Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "Illegal Sand Mining Is Ruining These Countries' Ecosystems" video.

Your man has it backwards. Cement clincher (pronounced clinker) production EMITS carbon dioxide... by the ton. Clincher, when pulverized, becomes powdered cement -- the grey stuff that is blended with sand and gravel to make today's common, ordinary concrete. Half-way through your exposition -- and no-one has mentioned that the missing sand is being exported to the Middle East. This is only eluded to by the expert comparing desert sand with river sand. Desert sand is utterly worthless. It's also not smooth -- in utter contrast to the assertions in your video. Desert sand exists too often as SHARDS. These are the particles that don't bond well to Portland cement. They provide fracture planes that start micro-cracks -- that critically weaken the entire body. Restated, the shards line up during the pouring and finishing process. This is exactly what you can't tolerate. Polishing billions of tons of desert sand is a wholly uneconomic proposition. BTW, Red China scarcely needs to import sand. She has river sand clogging the largest dam in the world to such a degree that it has to be sluiced out. (!) It's the Gulf oil states that are paying top dollar for sand. They are what's driving this. Since they are massive employers of Bangladeshi contractors and labor ... well, you can see the politics of it. Bangladesh really has to sell its sand and its labor. The river miners are merely under-taxed for their mining of the commons. This is an internal affair for Bangladeshi politics.
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