Building sandcastles, sustainability and strategies

If recycling won’t work, maybe it’s time to change strategies, writes Deborah Williams

Children's play area in Mushrif Central Park. Mona Al Marzooqi/ The National

When you build a sandcastle, there’s a delicate balance between sand and water: too dry and the sand slides away, too wet and the castle gloops into gritty ooze. Maintaining the castle’s structure requires a great deal of patting and shaping, pounding the sand into walls that seem deceptively firm, as if they might actually resist the encroaching tide.

Surprisingly, that same smoothing and pounding process seems to be the first step towards building a housing complex in the desert – a process called “sand compaction”. Using giant cranes, a huge flat disk – about as long across as two grown men laid end to end – is pulled high in the air and then dropped onto the sand, with an impact so profound that I can hear (and feel) it from hundreds of metres away. Over and over the disk gets pulled up and dropped, eventually covering the area with a series of overlapping circles, like some mysterious game board. Construction crews have been thumping the sand for several months now, and the process won’t be finished until the new year.

Pounding the walls of a sandcastle accomplishes the same thing as a sand compactor does, just on a significantly smaller scale: realigning the sand particles, squeezing out air and water so that the sand becomes more densely packed and capable of supporting a structure, or structures, as the case may be. An entire housing development has been planned for this patch of newly compacted desert, and one of the selling points for the development will be its “water features”: a series of ponds and fountains. The boom of the compactor reverberates with irony: water is being squeezed out of the sand so that eventually water can be pumped back in, albeit in a slightly different configuration. I wonder if the compactors have a mechanism to conserve the moisture being wrung from the earth, or if the featured water will come from some other source.

In another geological irony, this desert country that we call home is criss-crossed with water, a fact that confounds faraway friends. “It’s a desert,” they say. “How can there be so much water?” Of course, the water that surrounds us isn’t potable, which creates a significant sustainability problem: how do we find enough water to slake our thirst not only for drinking water but also for the beauty of lush parks and gardens? How many of us are ready to follow in the eco-path of Umm Al Emarat Park, which maintains its serene green spaces with a significant percentage of “grey water”?

The azure undrinkable water that surrounds Abu Dhabi leads to a problem that confronts every country, not just the Emirates: the ubiquitous plastic bottle, which may be the only thing to survive a global climate apocalypse. In the aftermath of the final floods, continents will disappear but the bottles will bob merrily along, little dinghies of human hubris. The plastic recycling programmes that Abu Dhabi has instituted can’t keep up with the plastic flotsam: the bottles pile up faster than anyone can clear them away.

If recycling won’t work, maybe it’s time to change strategies. Instead of recycle, repurpose: what if we found ways to use all those bottles for development? I’ve seen bottles wired together to create garden trellises, for instance, and a few countries have experimented with mixing plastic into their road-surfacing materials. Abu Dhabi’s summer heat would likely melt any plastic in a road’s surface, but surely some clever designers could figure out how to use all those bottles as liners for swimming pools and fountains – perhaps even as the base for the “water features” in housing developments. In fact, what if plastic bottles became the housing itself? An entire housing complex, wholly or even partially built from recycled materials? That’s an idea that practically markets itself. Plus, do you know what the bottles are filled with before they’re used as building materials?

Sand.

We’ve got plenty of that.

Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi