cisco said...
Taking beach sand may or may not be legal. It is certainly not ethical. If everybody did it how long would the beach last.
It is cheap enough to buy at your local landscape supplies depot or concrete supplies yard.
For $20 or $30 they can dump a half yard bucket in your trailer in 2 minutes flat.
You are not seriously considering shovelling that amount of sand UP into your trailer and then shovelling it out again into your kids sand pit. Sheesh.
It had to come. And yes, I am very much considering doing exactly that.
Lets assume that 80% of WA's 21,000km coastline is sand - that's 16,800km to supply sand for domestic sandpits. That's roughly 10m of sandy beach per Western Australian resident. I suggest you go to a landscape supply shop, buy a trailer of sand and head to your local beach and spread it over the full width of a 10m long section and then come back and tell us what impact it had. I'm guessing bugger all.
Besides, that's ignoring the fact that, despite the unprecedented surge in the use of sandpits that's bound to occur when people discover that sand can be got from the beach, it is highly unlikely that the use of sandpits is ever going to reach 1 sandpit per WA resident (me and my wife certainly don't plan on getting one, and my 2 kids will be sharing theirs). I would guess that less than 1% of the population (much, much less) is in the process of building a sandpit at any one time.
Besides, the landscape supply shop don't magically create their sand - the dig it out of somewhere using big, diesel powered equipment and then process it in what I can only guess is an energy and water intensive process. I think the environmental impact of me filling my trailer by hand at a beach is probably going to be less than paying a landscape supplier for it. And I need the exercise anyway,
I didn't ask the question in the search for some mis-guided moral judgement, just wanted to know how stealthy I had to be in my approach and where the best spot to do it was. Thanks for your answer anyway.
