Environmental challenges
The supply of sand and aggregates is becoming a major challenge in the face of dwindling resources and new types of available aggregates.
Every year, 15 to 20 billion tonnes of sand are used by the construction industry*. While this figure is impressive, it becomes even more so when we compare it to the sands that can be exploited by this industry.
Indeed, the majority of the so-called “complex” aggregates (deserts, local quarries, seabeds, etc.) available on our planet are [in retrospect] not exploitable for the manufacture of concrete, leading to various problems – high presence of clays, excess of fines, too slick, poor bonding with cements – thus restricting the quantity available of this precious resource.
* Source: Isabelle Cojan and Nor-Edine Abriak,
https://imtech.imt.fr/2019/03/27/sable-ressource-rare-remplacer/
