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> A country can be both an exporter and importer of sand.

That's pretty normal in general. Eg Germany both imports and exports a lot of cars.

My favorite example of this is trucks transporting Finnish bottled water to France and then bringing French bottled water back.

Reminds me of getting can of S.Pellegrino water with something in it. Looked at back of the can and wondered why is this in Japanese... So my guess is that it was first made in Italy, then shipped to Japan and then imported back to Finland...

One starts to question sanity of our consumption habits at times. I am no way environmentalist, but this sort of stuff just seems waste of energy inputs.

As long as you can ship stuff on a boat over the ocean, and don't care too much how long it takes, shipping it even multiple times across the planet is fine. Barely costs anything, both in terms of money and in terms of resources.

The (first and) last miles via truck can cost a lot more, but you can't guess those from whether there's Japanese writing on the label.

It's more that ocean shipping is extremely cheap. Meaning it uses very little labour and resources per mile.

It is not surprising to me that products which have lots of differentiation are both imported and exported. It was surprising to me that something I thought of as a commodity goes in both directions.

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