River sand is very expensive, why not dig the sand from the Yellow River as building materials? Can it also dredge the Yellow River?

Yellow sand for construction (sand, generally called yellow sand in the north. Of course, sand is not all yellow, there are white sand and black sand, but yellow sand accounts for the vast majority) suddenly became in short supply, and the price rose sharply. It has doubled year after year, and it has reached the level of selling by the catty, which was something that would never have been thought of before. The author's hometown is in northern Jiangsu, which is the hometown of ginkgo and garlic, and is also rich in yellow sand. Just find a piece of land in the field, dig down to a depth of one meter, there is sand, there is yellow sand and white sand, but most of them are yellow sand. It is in the yard, dig one or two meters down, that is yellow sand.

At the beginning of the 1980s, just a few years after the land was divided into households, the first round of major renovations gradually began in the countryside. The demolition of adobe houses, the renovation of new tile-roofed houses, and the wind of renovating new houses sprung up like bamboo shoots after rain, and became a trend in rural areas. Trends and trends are also a fad of social development. In just over a decade, the thatched cottages have almost disappeared, replaced by brand-new red brick houses. The farmer’s enthusiasm has been aroused by the household contracting of production, and the grain output has increased in steps, and the yield per mu has reached a new high. In addition, the market has been liberalized, allowing farmers to buy and sell freely, and handicrafts, traders, and individual industrial and commercial households have blossomed everywhere, and farmers’ income has increased rapidly. , the rural life has undergone earth-shaking changes, the days are changing with each passing day, all kinds of household appliances have entered thousands of households, and motorcycles are no longer rare. With the popularization of agricultural machinery, harvesters have also begun to show their heads. The era of electric lights and telephones, upstairs and downstairs, no cattle for arable land, and no oil for lighting lamps has just come. The basic necessities of life in rural areas have undergone tremendous changes.

Rural brick houses in the 1980s

Among them, the biggest change is living , that is, houses. Since ancient times, people regard food as their heaven and dwelling as their land. It can be said that in addition to eating to maintain life , the next thing is to live . There is a house to have a home, and a house to have a sense of belonging. For example, today's blind date, the first condition is the house. The habit of China for thousands of years is also a custom handed down from the ancestors. Housing is the most important factor. If you have money, you can improve your living conditions. If you are short of money, you have to knock down old houses and build new ones. Therefore, in the 1980s and 1990s, construction sites were everywhere in the countryside, and construction was being carried out everywhere. This also indirectly promotes the development of the rural construction industry, and also makes building materials usher in a broad market prospect. Of course, at that time, the cost of building three large tile-roofed houses was only 3,000 yuan, including materials and construction costs. This storm of tile-roofed houses continued until the beginning of the new century. The next wave was to tear down tile-roofed houses and build new buildings, which sprung up like mushrooms. The tile-roofed houses were also outdated and dilapidated. The most important thing is that farmers have more money. , Naturally, it is necessary to replace the shotgun with the cannon.

As a result, the second wave of housing construction intensified, and two-, three-, and four-story buildings sprang up. The tile-roofed houses of the past have disappeared, replaced by high-rise buildings, like a city.

Whether it is building tile houses or buildings, building materials are indispensable - steel bars, cement, stones and sand, among which sand is an essential element. In the 1980s, tile-roofed houses were built without steel bars and stones. The amount of cement (called cement in our case) was not large, and the most important ones were stones and sand. Our backer, there are rocks on the mountain, almost no money. During the slack season in winter, one person can go up the mountain with a shovel and a steel drill, and he can mine three or four square meters (cubic meters) of stones in a day (we call it "rocking"), and some people specialize in selling stones. The car (tractor) only sells for 5 yuan. A large amount of stone was used because at that time, tile-roofed houses were built with it to lay the foundation, and the depth of excavation was 1 to 2 meters, all of which were leveled with stones. Red bricks are more expensive, so this can save bricks and save costs.

And sand is the same as stone, and it costs almost no money. One person takes a shovel, finds a piece of land in the wilderness, and digs down. If you are lucky, you can dig out 10 square meters of sand in one day, and at the worst, you can dig out three to five square meters. Later, some people also used machinery to collect sand. We call it "drinking sand", which means drinking sand with a "sand drinking machine". If there is no labor force in the family, it is not a problem, and it is very cheap to buy, a car (tractor) is only 5 yuan, and you can also pay on credit, and it will not be too late to pay after autumn. For the folks in the village, it’s no big deal if they don’t give them. Anyway, stones and sand are worthless.

But all of this happened 30 to 40 years ago. It is basically delusional and impossible to think about sand mining now. The natural sand in the Yihe River is almost exhausted after hundreds of years of collection. By the way, the sand used to build the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge is Yihe sand. With the gradual improvement of environmental protection and farmland protection systems and the increase of punishment, quarrying and sand mining have become a thing of the past. And China is an infrastructure madman. Even in the countryside, there are endless constructions. There are construction sites everywhere, houses are being built everywhere, commercial houses, commercial streets, and self-housing in rural areas. These are inseparable from sand. , State control, on the one hand, the demand has increased greatly, which has led to the yellow sand, which was the most valuable in the past, and now it has become a scarce material, and the price has skyrocketed. It has changed from selling by car at the beginning to selling by ton and catty. , The city also sells by bag, a bag is about 50 catties, the price is about 10-15 yuan, about 2 to 30 cents per catty. For sand, this is already a sky-high price.

Sand desert has become an indisputable fact! And if the current trend continues, construction sand may face depletion. At present, more than 50 billion tons of sand are extracted every year in the world, and the extraction rate far exceeds the rate of its natural recovery. In 2002, the Indonesian government introduced measures to ban the export of sand. In 2017, Cambodia introduced a policy to permanently ban the export of sand.

The illegal sand mining incident in Luoma Lake, Jiangsu Province in China in the past two years even alarmed the State Council. CCTV also conducted unannounced visits, and mainstream official media also conducted follow-up reports. At present, this illegal sand mining has been curbed.

The sand is becoming more and more tense, and the price is increasing year by year. The yellow sand that no one cares about in the past has become "soft gold". The city uses sand in small batches, and even sells it with scales. This is indeed puzzling. Even elementary school students know that deserts account for 30% of the earth. The sand in the desert is everywhere and can be seen everywhere. It can be said that it is inexhaustible. Why not take sand from the desert?

Of course, it is reasonable, correct and timely for the state to curb random digging and harvesting. After all, private digging and harvesting will only damage the environment, endanger the ecology, destroy farmland, endanger water conservancy facilities, destroy forests, and endanger ecological balance. Furthermore, the flow of unqualified sand into the market will also lead to unqualified quality of construction projects, which poses a great potential safety hazard and endangers the safety of buildings and construction projects.

Then, here comes a question, which is also a question that puzzles many people, that is: China is a country with a large desert. Why is there so much sand in the desert not transported out for use? Also, the Yellow River is flooded with silt, and billions of tons of silt are imported into the downstream every year, so why not dig it out and use it?