We’ve previously talked about the heavy carbon footprint of the world’s most used construction material, concrete. You might remember that concrete is a composite material made of fine and coarse aggregate bound together by a liquid binder that hardens or cures over time. That aggregate, more often than not, is sand. Sand is the world’s most mined material with an estimated 50 billion tons extracted from lakes, riverbeds, coastlines, and deltas each year, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
