At a time when we are all worried about so many things, it is distressing to add another one to the pile, but this is serious, and can no longer be ignored. The world is running out of construction/industrial sand, and it will soon impact every facet of our lives. I know that sounds crazy, but bear with me, here.
Just about every weekday that I’ve worked since I moved to Seattle in August, 2014, I have opened a drawbridge for a tugboat which is pushing a barge that is carrying about 3000 gross tons of gravel and sand. Looking down at the barge from above, it’s easy to forget what a massive amount of material that is, but for context, if all of that was being transported by semi-truck, it would take approximately 600 of them each day.
For more information about this barge and its route, and where it gets its gravel, check out an earlier post I wrote about the sand crisis.
You’ll have to trust me on those numbers. The math is complicated. First of all, gross tonnage in shipping is a volume, not a weight, oddly enough, so you have to know the weight density of the gravel, and semi-trucks can’t haul a full load because they have weight restrictions. But still, are you grasping that this is an eff-load of gravel and sand?
And this is just one city. Sand and gravel are moving around all the other cities of the world at the same time. There is a desperate need for this aggregate (the industry term for both gravel and sand, which is usually found together).
Look around you. I guarantee that you are seeing dozens of things that are created with sand. The glass on your computer/phone screen. The glass in your windows. The concrete and/or bricks in the walls around you. The bed of the paved roads that you drive on, as well as the asphalt used to pave over the top of that bed. The silicone chips in every electronic device in your house. It’s also used to make sand molds to shape molten metal alloys, so without them, we’d have no I-beams in our skyscrapers or bridges, or engine blocks or brakes in our cars. We even need sand to carry on America’s questionable love affair with fracking.
We use 50 billion tonnes of aggregate each year. (And since we Americans have to be different, we use tons instead of tonnes, so that figure equates to more than 55 billion tons each year.) Billions, with a B.
Now, you might be thinking, what’s the big deal? I know that when someone tells me to think of an eff-load of sand, I think of this image from the English Patient. I mean, there are so many deserts in the world. So we’re good, right?
No. We’re most definitely not good, because desert sand is windblown, causing its grains to be rounded and smooth, and therefore it doesn’t bind together well for concrete, which is where the bulk of the sand that we need goes. (Here’s a fun fact. Dubai actually has to import construction sand from Australia!) No. What we need, ideally, is river sand, and sand from lakes and seashores. And that, Dear Reader, comprises 1% of the sand in the world.
Things have gotten so dire that we’re digging it out of alluvial plains and ocean floors. Go goodbye, vast swaths of forest, and even marine protected areas, many of which did not have the fine print in their legislation to protect the sand from being dredged using equipment outside their borders. I mean, who was expecting anyone to covet sand?
And unfortunately, it’s hard to keep track of the current crisis, because few countries monitor or measure sand’s use, import or export, or track its impacts, and there’s currently no international standard for doing so. Consider this: Major rivers often cross multiple countries. So if, for example, a country at the river’s source starts a major sand mining operation, and the silt flows down to the countries downstream, thus choking their fish and killing off their fishing industries and their ecotourism, how do you handle that?
And here’s something that’s happening right now. A country upstream of the Mekong Delta is mining sand, but that prevents the delta from getting its sand naturally replenished, as it has, annually, for millennia. And then several countries upstream have built dams along the Mekong River, with many more slated to follow, which will deprive the delta of even more necessary silt. Then the Mekong Delta, too, gets mined and isn’t replenished, and the sea levels continue to rise, it shrinks more each year.
This isn’t just tragic for the 20 million people in the Mekong Delta who rely on it. It’s a tragedy for Vietnam, as the delta is the source of half its food. And it is an extreme tragedy for Southeast Asia, because the delta is the primary source of most of its rice. If something is not done soon, it is predicted that half the Mekong Delta will have disappeared by the end of this century.
Sand is the most consumed resource on the planet besides water. (And we are already seeing what happens when parts of the world become desperate for water.) You may think there’s a housing crisis now, but as the population increases, and building materials decrease, we will be looking back at this current housing shortage with nostalgia. The number of people living in urban areas has quadrupled since 1950, and will grow half again as much by 2050. People need concrete to live in. We’re currently adding 8 cities the size of New York each year. (Where the hell we expect to grow our food and graze our livestock as the need for food keeps pace with the urban expansion is a whole other issue.)
China used more construction sand in the first decade of this century than the US did in the entire 20th century. And to accommodate the increased population, we are all creating more land—out of sand. Think of Dubai’s palm shaped islands, for example, and the islands that China is creating. Since 1985, worldwide, we have created 5,237 square miles of artificial land. As this illustration from the Stockholm Resilience Centre shows, human-made structures now exceed all the living biomass on earth.
Sand has become big business. Due to shortages and increased demand, international trade value has increased almost sixfold in the past 25 years. The price of sand will continue to soar as long as the demand does. When that kind of money is at stake, what soon follows are lawsuits between countries regarding sand imports, property rights, and environmental damage.
Those soaring prices have also attracted organized crime. Illegal sand mining is known to exist in at least 70 countries, and India and Italy, in particular, have sand mafias. People have been killed around the world because of sand. From Mexico to Kenya, environmental activists who have attempted to put a stop to sand mining have been killed. Law enforcement officers who have attempted to shut down or prevent illegal sand operations have been killed. Competitors have killed one another. Men, women and children who have gotten in the way have been killed. Even teachers who have taught about the crises have been killed. Children in third world countries are virtually enslaved and made to haul baskets of wet sand day after day. Why aren’t we hearing more about this? Well, stories about sand aren’t exactly clickbait, are they?
And sand extraction, both legal and illegal, has a great impact on all of us. It lowers water tables, making it harder for people to find drinkable water. It has increased river erosion, causing houses and bridges to collapse, and flooding to occur in places where it has never been before. That same erosion has destroyed the habitats of birds, fish, marine plants, crocodiles, crustaceans, and river dolphins. The sandbars that once protected coastal communities from flooding and storm surges are disappearing. The mines are increasing saltwater intrusion, which threatens the food security of entire communities. When sand is extracted from alluvial plains, it leaves behind holes that fill with standing water, which become breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes. It has had a negative impact on fishing, farming, and ecotourism. Coral reefs have been damaged. Coastal wetlands have been wiped out.
So, can anything be done about this problem? Yes. There are sustainable sources of sand, such as the sand being left behind by retreating ice sheets (which is perhaps another reason Trump covets Greenland), as well as the sand trapped behind dams. (And I’m just speculating, here, but if desert sand were put in the ocean in some environmentally safe way, would the shape of its grains eventually change so that it could be used for concrete?)
We need to find sources other than sand for our concrete, such as industrial slag and waste, fly ash, crushed oil palm shells and rice husks, foundry sand and recycled plastic. Scientists are trying to formulate durable concrete that requires less sand. We need to find efficient ways to use demolition waste, making old, crushed concrete into new, and provide financial incentives or legislate its use. A global program for monitoring sand extraction and use would help determine what types of policies would have the most impact. We also need to focus on improving occupancy rates in empty buildings, and repurposing such buildings into housing, so that fewer new buildings will be required. At some point, we may even have to consider preventing the construction of new buildings for housing until all vacant buildings that can be repurposed have been.
Every time that gravel barge that passes through my drawbridge, it reminds me of this crisis. I look at that gravel and think about the massive hole that is now where it used to be. I’m amazed that that mine has lasted this long. And when it’s tapped out, where will they go next?
We need to start thinking of sand as the finite resource that it is, just like we’re finally finally starting to do with oil and clean water. All these things can so easily slip through our fingers. Something has got to change, before change is forced upon us.
Sources:
The World is Running Out of Sand
How sand mining threatens our planet—and what we can do about it
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