At a time when humans do not stop building and erecting large buildings, there is a problem that should concern us more and more: there is a lack of sand to make concrete. But here anyone can laugh, since we have great deserts on the planet where there is a huge amount of sand that we could use without any problem. But it’s not that easy.
The problem. Today, traditional concrete is quite exquisite, since river sand is necessary to achieve a good result. And it has to be that way, because the desert sand is too round and fine to be able to “stick” well. But the truth is that we were running out of this sand so necessary to continue building.
We have a solution. The University of Tokyo and the University of Norway they have hit the key to turn the tables, and the solution is not only to use the desert sand that a priori we have left over, but rather it is to mix it with plant waste to create a material that has received the name Botanical Sandcrete.
The recipe. The recently published study details a process that deviates from traditional cement setting, using a hot-pressing technique instead. And for this you only need two ingredients:
- Fine desert sand which, as we have said before, is useless for conventional concrete due to its morphology.
- Wood particles and plant additives that act as organic “glue.”
All this, together with a temperature of 180 ºC and high pressure, means that the wood components help create a solid matrix that traps the grains of sand and transforms them into a handful of powder in a block that has great mechanical properties.
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What is it for? Here we should not be happy to find an alternative to a problem that we already had on our heads, since we are not going to be able to build skyscrapers with these tomorrow. Here the researchers point out that the material, as it is right now, is a non-structural alternative.
In this way, its use is mainly focused on pavements, urban tiles and enclosure blocks or outdoor furniture. Things that are ultimately not pillars for large buildings, but do allow us to save river sand.
Your advantage. Having an alternative, although it cannot be used in everything, allows us to drastically reduce dependence on quarries and the transportation of river sand. An action that results in the destruction of river ecosystems around the world by removing a fundamental element.
In addition to all this, using wood waste and plant additives means that it has a much smaller potential carbon footprint than concrete based on classic cement.
Its importance. To date, most attempts to use desert sand involved expensive chemical treatments or mixing them in very low percentages with conventional sand. But the focus of these researchers involves the use of biomass, making us a perfect example of a circular economy.
And if we see the full context of the situation, we are taking advantage of a resource that is very abundant but a priori useless like desert sand, along with a byproduct of the logging industry. But logically it still remains to be seen how it behaves over time and how well it endures adverse conditions. Although a priori we are facing great news.
Images | Keith Hardy rawpixel.com
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was originally published in
Xataka
by
José A. Lizana
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