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Re:China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World by donquichotte on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @04:29AM (#15958927)
Maybe synergies can be used here! On HN 1 month ago: The World Is Running Out of Sand: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15739917
Re:China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World by igravious on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @04:55AM (#15959049)
As noted in that discussion, there are different types of sand – (ironically?) the growing desert is not usable as a construction material; the individual grains are too small and spherical, in construction sand the grains are coarser and larger. Why is why we have the situation where Gulf states import some of the sand for their construction boom even though a huge proportion of their land is desert (that is to say – sand).

edit: so no synergies unfortunately!

Re:China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World by AndrewOMartin on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @05:53AM (#15959290)
So what you're saying is someone needs to invent a cryptocurrency where the proof of work is measured by the number of spherical grains of sand you coarsen?
Re:China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World by donquichotte on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @06:29AM (#15959401)
We need to launch an ICO here. The Internet of Sand (IoS) is the future. Every coarse grain will have its IPv6 address which is retained in a blockchain for tracking, making "intelligent concrete" the very fabric of architecture 4.0.
Re:China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World by Linorm on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @08:47AM (#15960127)
According to some research papers [1] [2] it may be feasbible to use desert sand for concrete at least - However, my knowledge about construction is very limited so I may have misinterpreted the findings.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_it_possible_to_use_dese... [2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jamila_Abdalhmid/post/I...