Vitrification

If you're like me and hate defacing the scenery just to get sand, why don't you use quartz instead?

Create Glass from Quartz

Step 1. Get Quartz

Step 2. Shove some into a crucible (where does this crucible come from, you ask? Don't worry about it. Soon it will be gone.)

Step 3. Put this crucible in a furnace

And voilà! (You'll notice it grants a bit more XP than smelting Sand into Glass.)

Break Quartz blocks into Quartz

"Full" Quartz blocks will give you 4 Quartz back and "half" Quartz blocks (stairs and slabs) will give you 2 Quartz back. Fair enough, right?

Amethyst is Quartz

Turn Soul Sand into Tinted Glass

Soul Sand is sand, isn't it? So we should be able to get some kind of glass out of it! Since Soul Sand is an edgy version of Sand, you should be able to smelt it into the edgy version of Glass: Tinted Glass.

And that's it for this mod. I hope you'll find it helpful.

Tested with Fabric API 0.91.0+1.20.1

This mod is provided "as is". It should technically work on all
1.20.X versions of the game. I am not planning to update/backport this
mod to a different version of Minecraft. You're free to do so yourself,
however.

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0