Photo by Jan Kopřiva
Picture what is likely a typical day for most of us: the alarm on your smartphone rings in the morning. Your hand reaches out to tap the touchscreen to silence it. As you stand up and plod to the bathroom you flip on the light and brush your teeth. The day’s first text message buzzes on your phone. After breakfast of cereal, juice, and eggs, you head out to a workplace or settle down to work from a home office. At some point work may involve using a computer or the internet in some way. The trip to and from the job may involve driving or public transit and walking. Perhaps upon stopping work or arriving back home you unwind by pouring a decent glass of red or white and plopping down in front of the TV.
In the bustle of daily life, it is easy to be unaware that basically every part of it, from the glass screen and chips in your smartphone, to the lightbulb in the bathroom, to the likely ceramic dishes in the kitchen, to the concrete and asphalt of the streets, to the fiber-optic cables that connect to the Internet, to the TV and computer screens, to the wine bottle and glasses, all are made with the same thing: sand. The foundation of the building you live in is likely concrete and perhaps the walls are plastered with stucco- i.e., sand. Throughout the day you used energy in the form of oil or natural gas that may have been fracked. Again, sand- and it is the same with solar panels and wind turbines.
In other words, sand is a key ingredient of modern life. Next to water, sand is the most used resource on Earth. Every year humans extract and consume around 50 billion tons of sand. Back around 1970 human consumption was 9.6 billion tons. The main driver of this exploding use is the urbanization of the planet. In 1950, about one-third of people in the world lived in cities. Today the number is about 55 percent with the UN projecting that the number will increase to 68 percent by 2050. That is a lot of concrete and glass.
There are also many projects where sand is being used to manufacture land itself. From Dubai’s palm-tree shaped islands to coastal China, sand is used to create land where there was none before. Singapore, long one of the world’s largest sand importers (much of the sand dredged from Cambodia) has expanded its total land by some 24 percent since 1960. All told, according to one study, since 1985 over 5000 sq miles have been added to the world’s coasts- that’s an area about as big as the country of Jamaica.
Since 2000, the demand for sand in India has tripled. China, which is urbanizing on a pace unprecedented in history, used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. used in the entire twentieth century. The global market ranges from $100 billion at the low end to as much as $785 billion. A recent report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) found that demand is expected to double by 2060 under current trajectories with sand demand for buildings alone expected to rise by 45 percent. Put it this way: even North Korea exports sand.
There are quite a few problems that emerge from this, starting with the basic fact that we are running out of sand. First, some background: What is sand? Sand is defined as unconsolidated (loose) grains of mineral and rock between 0.0625 mm and 2mm in size. It forms when rocks break down from weathering and erosion. Most sand is quartz, which is a form of silica (silicon dioxide, i.e. silica and oxygen). There are an estimated 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on Earth.
Not all sand is the same. For instance, desert sand is largely useless to us. Due to extreme wind erosion (rather than water) desert sands are too smooth and rounded. This prevents the grains from binding well with cement to produce concrete. Nor is desert sand suitable for glass making or silicon chips. So, the Sahara Desert’s oceans of grains won’t help at this point.
Glass-grade sand is made up of at least 95 percent silica, a lot higher than the grains on a typical beach. Still finer grades are used for solar panels and silicon chips. By far most sand is used to produce concrete. Construction sand needs to be more angular to help concrete bind. That sand is found in riverbanks, dunes, and flood plains. River sand is preferable to coastal sand, mainly because coastal sand must be washed free of salt (coastal sands still get used enough, as kind of a shortcut, and can lead to more dangerous structures- a likely factor in the devastation of the 2023 earthquake in Turkey).
In his book, The World in a Grain, Vince Beiser writes:
Today there is so much demand for sand that riverbeds and beaches around the world are being stripped bare of their precious grains. Farmlands and forests are being torn up. And people are being imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. All over sand.
River sand is a renewable resource. Geology is often described as a matter of pressure and time. As thousands of years go by and rocks that contain quartz break down, they release silica as they travel down rivers and streams. However, we are extracting more than can be naturally replaced. Dredging sand destroys estuaries and habitats, threatens local water supplies, causes banks to collapse and flood crop fields. The 2001 Riberio Bridge collapse, which killed 59 people (a bus and several cars were on the bridge when it collapsed) was attributed to unregulated sand mining, as was a bridge collapse in Taiwan the year before. Projections indicate that the Mekong Delta in Vietnam could disappear below sea level by 2100. At least 24 Indonesian islands have disappeared since 2005 due to sand depletion. In Morocco up to 60 million tons of sand are scraped off dunes lining the Atlantic coast every year.
The demand for sand has predictively created a black market for organized crime. In fact, it is more accurate to say the black market is the market. Estimates are that only about a third of sand mined globally is mined legally. ‘Sand mafias’ are everywhere. In India such mafias rake in as much as $100 billion a year. While the word ‘mafia’ brings to mind tightly knit groups under a crime boss, what is more common here are decentralized mixes of contractors, companies, union leaders, corrupt police forces, and opportunistic (mostly poor) locals. What is similar is the violence against those who get in the way of business. It is not completely clear how many activists have been killed for opposing sand mining specifically, but it is safe to say it is a decent percentage of the hundreds of environmental activists killed globally every year. A 2022 report by The South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) found that over a span of 16 months from December 2020 to March 2022, at least 418 people lost their lives due to sand mining-related reasons during this period, including a dozen by violence.
One solution in the ether is sand tracking. In 2023, UNEP launched the platform Marine Sand Watch to monitor marine dredging (between 4 and 8 billion tons per year). So far, the platform, using Automatic Identification Signals from ships and AI, is on track to check as much as 60 percent of dredging vessels worldwide. A group of researchers from the Department of Sustainable Earth Systems Sciences at the University of Texas are also tapping AI with the model SandID that has about a 90 percent success rate in identifying the original mining source for construction site samples. Tracking is a valuable tool for assisting investigators but has limitations- there is no way to instantly tell if the sand is mined illegally.
Recycling is another solution. The EU already requires its countries to prepare 70 percent of non-hazardous construction and demolition waste for reuse or recycling. The Netherlands doesn’t use much coal these days but construction crews there use fly ash, a byproduct of burning coal, as material for concrete and cement.
Then there is manufactured sand, known as m-sand. Here manufacturers crush stones into small enough pieces required to make aggregate for concrete then wash the new sand free of dust particles. M-sand is often touted as a potential, sustainable game changer but scaling up all these methods will be necessary. Concrete production itself accounts for 8 percent of global carbon emissions. The fight to decarbonize the sector, with more public funding and research, has to include a movement toward safer, more sustainable sand. The hourglass is running low.
