Sorrow of the sand miners: The Reengineer Monitor #23

Chinese battery tech, Passive House skyscraper - and more!

Photo by Min An.

Before I dive into this week’s The Reengineer Monitor, allow me to flag a story I wrote for BBC Future, which was published on Wednesday. It’s about the frantic effort to download and archive climate data from US government websites, before such information gets pulled by the Trump administration.

Heating and cooling

UK heat pump deployment appears to be ticking upwards, with a record number of installations logged during the first quarter of 2025.

A program in the US state of Oregon is bringing air-to-air heat pumps to homeowners, offering heating and cooling facilities to families who previously struggled during heatwaves, a local news report explains.

Buildings and infrastructure

Sand, essential for materials such as concrete and glass, is the second-most used resource on Earth after water. Many people around the world are engaged in illegal sand mining, which often leads to the severe erosion of landscapes. This is only worsened by climate change-exacerbated rainstorms and flooding. Context reports on such a situation in Malawi, where women are caught in a desperate Catch-22: they feel they must mine sand in order to earn a living – but they are also aware of how this work is damaging their local environment.