
By Lauren Burns
AFTER water, sand is the second most used natural resource on earth. We use even more sand than oil. Growing cities such as Melbourne create demand for the sand used in concrete. It takes about 200 tonnes of sand to build an average family house, and a kilometre of a highway requires about 25,000 tonnes.
Like many of Earth’s resources, we’re using more sand than is being naturally replenished by natural life systems. Globally, we’re using 50 billion tonnes of sand every year, twice the amount of sand produced by every river in the world.
AFTER water, sand is the second most used natural resource on earth. We use even more sand than oil. Growing cities such as Melbourne create demand for the sand used in concrete. It takes about 200 tonnes of sand to build an average family house, and a kilometre of a highway requires about 25,000 tonnes.
Like many of Earth’s resources, we’re using more sand than is being naturally replenished by natural life systems. Globally, we’re using 50 billion tonnes of sand every year, twice the amount of sand produced by every river in the world.
Locally, the magnificent Grantville Grasstree Forest and adjacent forest corridor are threatened by sand mining under the Victorian Government’s Strategic Resources Areas pilot project to secure sand for Melbourne’s urban expansion. The proposed planning provisions under SERA would take away the right of communities, farmers and local government to object to sand mining.
The government claims that South Gippsland’s proximity to Melbourne makes sand mining here “sustainable” because it reduces trucking distances. This claim disregards the fragile ecology of this important biolink of remnant coastal forest, which is home to endangered flora and fauna such as the southern brown bandicoot.
As Save the Holden Bushlands spokesman Tim O’Brien puts it, “Trading regional extinctions of vulnerable species for the car parks and bridges of Melbourne is a failure of Government, a failure of environmental policy, and fails the future.”
What to do?
In 2015 the European Union created an action plan for a circular economy with measures covering the whole life cycle from production and consumption to waste management and the market for secondary raw materials.
Enter Net-Positive Waste. The idea is pretty simple. Instead of burying waste in landfill, we take the raw materials of the waste and upcycle them into new products. This reduces landfill and consumption of virgin resources in the manufacture of new products, uses less energy and creates fewer greenhouse gas emissions. The collection, reprocessing and remanufacturing of waste resources creates four times as many jobs as sending it to landfill.
But to make it work someone has to process the waste and someone else has to buy these recycled products. An Australian company called Closed Loop has been founded as a matchmaker to pair up waste streams with companies that need fr those resources. One of their projects is using recycled glass as a substitute for the sand used in bitumen used to surface roads.
“As soon as you put a value on waste, it stops being waste and starts being a resource,” says Closed Loop founder Rob Pascoe.
In late 2018, Sustainability Victoria, the University of Melbourne, construction company Hanson and VicRoads collaborated on a pilot program using waste glass recycled from kerbside collections not suitable for recycling back into glass packaging as an ingredient in concrete. Eighteen months later, Hanson recently completed their first pour using recycled glass in concrete at a trial site at the level crossing removal project at Reservoir Station.
The aim is to provide a viable alternative to the sand used in concrete. The results will inform VicRoads, enabling a review of current concrete standards.
Professor Tuan Ngo, Director of the Advanced Protective Technologies for Engineering Structures Group at the University of Melbourne says the research could lead to widespread use of glass in concrete applications in Victoria and across the country.
Another alternative to traditional concrete is hempcrete, made from lime, hemp and water. Lime is weak under tension, so the fibres from hemp cellulose are used to make a strong building material that is about one seventh the weight of concrete. Structures built by the Romans and Japanese from hempcrete centuries ago are still standing.
Hempcrete Australia Pty Ltd is an Australian company that distributes and sells the hemp binder and provides building services for designers and builders. They state that hemp is a crop that has several farming and environmental benefits. It takes only 14 weeks to mature and doesn’t need herbicides because it grows too quickly for any weed to compete. It’s unpalatable to insects, so doesn’t need pesticides, can grow in a wide variety of climatic and soil conditions and helps rejuvenate poor soils.
An added benefit: each tonne of lime-based hempcrete is estimated to absorb and sequester 249 kg of CO2 over a 100 year lifecycle. Hempcrete is also fully recyclable. A demolished building can be easily broken down and used in a new build.
Back to Gippsland’s forests.
If you’ve never been there do yourself a favour and visit Tarra Bulga National Park. At 1522 hectares, it’s a relatively small national park but contains a magical fragment of intact temperate rainforest of mountain ash, tree fern gullies and Gondwanan myrtle beech that once covered the Strzelecki ranges.
Tarra Bulga was saved by a determined local community which protected it from being cleared for farmland.
Taking inspiration from Tarra Bulga, I like to imagine that rather than the sterile pit of a sand quarry, we could turn the Holden Bushlands and surrounding forest corridor into a magnificent national park that will be admired and help inspire generations in perpetuity.
Here we go again!
Oct 30 2020 - Waterline residents fought off the sand miners in the 1990s. They’re back with a vengeance, writes Meryl Brown Tobin.
The government claims that South Gippsland’s proximity to Melbourne makes sand mining here “sustainable” because it reduces trucking distances. This claim disregards the fragile ecology of this important biolink of remnant coastal forest, which is home to endangered flora and fauna such as the southern brown bandicoot.
As Save the Holden Bushlands spokesman Tim O’Brien puts it, “Trading regional extinctions of vulnerable species for the car parks and bridges of Melbourne is a failure of Government, a failure of environmental policy, and fails the future.”
What to do?
In 2015 the European Union created an action plan for a circular economy with measures covering the whole life cycle from production and consumption to waste management and the market for secondary raw materials.
Enter Net-Positive Waste. The idea is pretty simple. Instead of burying waste in landfill, we take the raw materials of the waste and upcycle them into new products. This reduces landfill and consumption of virgin resources in the manufacture of new products, uses less energy and creates fewer greenhouse gas emissions. The collection, reprocessing and remanufacturing of waste resources creates four times as many jobs as sending it to landfill.
But to make it work someone has to process the waste and someone else has to buy these recycled products. An Australian company called Closed Loop has been founded as a matchmaker to pair up waste streams with companies that need fr those resources. One of their projects is using recycled glass as a substitute for the sand used in bitumen used to surface roads.
“As soon as you put a value on waste, it stops being waste and starts being a resource,” says Closed Loop founder Rob Pascoe.
In late 2018, Sustainability Victoria, the University of Melbourne, construction company Hanson and VicRoads collaborated on a pilot program using waste glass recycled from kerbside collections not suitable for recycling back into glass packaging as an ingredient in concrete. Eighteen months later, Hanson recently completed their first pour using recycled glass in concrete at a trial site at the level crossing removal project at Reservoir Station.
The aim is to provide a viable alternative to the sand used in concrete. The results will inform VicRoads, enabling a review of current concrete standards.
Professor Tuan Ngo, Director of the Advanced Protective Technologies for Engineering Structures Group at the University of Melbourne says the research could lead to widespread use of glass in concrete applications in Victoria and across the country.
Another alternative to traditional concrete is hempcrete, made from lime, hemp and water. Lime is weak under tension, so the fibres from hemp cellulose are used to make a strong building material that is about one seventh the weight of concrete. Structures built by the Romans and Japanese from hempcrete centuries ago are still standing.
Hempcrete Australia Pty Ltd is an Australian company that distributes and sells the hemp binder and provides building services for designers and builders. They state that hemp is a crop that has several farming and environmental benefits. It takes only 14 weeks to mature and doesn’t need herbicides because it grows too quickly for any weed to compete. It’s unpalatable to insects, so doesn’t need pesticides, can grow in a wide variety of climatic and soil conditions and helps rejuvenate poor soils.
An added benefit: each tonne of lime-based hempcrete is estimated to absorb and sequester 249 kg of CO2 over a 100 year lifecycle. Hempcrete is also fully recyclable. A demolished building can be easily broken down and used in a new build.
Back to Gippsland’s forests.
If you’ve never been there do yourself a favour and visit Tarra Bulga National Park. At 1522 hectares, it’s a relatively small national park but contains a magical fragment of intact temperate rainforest of mountain ash, tree fern gullies and Gondwanan myrtle beech that once covered the Strzelecki ranges.
Tarra Bulga was saved by a determined local community which protected it from being cleared for farmland.
Taking inspiration from Tarra Bulga, I like to imagine that rather than the sterile pit of a sand quarry, we could turn the Holden Bushlands and surrounding forest corridor into a magnificent national park that will be admired and help inspire generations in perpetuity.
Here we go again!
Oct 30 2020 - Waterline residents fought off the sand miners in the 1990s. They’re back with a vengeance, writes Meryl Brown Tobin.