The next time you visit one of the sparkling white beaches of South Florida, you might want to take a few precautions when you leave. Make sure you empty the sand from your shoes and shake it out of your swimsuit and towel, and don’t let the children carry off a bucket of sand — because several counties are running out of the stuff.
Miami Beach. Credit: Wikipedia.Sandy beaches are part of the life’s blood of Miami-Dade and several nearby counties — in more ways than one. They attract tourists and new residents, and they provide protection against the fury of tropical storms.
But storms and tides carry sand away from the beaches. Sand also moves into bays through ship channels. And rising sea level is claiming even more of the beaches.
For decades, Florida’s been rebuilding its beaches by dredging sand from offshore — at a cost of millions of dollars per year. And some regions of the Florida coast still have large offshore supplies. But around Miami and Palm Beach, those supplies are about gone. Coral reefs and rapidly deepening waters limit what can be dredged from the ocean floor.
Some locations are trucking in sand from mines in central Florida — hundreds of thousands of tons of it. But that’s more expensive than offshore dredging, and it requires huge fleets of trucks to roll through city streets. One region is experimenting with using ground-up glass bottles. Since those bottles were made from sand to begin with, it’s a beach recycling project — helping to prevent Florida’s famous beaches from disappearing.
