The Weird Logistics of Succulents, Sand, and Magnets

In this episode of Everything is Logistics, we discuss the fascinating and often unexpected challenges in shipping succulents, sand, and magnets. We're talking plant smuggling, sand stealing, and magnet mayhem - yeah, you read that right. Learn how millennials are driving a black market for succulents, how beach sand is vanishing for concrete, and why your package of magnets might end up stuck to the side of a UPS truck.

LINKS:

• Succulent Smuggling and The Logistics Behind It
• Logistics of Sand and Why It Gets Stolen
• The Logistics of Magnets

WATCH THE FULL EPISODE HERE

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Chapters

• 0:05 Introduction to Weird Logistics Topics
• 1:30 Succulent Smuggling Explained
• 4:24 The Mystery of Missing Sand
• 7:26 Land Investment for Future Sand
• 10:27 The Science Behind Magnets
• 11:28 Manufacturing Process of Magnets
• 12:00 Challenges in Shipping Magnets

Transcript

Blythe Brumleve: 0:05

Welcome into another episode of Everything is Logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. We are proudly presented by SPI Logistics, and I am your host, Blythe Brumleve, and in this episode, we're going to be talking about the weird logistics around succulents, sand and magnets, which I know it sounds like a strange combination of commodities, but each of them has their own unique shipping journey around them, along with some crime elements, particularly surrounding succulents and sand. After that, we're going to be talking about shipping magnets, which can be a little bit more challenging than you think, considering that these packages can get stuck to the sides of delivery trucks. So let's kick things off with the logistics of succulents and how rare species are being smuggled all across the world. Have you ever heard of the phrase succulent smuggling? Let me break it down for you. Now, over the last handful of years, the plant market has exploded, especially as millennials are getting a little bit older and delaying having kids. And because they're delaying having kids, they're getting more pets and they're buying more plants now, because of this sort of explosion in demand, it really happened during covid When a lot of people were looking for some kind of thing to take care of. We as humans need, you know, some kind of a biological need to take care of something, and that's where the plant market really exploded, leading to succulent smuggling. Now, because of the insane demand of all of these different growers, they are finding it very difficult to keep in stock the trendy plans that you see on social media. And so what happens and what was documented in this documentary plant heist about a year ago is this growing issue that's happening over on the West Coast, specifically in California. Now this plant here is called the dudleya, and obviously it's really pretty but it's also really in high demand, especially in East Asian countries. And so what's happening is that the demand is so high that travelers are coming over. They're coming to the state of California. They're renting a car, and they are driving down the state in order to find this plant that grows on the mountainsides. And they're filling up backpacks, and then they are taking those plants, and they are shipping them back over to several different countries over in East Asia, Croatia, some other countries included. But because of the nature of succulents, they don't need a lot of sunlight, they don't need a lot of water. They make it super ideal for plant smuggling, and that's what's happening with a lot of these different deadlia plants. Here's an image from the documentary that shows, you know, somebody actually getting caught by one of the 400 Game Wardens that are around the state of California, but there's only 400 and that's a lot of area to comb through, so the game wardens really rely on tips coming from the public in order to find these plant smugglers. Because it's rising in value, some of these plant markets have exploded into multi-million dollar markets just one of these plants. Now you're seeing several plants in this photo, but just one of these can go for as much as $700 now, because of the release of this documentary, the deadliest specific smuggling has actually gone downhill, but the UN says that this is a global issue, and anywhere from you know, 300 to 500 plants can be found online for sale right now, on Amazon, eBay and all of these different websites. So it's really, really important to if you're going to be buying plants online, to first find out if it fits within the biodiversity of the of the area of the country where you're actually going to be growing this plant and caring for it. I thought this was a really fascinating look into the overall, just sort of plant supply chain. So if you want to see more from this, go, just go to YouTube and search for plant heist. All right, if that story wasn't fascinating enough, let's talk about the logistics of sand, which you might be thinking, Who cares, but a particular kind of sand is essential in creating concrete, and you can't get the sand from anywhere. The sand that makes up concrete is a specific kind of beach sand. You can't just go to Death Valley or the Sahara Desert to get sand. In order to make concrete, it has to be a particularly kind of beach sand, and it's being smuggled to the highest buyers on trucks and barges in the middle of the night. So let's take a listen.

Unknown: 4:28

Entire truckloads of sand went missing and they never returned. Jamaica's mines commissioner at the time suspected that government officials were involved. 15 years later, the mystery is still unsolved, but there are locals that are reporting truckloads that are still running in the night. I'm just gonna fucking camp out with one of those locals, like, just try to follow these trucks. Hello. Have you heard of Coral Springs beach? You have to be honest with you. I don't trust anyone. Sorry. What? People? Dominant people, we don't deal with them. Brumleves hung up anyways, here's what we know, the stolen beach wasn't a tourist spot. These locals say that sand theft happens frequently, just not this much of it. It's not just Jamaica. Around the world, sand is going missing. Indonesia even started losing some of their entire islands using excavators and trucks. The sand was worth about $1 million which leaves the question, Where do you hide hundreds of tons of sand?

Blythe Brumleve: 5:24

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Grace Sharkey: 6:18

wow. I want to like just, I feel like

Blythe Brumleve: 6:20

this is deserves an entire like deep dive, and credit to this this YouTuber chapel, you could find the full documentary over on their YouTube channel, C, H, U, P, P, L, but they highlight the the difficulties behind even policing this, that it's almost like criminals are coming in the middle of the night, and you have to make concrete, You have to have a specific kind of sand, and only certain beaches have access to this sand. It's not like you can go to like the desert and get that sand and that's suitable to make concrete and to use it in all of our building materials and things like that. So I thought that that was really, really fascinating. So if you want to check out more, go to YouTube and look up the channel chapel, they have about a 10 minute long video that that goes into this a little bit more in depth. But it's, it's crazy that this isn't, I guess, being talked about more.

Grace Sharkey: 7:12

Yeah. You know, I'm like, kind of looking at articles about it right now too. It's, it's insane, yeah, yeah. Like, what do you you just come in the middle of the night and you steal it off the beaches. Crazy. I

Blythe Brumleve: 7:24

mean, you know, that's basically what they're saying. Yeah, it's

Grace Sharkey: 7:27

interesting. I know someone who, like, bought a bunch of land for their they built a house on it. But the real reason they bought the land was because something about, like the gravel underneath could be used, or like, the gravel underneath will slowly become sand that could be, uh, used in the future. So it's like, they basically bought this land to sell it. Like they're just, they're like, whenever I basically run out of money, I'm just gonna sell another acre and sell another acre to, like, construction companies. And it, yeah, it's like, it's fascinating. This is why I love logistics, because it's like, you Yes, right? Like, how do you even find enough stuff to make contents? Like, that's incredible. Now I'm going to be doing a bunch of research on it too, because now it just makes me wonder, yeah, like, how many concrete companies out there having to make, like, some special calls in a closet somewhere to, like, get their

Blythe Brumleve: 8:23

gate gas station? Yeah. Do you all have gate gas stations?

Grace Sharkey: 8:27

No, we don't know. Well,

Blythe Brumleve: 8:30

I think they're primarily based in the southeast, but everywhere around town you can see gate gas stations, yeah. But I was talking to an IT professional who works on, like, their servers and things like that. And he said, No, they're actual, it's not gas where they make all their money. They actually make all their money from concrete by providing, being the concrete supplier to all of these different companies. So it's like a whole like supply chain, like the logistics of getting the sand, stealing it, using trucks to steal it from a beach, putting it on a ship and ferrying it too, you know, either maliciously or, you know, business wise, somehow they're, they're, you know, getting a hold of this sand anyways, but it was a great document, or a great little like mini documentary. So chupple is, is the name I'll link to it in the show notes. But, and lastly, we've got one of my favorite source to porch stories, and that's around the logistics of magnets, whether small or large magnets have the specific shipping requirements to help them reach their final destination without being stuck to the side of a delivery truck or messing up communications on a plane. So let's have a listen. I am kind of a nerd about magnets. I love magnets. Ever since I was a kid. I just thought the way that they work is so interesting, because you can take the sides of, you know, I just vividly remember being a little kid and trying to, you know, push the magnets, yeah, feel that force against it. I'm like, what's happening here? How. Was that created? And so I thought to myself the other day. I said, How the hell are magnets made? And just to I would play a clip about it, but it's essentially the, you know, electrons. You know, basically electrons. No, I'm just going to play the clip. Let's just play this, because it needs to be played. Let's do this. Here we go. How the

Unknown: 10:27

Einstein showed us that if something is moving, in your point of view, it looks shorter in the direction of movement where there is an electric current to us, the moving negative electrons look like they balance out the stationary positive nuclei. But in the electrons point of view, the positive nuclei are moving and therefore closer together, negative and positive charges attract. So an electron moving outside of the wire can be attracted to the higher density of positive charge in some materials like fridge magnets, the atoms act like small loops of current. If these loops are all in the same direction, they add up outside and cancel out inside. You're left with an effective current on the surface of the magnet that makes a magnetic field that can attract things containing movable charges, like metals.

Blythe Brumleve: 11:09

So if that is not cool enough, now we go to the part about actually like magnetizing the different metals. And so you take different metals and how does, how are they actually like manufactured? And so I found a manufacturer over in China that had post videos on how magnets are actually charged. So

Unknown: 11:28

familiar with magnets, but do you know how it's made?

Grace Sharkey: 11:32

Exact voice. What do you know how it's made before

Unknown: 11:36

magnetization? I magnetization completed. Now they're magnet

Blythe Brumleve: 12:01

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