Multi-Disciplinary Reading – Book Reviews

The World in a Grain, Vince Beiser, 2018 – I expected this book to be extremely dry read but it was quite relatable and entertaining. The premise of the book is that sand is in everything we use everyday, from roads, buildings, glass, ceramics, PV cells, microchips or are used in manufacturing like in the process of casting (silica crucibles in casting metals). It goes deep into the history, politics, ecology of sand while also touching upon its unique properties that make it so versatile a product

My notes –

• Sand is to cities what flour is to bread and what cells are to our bodies. Concrete, glass, asphalt roads or silicon chips – all need sand

• Construction industry uses $130b worth of sand every year

• Sand lies deep in our cultural consciousness, in our metaphors – so we draw lines in the sand, build castles in it or bury our heads in it

• Discovery of transparent glass in Italy in 15th century lead to microscopes and telescopes and the renaissance’s scientific revolution

• At the turn of the century buildings were made of stone, brick, clay or wood and glass in the form of tableware or windows was a luxury – mass manufacture of concrete and glass changed all that

• Glass bulbs, porcelain, hydrated silica in toothpastes (mild abrasive), elastic made with silicone derived from sand, silicone in shampoo also makes hair shinier, makes shirts less wrinkle prone, fiber-optic cables, glue and even wine has a dash of colloidal silica to improve clarity and shelf life – sand is everywhere in our products

• Though we have lot of sand on earth, we are running out of it for construction. Desert sand, having been shaped by wind rather than water are too round and dont bind together well

• In 1950, 746m people lived in cities. Today 4.2b or more than half of all people live in cities increasing per capita consumption of sand

• China alone used more cement between ‘11 and ‘13 than the US did in the whole 20th century

• Dubai imports construction sand from Australia

• Sand is loose grains of hard material between 2mm and 0.0625mm (Udden-Wentworth scale). Made of glaciers grinding up stones, oceans degrading seashells and corals, volcanic lava chilling and shattering etc. 70% of all sand is quartz (silica or SiO2 but stained by oxidation) mixed with iron, feldspar etc

• Sand and gravel together is referred by construction industry as “aggregate”. Sand is also used in mortar, plaster and roofing components

• Marine sands can be useful for construction in concrete but only after salt is washed off them which is very expensive but can be used for artificial land building (as in Dubai’s palm jumeirah)

• Higher purity sand as in France’s fontainebleau region are > 98% pure silica and are used for glass making and also for making molds for foundries, adding luster to paint and to filter water in pools. Highest purity quartz used for computer chips and for sand traps in golf courses

• Sand mining (very low-tech industry) tears up wildlife habitat, fouls rivers and destroys farmland. Sand helps in percolating water to aquifers – without it water in river rushes to the sea (south india has suffered from this)

• Two dozen Indonesian islands have been destroyed by sand mining (that sand ended up in Singapore in reclaiming land from sea – 50 sq miles in 40 yrs). UK and Japan rely more on sand from the sea

• Hard and rounded sand grains from Wisconsin and Minnesota is used for fracking

• Concrete is the skeleton on which modern cities are built and as important as electricity to the modern world. 75% aggregate (gravel and sand), 15% water and 10% cement. Has been around in some form for over 2000 years from the Mayans to the Greeks (Colosseum, Pantheon). But once Romans stopped making it, it went out of production for 1000+ years! (British brought it back in 1750s)

• Portland Cement – powdered limestone + clay fired to high temps in a kiln). 95% of cement used in America is portland cement

• Concrete has high compressive strength (stands great pressure without breaking) but low tensile strength – so a reinforcement in terms of steel bars (TMT) is necessary (twisting TMT bars adds to its tensile strength and grips concrete better)

• Concrete took over in early 1900s but was decried by stonemasons and bricklayers as unproven and unsafe (threat of new technology always has this response from incumbents). It took off post WW-II as stark, angular concrete-style became popular in buildings

• Urban population in US doubled in the early 1900s across cities and Material Services Corp pioneered aggregate (sand and gravel) supply. It still around in some form (low disruption risk)

• Every mile of US highway is made with 15000 tons of concrete. Asphalt or bituminous concrete or blacktop is when tar is added to sand and gravel (tarmac is short for tar-macadam). Bitumen is a byproduct of refining oil so as gasoline went into cars, bitumen went into roads. Asphalt and concrete roads have same ingredients – only binding agent varies – cement vs bitumen (concrete roads have lower upkeep)

• Cars and paved roads fuelled each others’ growth – the moved paved roads that were built, more people wanted cars

• Between 1914-1926 – 250k miles to 500k miles roads. Automobiles reached 20 million. More jobs were created in gas station, repair shops, restaurants, hotels and motels along the highway

• Autobahns pioneered most things we come to expect in modern highways – median separating lanes, on-off ramps, flyovers, clover-leaf intersections, banked roads for high-speed turns. Americans copied that style for their interstates (driven by Eisenhower). Partly financed by high tax on gasoline, diesel and tyres – finally completed in ‘91 (46876 miles and cost $130b)

• 70% of all US freight is carried by trucks – 7 times more than trains as railroads lost out to the interstates. Manufacturing jobs went where highways went as rural labour was cheaper. Millions of Americans moved to suburbs – 30m in ‘50 to 120m in ‘90 (Both these trends are yet to catch up in India).

• In ‘57 there were 4000 swimming pools in US – next year 200k – today its 8 million (large open spaces in suburbs)

• Highway hypnosis – the uniformity of signs and colors on a highway that makes it feel like a conveyer belt than a road, smothering the underlying regional character

• Sand used to make glass must at least be 95% silica and largely free of impurities (Iron imparts a green color to glass) – Melting sand alongside soda which lowers its melting point, limestone or seashells produces basic glass when the mixture cools (1600 deg C)

• Romans figured out how to make transparent glass by adding manganese oxide. They also pioneered glass-blowing and made wine glasses. Glass-makers were so profitable that they were nearly royalty in 13th century Venice (they used sand from France’s Fontainbleau region)

• Corning glass operates its largest opthalmic glass production center today in Fontainbleau (a natural resource rich region can retain its heritage for long time)

• Spectacles increased the intellectual life of professional workers by 15 yrs or more and abetted surge of knowledge in Europe from 14th Century. Telescopes and Microscopes moved science forward by leaps and bounds

• Bottlemaking using the Owen’s machine make bottles a commodity from luxury and altered consumption (milk, beer, ketchup to medicines – everything was reimagined) – couple this with highway network and suddenly products were distributed far and wide

• Flat glass had equally profound impact in early 20th century – with windows for houses, cars, tableware becoming common with sheet glass

• Fiberglass-reinforced plastic led to weather-resistant material than steel that was used in cars and boats. Thermopane (double-paned glass) led to settlements in deserts of Arizona and Nevada as now heat could be kept out

• Corning pioneering ceramic baking dishes, pyrex bakeware and storage containers, mass-manufactured lightbulbs, TV picture tubes, heat-resistant windows for NASA spacecraft and even the first fiber-optic fibers and of course the Gorilla glass

• Glass today has lost out to plastic and metal containers which make up 80% of the market (China today is world’s largest producer and consumer of glass)

• Spruce Pine has the purest quartz anywhere in the world (used in computer chips)

• Silicon for solar panels has to be 99.999999% pure. Silicon for chips 99.99999999999% pure – one lonely atom of impurity among billions of silicon atoms

• Silicon metal is converted to silicon tetrachloride (used in glass cores of optic fibres) and trichlorosilane which is treated to become polysilicon. 99% pure silicon metal goes for $1 per pound. Polysilicon is 10x that. 99.998% pure silica is used in halogen lamps and PV cells (Iota 6). Iota 8 has 8 molecules of impurity per billion of SiO2 is 99.9992% purity ($10k/ton) – used to make crucibles

• The computer chip is made from wafers of purest silicon through a process called photolithography

• 3/4th of all silica sand production in the US goes towards fracking. Only 7% towards glass (Unimin biggest fracking sand producer in the world)

• Beaches are disappearing all over the US and the world because of sand mining upriver and dams as seas reclaim sand from the beaches. Artificially building beaches – or beach replenishment is a $7b industry. Maintenance is high as well – it lasts only 5 yrs

• In the US beach nourishment cannot use non-domestic sand (lobbying by dredging industry there).

• Palm Jumeirah – world largest man-made peninsula in the shape of a palm-tree is built with dredged sand (doubled coastline, added 48 miles of new shore and 38 miles of beach). Powerful centrifugal pumps have made it easier to dredge sand. If adequate sand is available new seafront land can be built at $536/sft – fraction of what it costs to buy seafront land in HK, SG or Dubai

• China’s powerful dredging ships (the magical island maker) built 3000 acres of new land in 18 months in the South China Sea

• In 1990, only 10 cities in the world has 10 million population. By ‘14 there were 28 of them, home to 453 million people.

• The cement industry is one of world’s leading sources of greenhouse gases (behind coal plants and automobiles)

• US has 84000 dams with avg. age of 56 years. Some 15500 dams are high risk. US may have to revamp a lot of its roads and dams in the near future

• Self-healing concrete, geopolymer concrete, hydrogels are some ways to repair and replenish concrete. Recycled concrete is good only for low-quality applications like road base and sidewalks. Asphalt though recycles better

We fail to notice what’s omnipresent and like air, sand is omnipresent for modern civilisation. Tracing the way in which we have manipulated sand over the centuries also tells the story of how we have progressed as a civilisation – from paving roads, blowing glass, raising buildings to shaping an intelligence that would someday surpass us. 9/10