[gr1zzlybe4r]

I was wondering about this after a recent beach trip I took. I won't name where I was, but I noticed a considerable improvement in sand quality on the beaches in front of the nice hotels. It was a quality difference that went beyond normal beach cleanup. Perhaps the sand was sourced locally, and beach improvement surely pales in volume to construction use of sand, but still it was the first time I'd wondered about sand mining/theft.

[throwup238]

Regions that depend on tourism spend a lot of money on their beach sand. Even San Diego, CA where tourism is probably not even top 10 of industries by revenue, they replenish the sand that gets eroded every few decades. The process just started on the northern beaches: https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/long-awaited-sand-rep...

They ship it in by sea on huge barges that are quite something to watch.

[everybodyknows]

> They ship it in by sea on huge barges that are quite something to watch.

Not shipped in, pumped in: The source is less than a mile offshore, overlying a reef that supported lots of marine life, much of which is now being picked over by seagulls.

The hope is that friction and inertia will prevail for a few years against wave action and gravity. But, the project has its nose in the trough provided by the national and state taxpayers, and local politicians go along.

> tourism spend a lot of money on their beach sand

Not a factor in Solana Beach, the Chamber of Commerce is utterly supine on public policy issues. Rather, it's the owners of houses on the bluff top, where prices start in the high 7 digits, who drive beach policy: they all have, or want to construct, concrete armored seawalls. Like these:

https://www.google.com/maps/@32.9963108,-117.276439,3a,75y,8...

With an effectively unlimited legal budget to invent ways around the law and litigate against the Coastal Commission, and willingness to mob City Council meetings, incumbents keep their mouths shut. Local resistance has collapsed down to a few die-hards at environmentalist groups, e.g. https://sandiego.surfrider.org, fighting what amounts to a retreating action.

[bboygravity]

Error error, cannot compute (I'm Dutch).

[pests]

What are the negatives to the concrete seawalls?

[latchkey]

Due to a recent storm in San Diego, large swaths of Mission/Pacific Beach houses and the boardwalk were left with tons of sand all over them.

The city scoops up the sand off the boardwalk and loads it into trucks which take it a few miles away to Fiesta Island.

Why? Apparently it is contaminated badly enough by whatever is on the boardwalk, that they don't want to just push it back onto the beach (and back into the water).

[bombcar]

It's $14 billion a year for San Diego County, that's not chicken feed.

[bmelton]

Sargassum Seaweed is usually what washes up to shores and makes beaches ugly. Resorts in the Mexico and Caribbean regions get a lot of it ashore, but there are now industries that use the seaweed as a building material.

Sargablocks[1] are one of the companies that are turning sargassum into cheap building materials

[1] - https://fortomorrow.org/explore-solutions/sargablock

[demondemidi]

Playa del Carmen replenishes its beaches every few years. If you go at the wrong time, the beaches are like 7 meters wide, come back six months later and they are 30 meters wide.