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Handprints and signatures left behind…
r. dafremen

For some reason the words of the Ex-Cemex executive that I’d met on the bus stuck with me. “No, that’s a common misconception. Cement doesn’t dry”, he informed me, “it hydrates.”

It takes a second or two to wrap your head around a concept like that. In most of our experiences, when something goes from a wet semi-liquid to a dry solid, it’s because the water content has evaporated. This isn’t so with cement apparently. Cement, it seems, absorbs the water molecule to form a completely new compound that is dry, and hard. Wow..you learn something new every day.

It wasn’t until almost two weeks later that I was thinking about the natural process of water recycling. Water that doesn’t return to the large sun-heated surface of the oceans through gravity, does so through an evaporative process. Either way, it all returns to the sea. Then I remembered what the man had told me. “..it doesn’t dry. It hydrates.”

Which means that water is a part of the dried cement. It doesn’t go back into the atmosphere, it didn’t return through the ground. It’s lost. It’s gone. It’s part of the concrete/cement structures that surround us every day. That’s wild..but it’s also..sad. We’re surrounded by water that’s lost forever..and we see the reminders of it all around, more obviously displayed for us than trash in our streams. Heck, proudly displayed..

If someone destroys water, or pollutes it so that we can’t use it..aren’t we usually upset about that? A gum wrapper kills a few fish..a stretch of highway takes tons of water away from the Earth..forever as far as we know. I’m not sure what that means. Do we care about the loss of our water resources? Or does it all depend upon whether or not the water is sacrificed to mighty skyscrapers and traffic accommodating stretches of road instead of the industries that make beer, cleaning supplies and cosmetics?

Those waters with things added to them…can possibly be cleaned up. But water lost to cement absorption? Lost for good.

It certainly seemed like something worth thinking about. What do we believe in? (While we’re talking about our ecological concerns..) What are we fighting for and what are our reasons for doing so? Perhaps we should really begin discussing the foundations of the ecological ideology rather than the usual public rhetoric about endangered this and global warming that. What are we trying to accomplish as a whole..and what are the signs that we are succeeding? Do any of us know?

daf

UPDATE:
We did a little research and came up with some data that is apparently common knowledge. Perhaps it’ll help us decide whether or not cement use really is a problem.

1. Making cement permanently DESTROYS the fresh water that is used.

2. Cement is only made with fresh water because salt water doesn’t react chemically the same way and would provide a substance unsuitable for use in construction.

3. 3.5 trillion gallons of fresh water are lost to cement production worldwide EVERY year. That figure is rising.

4. The freshwater reserves available to all living things on the planet constitutes less than half of 1% (.4%) of all water on the planet.

5. The entire human race needs a pool of between 17 Quadrillion and 50 Quadrillion gallons available to it each year for survival. That doesn’t include industrial uses. It also doesn’t include the water required to keep the OTHER living things on the planet alive.

6. Desalination (removing salt from salt water) isn’t very cost effective and won’t be a viable solution until we’ve driven the price of fresh water up by destroying it. (SOLUTION!?) Desalination creates the same toxic byproducts which were responsible for the naming of the Dead Sea(brine.)

Still gathering more data. Talk to you later.

daf

The new Daffy Times is out. This month we talk about the surreal American political scene.
You’ll find that here: Daffy Times - Volume 3