A building may be built out of bricks andmortar, and be painted like you see here. In this photograph you may observe parts of this brick wall. Imagine what would be seen if we could separate the individual parts of the wall.

Imagine being hired to remove all the paint from the wall. This would leave only the brick and mortar base. If the building was large you would hopefully get paid a lot for this job!

Breaking the building down to smaller particles requires more work. Imagine removing the mortar and leaving only the individual bricks. Could a building built this way would ever be able to stay up?

If you wanted to work a long time, you should be able to use a hammer to break each brick down into smaller particles eventually ending up with sand and clay particles.