land. It's not rocket science,
we're just moving dirt. (Richard chuckles) - [Baratunde]
Practices like these have allowed local communities to recover some of the
wetlands and, in turn, protect the wildlife and human
communities that rely on it. Unfortunately, it's
not a perfect solution. Dredging and other
forms of sand extraction can actually damage
the ecosystems they're
ultimately trying to protect, and the land they
create is eventually going to erode the same way, which means that to even
have a chance of keeping up, we'll have to keep on dredging. To make things worse, because
it takes sand thousands to millions of years to form, sand depletion is
a zero-sum game, at least as far as human
lifespan is concerned. So, when sand is taken
away from one place to help restore another, we're
eventually going to run out of sand at the source location. So, it's clear what we need
is another source of sand. And one solution
might be just upriver. (bright music) Welcome to New Orleans. In this city, known for its unique history
and exuberant culture, a small group believes
they have the answer, or at least one of them. - I recycle glass into sand and use it for
coastal restoration, disaster relief, new
glass products and more. - [Baratunde] Fran
Trautmann is the founder of Glass Half Full. - In reality, 70%
of all glass created in the United States
goes to a landfill. So, the majority of our glass
is going to waste right now, and many places need
an option to turn glass into something new that isn't
just sending it to a landfill. - [Baratunde] Sadly, it's true,
and it's been getting worse. Starting around 2014, many small and mid-sized cities couldn't
afford the rising cost of glass processing, so they just cut-glass
recycling programs altogether. (glass clattering) (light music) - I've lived in South
Louisiana my whole life. I've seen firsthand
our lack of recycling and also our coastal erosion
crisis here in Louisiana. And so, when I got to college
and my co-founder said, hey, we should do something about
glass recycling and we realized that we could turn glass back into sand and use that locally, everything just clicks. (bright music) So, this is our
mountain of glass. It used to be probably
triple this size, but now we are much more
efficient with processing. This is our processing system. This is where the magic happens. Sand and gravel
will come out here, where it'll then travel
up this conveyor belt and then be sifted by sockets. This is our main sand product,
so it's a coarse sand. This is what we use for
coastal restoration. - [Baratunde] But how
does recycled sand compare to the real thing? - Hey, it's almost
as tall as me. - [Baratunde] Julie Albert
is an associate professor at Tulane University. She's studying the
viability of glass as a solution to
coastal erosion. - So, these are bald cypress. They are growing in
either 100% glass sand, sediment dredged from
the Mississippi River, or a mixture of the two. It's important to remember that the glass that we're crushing into sand originally
came from sand. - [Baratunde] Glass is mostly
silica sand, after all. We've heated it up to
really high temperatures and cooled it down into shapes
we want, like glass bottles. - So then when you
take that glass bottle, and you crush it back into sand, now you've got something that physically looks
just like natural sand, and chemically is
pretty much the same as natural sand. It's a very positive finding
that the plants are happy with the recycled glass sand. It means we can put the
glass sand on the beach and expect the vegetation
to grow, take root, hold everything in place. - Since its founding in 2020, Glass Half Full has recycled roughly 5 million
pounds of glass, about half of which
ends up as usable sand. And most of that goes to
help restoration projects. But recycling glass
into sand has benefits that go way beyond just
coastal restoration. That's because sand
is way more important than you might think. It's the second most used
natural resource on Earth, right after water. - So, you see a
desert and you say, there are so many deserts
with too much sand. How can there be
a sand shortage? Desert sand is windblown,
meaning that it's extremely fine and rounded, and that
is essentially useless. The really valuable sand
is generally river sand, but can also be sand from
quarries or even dredged from our oceans. - [Baratunde] This means
that the sand crisis isn't just about less sand. It's also about how hard it is to get to the sand that remains. - We're not gonna literally
run out of sand anytime soon. It's not gonna be like
the Mad Max scenario where you've got gangs
of biker mutants fighting over the last little heaps
and hillocks of sand. There's still a lot
of sand out there. We're having to go further
and further and do more, and more damage to get
at the stuff that's left. - [Baratunde] This is
Vince Beiser, a journalist who literally wrote the
book on the sand crisis. - So, the number one
thing we use sand for by far is concrete, but it's actually a
very recent invention. Concrete really only took
off in the early 1900s. And we went from a world in
which we barely used concrete to a world where we use concrete
for everything very fast. - [Baratunde] This may
be why areas of the world where sand extraction impacts
the environment the most are areas with soaring
infrastructure demand, like India and China. But the impacts are more
than just environmental. - In some places, it's gotten
so bad that organized crime has gotten into the game. There's a huge black market
for sand, believe it or not. - [Baratunde] That's right. When a valuable resource
becomes really scarce, people resort to extreme
measures to get it. Don't believe me? Look at what happened in 2008. - An entire beach was
stolen in Jamaica, which is just insane
to think about. They went to bed one night,
there was a beach, they woke up, no beach, because it was made
of this beautiful white sand. - [Baratunde] They
stole a whole beach. Seriously. The late Queen of England
actually tried to get it back. If you live in the US
and you haven't heard about these kind of events, there might be a
reason for that. It's just not as dramatic
here, at least not yet. - I do not think that Americans
are paying enough attention to this issue. I mean, I've been banging
on this issue for six, or seven years by now. So, it's kind of amazing. It's like the great
under-reported
environmental issue of our time. - [Baratunde] It may
not be as obvious as what's happening in places
like China and Jamaica, but America's sand
crisis is getting worse. One of the main issues
that we really face here in the United States when
it comes to sand is beaches. They're eroding
very, very rapidly. To keep beaches nice and
long and fat and sandy, we actually have to
artificially maintain them. One of the ways that we do
that is by scooping up sand or sucking up sand
from the ocean bottom and just shooting
it up on the coast. - [Baratunde] So, it's
not just Louisiana. Beaches all over the US
are having to be rebuilt, and the sand for that, It
has to come from somewhere. - We've been taking so
much sand that in a lot of places there is no more
sand on the ocean floor. Like in Miami, they
can't do that anymore. They have literally used up
all the sand they can access on the ocean floor. So instead, they have
to bring it in by truck. You have to go a
couple of hours inland to these enormous pits
where they dig up sand out of the earth, pile it on
trucks, haul it to the coast. We're spending
billions of dollars to artificially
fatten up beaches from Florida to California. - [Baratunde] What
can we do to solve it? Locally, we can use
innovations like recycled sand. This restores our coastlines while reducing our dependence
on mining for sand. - The global sand
shortage is a huge issue. It can't be solved
with just one solution, but I do believe when glass
is otherwise ending up in a landfill, then using
recycled glass sand is one part of that solution. - [Baratunde] But for
now, what you can get from recycled glass is
just a drop in the bucket. - The dredge that is sitting
out there in the lake right now can move about 40,000 cubic
yards of dirt in one day. So, all of those dump trucks
that you see on the highway, it would take 2,500
of those to do what this dredge
can do in one day. - I'm no mathematician,
but to me, that seems like a
lot of glass bottles. And that is just to match
the sediment extracted by a single dredge. That gives you an idea of why recycling alone can't
solve the global sand crisis. - Recycling, sadly,
is not the solution. Recycling can help. It can reduce the
amount of fresh sand that we have to dig up out of
the planet or from riverbeds, but it can never
fully replace sand. - [Baratunde] As human
civilization continues to grow, our need for sand will grow too. But that doesn't necessarily
mean that the way we exploit our environment needs
to grow with it. We have to figure out
ways to live our lives, and to build our cities, which
is where most people live, in ways that just consume
less across the board. Less sand, less concrete,
less glass, less energy, less of everything. And that is very much doable. - Maybe the first step is
gaining a new appreciation for the things we
take from the Earth, even something as small
as a grain of sand. - Thanks for watching. For more tales from
the great outdoors, check out season two
of America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston. You can find us in
the PBS video app, or your local PBS station. Click the link in
the description below
to find out more.
