VOICE OVER: Sand is everywhere.
JACQUELINE GLASS: We use 40 to 50 billion tonnes of sand and gravel around the world every year.
40 to 50 billion tonnes!
FIONA CHARNLEY: It’s a fundamental resource to construction and construction is one of our biggest industries.
JACQUELINE: It’s a massive amount, but sand is a finite resource.
VOICE OVER: Now, we’re facing a growing problem.
FIONA: It’s not an infinite resource, it is running out, and once we put it into buildings,
it’s actually really difficult to get back out.
JACQUELINE: There’s been a decade of conversation around a sand crisis.
VOICE OVER: As the world runs out of sand, researchers say something needs to change,
from the way we build our cities to the way we destroy them.
To explore what can be done, Nature has brought three sculptors,
two academics and seventeen tonnes of sand to this recycling plant in London.
This is a story that starts off with a grain of sand and reaches around the world,
impacting global carbon emissions and the economics of an enormous industry.
In this film, we're going to ask a question.
Could the solution to the sand crisis be to start thinking
circularly?
JACQUELINE: If you're looking for sand, look out for concrete - and you know what that looks like.
You think about the buildings, the columns and the blocks that make up our buildings,
so there’s sand in there. About 30% of concrete is sand.
VOICE OVER: Jacqueline Glass’s research focuses on transforming the construction industry,
including making better use of the precious materials like sand that make up our cities.
But not all sand is created equal.
In fact, particles of building sand have very particular properties.
JACQUELINE: So they look a bit like triangles or squares, they've got nice little pointy bits to them,
because that helps us bring them all together and get them to stick together properly.
VOICE OVER: This is what sand made by water erosion looks like.
Unfortunately that doesn’t apply to the sand found in abundance in deserts around the world.
JACQUELINE: And that's quite different, because that's formed by the wind blowing. So it makes
these very smooth, rounded little particles. And they just don't come together as well,
so we can't use the desert sand for construction.
VOICE OVER: So getting the right kind of sand is harder
than you might think - and often it means disturbing local ecosystems.
JACQUELINE: We're taking sand, we're mining it or we're extracting it from, say, rivers
or beaches along the coast.
And it affects nature. It affects animal life. It affects water flows.
VOICE OVER: And yet, because sand is in such high demand, illegal mining operations are rife.
JACQUELINE: And that sometimes involves forced labor, and slavery.
So the extraction of sand can lead to social problems locally, as well as environmental.
VOICE OVER: As well as concrete, this sand is used to make building materials like cement, bricks,
mortar and tarmac. It’s everywhere from the foundations of buildings,
right up to the top of the tallest skyscrapers.
But while a sandcastle can be turned back into its original building material and
re-made over and over again, the same isn’t always true for the sand used in buildings.
FIONA: Once we put it into buildings,
it's actually really difficult to get back out and reuse.
VOICE OVER: Fiona Charnley is an expert on circular business modeling, working with different
industries to think about the resources that they’re using, re-using and, potentially, wasting…
FIONA: We tend to focus on the design of buildings and the use of buildings once they're constructed,
but give little thought to what happens afterwards, the demolition process,
can we reuse the valuable materials and resources that are in buildings.
VOICE OVER: Researchers like Fiona are arguing that there
needs to be a change in the whole economic model for construction.
FIONA: Within our current linear economy materials and products flow from the mining company through
to the manufacturers, to the retailers and then to the end users, and typically end up in landfill.
However there’s lots that we can do to retain that value and loop it back into our system.
VOICE OVER: Thinking about looping and maintaining the value of materials like
sand across their whole life, is part of an idea known as the circular economy.
FIONA: So the circular economy actually it's, it's not that revolutionary,
it's just taking the core components of our linear economy and rearranging them. So actually,
that we're sharing that value, we're feeding that value back into the system, and products
and materials are inherently designed to go round and round and be used as many times as possible.
VOICE OVER: By circulating materials back into the industry, there's less waste and that reduces
the need to extract new materials. Something particularly relevant to sand and construction.
JACQUELINE: In the UK, the construction and demolition industry produces well
over a hundred million tonnes of waste a year. Twenty-nine million tonnes of that goes to landfill.
Which does mean we are recovering, reusing and recycling quite a lot.
VOICE OVER: Recycling concrete, like they do at this plant, is an important part of making
construction more sustainable, but it’s not always the most efficient option available.
FIONA: That recycling process is hugely energy and resource intensive. And it means breaking
that product down into its component parts or even destroying the materials.
JACQUELINE: What happens is kind of what you can see here. We demolish the building,
we take it apart, and we break it up. And it means that those components that were designed
with such care - we’ll never get that value back from these materials ever again. We can only use
them in a lower grade application because we now don’t know what they’re capable of.
VOICE OVER: The circular economy provides alternatives to recycling waste materials.
JACQUELINE: If we go back to the design process,
we can understand why there's waste there in the first place,
it’s because we are thinking in rather a linear way and we’re almost expecting waste to happen.
So people are really interested in design for deconstruction, design for disassembly.
VOICE OVER: One alternative to recycling
is buildings with components that can simply be reused as they are…
JACQUELINE: So for example, with precast concrete, we could remove a whole piece of a building,
whether it's a floor beam, or a column, and we could reuse it in its entirety.
Because it's been designed to be taken apart. And also we know exactly what it
was designed to do in the first place, so we can reuse that entire piece with confidence.
VOICE OVER: Even more efficient than reusing components is reusing entire buildings.
JACQUELINE: So for example, the University of Cambridge,
the Centre for Sustainability Leadership, its new building was a telephone exchange.
So they've kept the, almost the whole building intact from previously. They've brought in a
whole reception desk, which was destined for waste. It was destined for landfill.
VOICE OVER: In fact simply extending the lifespan
of a building while it’s in use is a key part of the circular economy.
FIONA: The most efficient way that we can retain the value that's within products is
at the use phase. The user can maintain and look after their product themselves,
they can get them refurbished and upgraded. And then once the part of the product has
come to the end of its life with one user, it actually can be shared between multiple users.
VOICE OVER: Sometimes, that can mean considering alternatives
to knocking a building down and starting again.
JACQUELINE: The in-use phase of a building is actually often overlooked. But there's huge
potential there. And this is again about looking forward when you’re designing. Because you can
think about how, can I help the future occupants or its future owners to adapt the building rather
than having to demolish it. So for example, one of the older buildings at Canary Wharf,
which was built in 1991, the piles, and these are the concrete feet that hold a building up,
they’re quite deep, so actually they can take more building on top. And what they've been
able to do is they've been able to keep that building intact, and make it bigger,
because those piles can take extra weight. So that building now has a longer life than
might have been expected because it's been able to be adapted and extended.
VOICE OVER: The circular economy isn’t a revolutionary idea,
but it’s one that could change the way we think about sustainability.
FIONA: It's only really in the last 10 to 12 years that the term circular economy has
been used much more frequently. And actually, I think it's a fantastic framework for businesses
to understand that actually, sustainability doesn't just have to be about reduction and
recycling and minimizing, but actually, the circular economy is about creating new revenue,
new profit, new value, and about innovation and entrepreneurship.
VOICE OVER: But that’s not all. The production of concrete and cement accounts for something
like 4 to 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions - that’s more than the output of most
countries. And a circular construction model could drastically reduce those emissions.
FIONA: The circular economy is a key way of helping us to achieve our 2050 climate
goals and to help tackle climate change. And it really needs to be introduced as core strategy,
both in our industrial strategy, but also our climate policies to make sure
that we have the right legislation in place to help us to create this shift.
VOICE OVER: According to Fiona, cooperation between government
and industry will be key - and academia too has a role to play.
FIONA: At the moment, the circular economy has been largely industry led. Businesses are innovating,
particularly small businesses and entrepreneurs, and to a certain extent academia is still catching
up. There's a real emphasis on academia to provide the underpinning evidence base to
back up a lot of decisions that we’ll need to be making to implement a circular economy. And also,
collaboration between academia, industry and policy is going to be essential because this
shift we need to do at scale. We can't just look at independent parts of our economy or particular
materials or particular businesses, we need to all be joined up to be doing this together.
JACQUELINE: I've always been passionate about the environment and sustainability
and even making small interventions into the way we build, changing even one architects decision
about the way they build and the materials they choose can have a real carbon benefit. So if I
can influence even one person to think a little bit differently, that's what's important to me.
JACQUELINE: I love concrete… (laughs) you can’t use that though. A bit biased really! Um…