“Sand is the foundation of human construction and a fundamental ingredient in concrete, asphalt, glass and other building materials. But sand, like other natural resources, is limited and its ungoverned extraction is driving erosion, flooding, the salination of aquifers and the collapse of coastal defences…” – The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) February 2023
Forbes:
How Sand Mining Is Quietly Creating A Major Global Environmental Crisis
Excerpt:
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has partnered with Kenyan spoken word poet Beatrice Kariuki to shed light on the problems associated with sand mining, part of a wider push towards a zero waste world.
“We must redouble our efforts to build a circular economy, and take rubble to build structures anew,” Kariuki says in a new video. “Because without new thinking, the sands of time will run out.”
Sand is the second-most used resource on Earth, after water. It is often dredged from rivers, dug up along coastlines and mined. The 50 billion tonnes of sand thought to be extracted for construction every year is enough to build a nine-storey wall around the planet.
A 2022 report from UNEP, titled Sand and Sustainability: 10 Strategic Recommendations to Avert a Crisis, found that sand extraction is rising about 6 per cent annually, a rate it called unsustainable. The study outlined the scale of the problem and the lack of governance, calling for sand to be “recognized as a strategic resource” and for “its extraction and use… to be rethought…”
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Additional Reading:
Our use of sand brings us “up against the wall”, says UNEP report
Sand and Sustainability: 10 Strategic Recommendations to Avert a Crisis
The role of resource extraction in a “circular” world
Excerpt:
How ‘Yellow Gold’ Became a Resource Under Pressure…Sand is the second most consumed resource in the world after fresh water. Substance of our concrete civilization, its demand will intensify in the years to come. A situation that generates geopolitical tensions.
To the east of Les Sables-d’Olonne (Vendée), trucks come to the Sablimaris sandpit to collect their cargo: 30 tonnes of sand per skip. The line is uninterrupted. Sand is the essential component of concrete . The site manager, Alain Laurent, guides us through the blond pyramids. His voice covers the roar of the sieve, a machine that separates the fine sand from the pebbles. A few shells float in the golden swirls. This sand comes from the seabed, sucked up by the two French sandpits Stellamaris and André L crisscrossing the Atlantic. Les Sables-d’Olonne and some of the towns of Vendée are built on this sand.
Silky, it slips between the fingers. The rustling of the grains sings the ephemerality of things. Invisible within an infinity of similar ones, the grain is the symbol of the flight of time. Time eats away at life. Sand is the dust of lost time. On the beaches, vacationers leave their mark. Twice a day, the tide erases the steps, the wind carries away the traces. Is the human adventure a sandcastle?
Yet sand is not ordinary. A single grain, it seems, is enough to jam the machine. Ancient man wrote his first thoughts on the ground. Archimedes drew his geometry on the sand. A Roman soldier walks over his drawings: “You disturb my circles,” says Archimedes. The sword is drawn. The philosopher’s head rolls in the sand, which soaks up the blood, like that of the heifers sacrificed to the chthonic gods in Antiquity. Similarly, it is on the sand that Remus and Romulus trace the location of Rome. It is on the sand of the amphitheater that the first tragedians summarize the human condition. The arena (from the Latin arena, sand) where the gladiator fights took place served as a television and a spectacle. Besides, isn’t a screen a silica surface? An age-old gesture is taking place on the Internet: you erase a page with a click, just as you would sweep away an inscription in the sand.
Soldiers of modern armies continue to do their own combat preparation in a sandbox. Thus, the ultra-technical military institution continues the gesture of Archimedes. Sand, humanity’s writing desk.
Concrete has been the material of choice for architects for a century. The idea can finally take shape, freed from the determinism of matter. Sand is the perfect metaphor for capitalist value: fluid, modular, transportable. A symbol of our liquid life. In Les Sables-d’Olonne , “a country without stones and without fresh water”, as the mayor, Yannick Moreau, reminds us, the arrival of concrete heralded the change. The city with such a poetic name has adopted a uniform architecture. Too bad for the premature aging of the building, which has become a commodity that is all the more profitable because its renewal rate is rapid.
Construction is by far the sector that consumes the most sand. But our addiction goes further. Sand is used in the manufacture of paper, cosmetics, laundry detergents, plastics, paints, tires and a multitude of other products. Silicon is the basis for the manufacture of microprocessors, without which the digitalization of the world would not have happened. Sand is the raw material for dematerialization.
Man does not think about sand any more than he does about the air he breathes, and yet he cannot live without it. It is the most consumed natural resource in the world, after fresh water. More than 50 billion tons are extracted each year, making it the world’s leading mining industry. Sand, the new yellow gold…
(French to English translation by Google)
Excerpt:
The greed for grains of sand comes at an ecological disaster and fatal human cost; murders and other associated crimes which have taken a toll on poverty-stricken communities, particularly women.
The ERC investigation, Beneath the Sands, exposes how greed for grains of sand comes at a fatal human cost: As cities rise in number and countries urbanize rapidly, sand mining-related murders and other associated crimes have taken a toll on poverty-stricken communities.
We documented sand-related crimes happening in Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Philippines and India, from tax evasion, trespassing to threats stalking activists to people caught in the crossfire between gangs known as ‘sand mafias.’
Finally, we look at how sand mining impacted the women in Cambodia, India, Kenya, and Indonesia. From home to the streets, women are on the frontlines in the resistance against these powerful sand mining operations.
Here are the stories they uncovered…
Read other articles in the series :
Women against the grain – Beneath the Sands ERC
Women in Cambodia, India, Kenya and Indonesia share how they are on the frontlines in the resistance against powerful sand mining operations in their communities.
In a trade that is dominated and driven by men, women often bear the burden of the negative social and environmental impacts from sand mining activities across the world. This is evident in much of our reporting on the global industry. As is common with many environmental issues we face today, we feel that the disproportionate burden to women is a heavily underreported issue…
We can’t run away – Beneath the Sands ERC
The rise in sand demand endangers the lives of children, laborers, journalists and environmental defenders.
Greed over grains of sand has a fatal human cost: As cities rise and countries urbanize, sand-related murders and other associated crimes have taken a toll on poverty-stricken communities.
In parts of the globe, where sand is extracted, criminal gangs and sand mafias control the multi-billion dollar trade, spawning violence in land-rich, developing nations. On their trail are hundreds of people — miners, journalists and environmental defenders — reported to have been killed, imprisoned or threatened…
Reclamation: A flawed solution – Beneath the Sands ERC
A deep dive into the rationale behind some of Asia’s reclamation projects, the toll they take on our environment and communities, and the search for more sustainable alternatives.
Reclamation is seen as a solution for countries to deal with increasing land demands, by expanding their territory and rehabilitating previously uninhabitable lands or seas. Yet, the process guzzles an alarming amount of sand, causing massive environmental damage as well as a rise of transnational criminal syndicates trading in illegal sand..
Nowhere to fish, nowhere to farm – Beneath the Sands ERC
Across Asia and Africa, countries are dealing with massive sand mining that destroys fishing grounds, farmlands, and homes.
Beting Aceh, an island in Riau Province, Indonesia, has been Eryanto’s home for 40 years. The island is known for its white sandy beaches and clean ocean water; more than half its residents are fishers.
But the island has drastically changed over the past two years. The ocean water is getting murky, the beach is shrinking, and it has suffered from massive erosion, indicated by the uprooted trees strewn along the coast. Many villagers say the damage is linked to a sand mining operation happening between Beting Aceh and the neighboring Babi Island…
Global sand trade figures don’t add up – Beneath the Sands ERC
On March 17, more than 120 tons of sand packed into drums was loaded onto the Basle Express, a container freight ship more than three soccer fields long. The ship was docked in one of America’s major ports, Savannah, Georgia, in the Southeast region of the country.
The shipment itself was not remarkable — except for how it is emblematic of the international sand trade, highlighting the type of sand that attracts foreign buyers, the countries that are buying and those that are selling…
