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MINERALS/SAND
Minerals mined in Florida are: limestone, dolomite, shell, heavy minerals, fuller’s earth, peat, clay, gravel, phosphate, and sand (Mining and Mitigation, 2025).
Sand, an essential material in making concrete, is the reason Florida has makes concrete (Florida Concrete & Products Association, n.d.). Unfortunately, the world is running out of construction sand. Desert sand, for example, is not usable in construction as its grains are too smooth to adhere to other materials. Sand created through water and rock interactions makes for rougher grains that hold together when mixed with other components, like when you make concrete (SONCO Safety Marketplace, 2024).
(SONCO Safety Marketplace, 2024).
CONCRETE/CEMENT
Concrete is one of the most used materials in construction (Autodesk, 2025). An inference made from that is that a ton of sand must be used to make all that concrete. Cement emissions, used to make concrete, can cause lung disease, stomach impairments, and colon impairments.
It can have silica which can lung cancer and silicosis which is currently incurable and likely leads to death, (Silica, Crystalline - Overview | Occupational Safety and Health Administration, 2024). There are also small amounts of Chromium which can cause allergic reactions, (ELCOSH: Cement Hazards and Controls Health Risks and Precautions in Using Portland Cement, 2025).
Graph created by Oliver Tache (Carbon Majors. n.d.)
Limestone, the most used ingredient in making cement and when it is heated to about 900 Fahrenheit, it turns into calcium oxide. The calcium oxide is added to more ingredients and then heated more in order to create cement clinker, (Curbing Concrete’s Carbon Emissions with Innovations in Cement Manufacturing | ASU News, 2023). Cement clinker is dangerous because it emits vast amounts of carbon dioxide. This is the intermediate stage of cement and when it is done with average kilns, it is estimated that per one ton of cement, one ton of carbon dioxide is released (Bandera, 2024). However more updated kilns are being made and they are finding ways to reduce this number of CO2.
IMPACTS ON THE ENVIRONMENT AND HUMAN HEALTH
THE EVERGLADES
The Everglades is one of the victims of the construction industry. It’s being drained, due to the fact that people want more space for agriculture or urban development. Less than half remains. (Everglades Restoration, 2024) This wetland is crucial to the survival of many species, yet wildlife has dwindled.
There are multiple efforts to save the Everglades, but time can only tell if they can save this wetland ("The Everglades," 2023).
("The Everglades," 2023).
The Everglades is being affected by water pollution. The re-plumbing of the Everglades, because of its draining, has resulted in a system where the health of critical coastal estuaries are at risk. At times, too much polluted water is pumped to both coasts from Lake Okeechobee, while too little freshwater flows south to the Everglades and Florida Bay and west coasts. Meanwhile, the lack of freshwater in Florida Bay, an iconic wildlife paradise at the tip of the state, causes salinity to spike and kills seagrass beds, an important habitat that shelters and feeds the bay’s abundant fish and shellfish. (Protecting The Everglades, n.d.)
The Everglades also has been divided by construction. This unbalanced flow of water prompts outbreaks of toxic green algae that dirty Florida’s beaches and harm the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries on the east. Canals, levees, roads, and other facilities have resulted in lost connections between the central Everglades and adjacent transitional wetlands. This separation and isolation can damage the Everglades' wildlife communities and the sustainability of the ecosystem. Construction of canals and levees and impoundment of the Water Conservation Areas (WCAs) have caused over-drainage in some places and too much flooding in other areas. (Everglades, n.d.)
HUMAN HEALTH
A total of 35 studies were included in a article we looked at. The results showed a number of conditioning factors for stress, anxiety, and fear among construction workers such as age, inappropriate safety equipment, safety culture, high workload and long working hours, physical pain, low social support from direct supervisor or co-workers, lack of organizational justice and lack of reward, financial situation, maladaptive coping strategies, and characteristics of the pandemic. (Gómez-Salgado et al., n.d., p. 1). In 2022, nearly 1 in 5 workplace deaths occurred in the construction industry (A Look, 2024).
DEFORESTATION
Deforestation occurs from the need for wood in construction. Although many say timber is a good material, most of its stored carbon is lost during production. New research shows using wood in construction is likely to increase emissions for multiple decades, even relative to using concrete and steel. "True" mass timber would need additional harvesting of the world's forests. Also, supplying large quantities of timber for construction would increase wood harvesting. Relying on plantation forests for mass timber might yield climate benefits, but not when factoring in the growing needs for wood (Searchinger et al. , 2023). Deforestation has a large effect on the environment, such as hurting wildlife from habitat loss, as said earlier.
The growth of our concrete jungles contributes to the decline of our natural ones. This is an immense issue, as the loss of important habitats, carbon sinks, and hotspots for biodiversity, is a huge problem. The loss of forests also could affect weather patterns, due to the trees' role in the water cycle. Our "concrete jungles" not only decreases forests, but it increases emissions, as said earlier (Boyle, 2024).
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