Oh, wow! Did this hit a long-standing sore spot! I have been in construction for over 60 years. I hate to have to tell you, but it is not just sand that is in failing supply. It is aggregate as a whole. Certain use cases have required shipping of sand across oceans (really). Much of the issue, IMHO is the engineers involved in construction. Story from when I began working with FEMA on disasters. I was asked to accompany an inspector to a site visit since I was a hydrologist. My background included excavation, construction, geotechnical soils work and graduate environmental hydrogeology. When I got to the site, we were reviewing a lock on the Erie Canal located in the Mohawk River. A small feeder stream, the Schoharie Creek, had created a sand bar immediately below where it entered the much larger Mohawk River. The bar, after the latest flood, had expanded to where it was causing problems with the lock gates on the upstream side. Since, at that time, the NY Thruway Authority owned the Canal Corp, there were at least 40 to 50 engineers and official wandering around discussing how much money the State needed to remove the sand bar. The general consensus came to a federal share (@75%) of about $750,000.00. I looked at the situation and asked a simple question. Since the area was moderately mature, construction-wise, aggregate and sand was hard to come by. Would not a gravel company jump at the opportunity to mine the sand bar since removal was needed anyway? Dead silence. A couple of weeks later, I saw the inspector and asking how his project was coming. His response? "No project." They had asked a gravel company if they would like to mine the sand bar for free and had gotten an enthusiastic "Yes!" No federal or state funding was needed to fix that problem.
Far too often, I have seen engineers build bypass channels for flood water only to create massive sand bars in rivers that then begin to force the river to eat out the opposite bank. I know of one, financed and managed by the National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) that continues to create that damage to a living stream. Every levee and dam placed in a stream tends to create similar problems. One reason the Corps of Engineers (USACE) has to continually dredge the Mississippi River is that their levees create sedimentation traps that drop washed gravel and clays in areas that then reduce the levees' carrying capacity. The Rio Grande River silts up regularly due to controlled release of muddy water from upstream dams (only one of dozens of examples I am aware of). Because there is insufficient flooding to clean the channel, vegetation grows on sediments, forcing future flood water to run, often miles out of the channel. Of course, when high velocity water hits normal ground, it digs new channels, moving the sediment downstream to create more problems.
I have not even begun to describe the environmentally damaging and unsustainable use of placing sand on beaches. That job nets the USACE billions annually.
Normal farming eats soil away. It either blows away or runs off in heavy rains. Many areas of the midwest that had several yards of topsoil are down to precious feet. All that material is aggregate that flows down our rivers and into the sea. While on its journey, it creates one issue after another. Practices such a permiculture are one of the best defenses, but are still too small to stem the bleeding of our aggregates. And then someone wants a particular concrete and ships aggregate from some poor area to a richer one. Yes, the local community is getting work, but at what price? That aggregate is finite. Of course some governments allow massive damage. To build the Three Rivers Gorge in China in an attempt to control flooding on the Yangtze (Yellow) River, they placed explosives and dropped entire gorge walls into the river and built on top of the rubble. Of course they also relocated over 3 million people, but to the ruling Party, that was a small price to pay. Of course, massive damage was absorbed by the mighty river, but who cares?
The issue with sand and grinding glass is often silicosis, a disease created when someone breathes in silica dust or ground mica or any other form of micro-silica. It cuts the lung tissue and makes breathing hard, if not impossible. Control such dust with sprays of water, use ball mills to grind up sandstone or shale. Sandstone is the best source of bedrock to turn into sand. It is composed of sand, thus the name. Shale is not as useful due to the fact that shale is composed of very fine sand, silt and clay.
Back in the 50's, cinders from the railroad and coal furnaces was used to make cinder blocks. It has been found that old cinder block, after 40 to 50 years (far less if exposed to flood waters) will disintegrate and fail as a structural material, who knew? It was a cheap use for what was considered a waste product and allowed homes to be constructed for the poor or monetarily disadvantaged. Those homes are now being used by minorities, senior citizens and the disability community - often in flood plains. Throwaway people in throwaway homes. But I digress. Sometimes I know too much and it has to come out.