Looting of the sea: the great sand theft – ABC

Few things seem so inexhaustible to us..However, sand is not an infinite resource. And, furthermore, it is running out..Sand consumption already doubles what nature is capable of replenishing. And the problem is aggravated by two factors. One is that demand continues to increase, at a rate of 60 percent so far this century (in China, more than 400 percent)… The other problem is that it takes millennia to regenerate: the time it takes a glacier to crush the side of a mountain, with ice as a patient stonecutter and water as a slow sander. Well, sand is nothing more than that: crumbled rock that the wind carries; and that rivers and marine currents deposit hundreds of kilometers away…

China is the largest producer of cement, with 2,410 million tons annually, far ahead of India (290) and the United States (86)…Sand is not only in concrete; also in steel and ceramics. And in the ballast on which the train tracks rest. But it has other applications: polishes, paints, detergents… There is a reason it is the most demanded raw material after water. It’s in the computer chips; in toothpaste and cosmetics; in paper and plastic. The food industry also needs it to manufacture sugar, bread, wine, beer… The silicon present in quartz sand is used to produce glass. And the fracking industry injects it into the subsoil at very high pressures to fracture shales, metamorphic rocks that contain hydrocarbons. “Each Spaniard consumes, without being aware of it, 11,650 kilos of sand per year,” explains César Luaces, director of the National Association of Aggregate Manufacturers.

The impact has not only been environmental, but also political – explains Pascal Peduzzi, researcher at the United Nations Environment Programme. The sand for the new Singapore neighborhoods was taken from Indonesian islands, which were slowly sinking. “A submerged island does not count as a border, which means Indonesia lost territory…”

Worldwide, sand and gravel moves around €57 billion annually in the construction sector. And then there is the black market. India has an insatiable appetite for concrete. And the sand mafia has become the country’s first criminal industry, capable of bribing police and officials to turn a blind eye…

The plundering of India is repeated in other countries. On the beaches of Morocco, sand thieves use donkeys to carry it. Gunmen threaten villagers in the river deltas of Cambodia and on the coasts of Vietnam. Similar scenes are being experienced in Sierra Leone and the Caribbean. The Cape Verde archipelago, in the Atlantic, opposite Senegal, risks suffering the same fate as Indonesia. And the sand used to build Shanghai’s skyscrapers was extracted from Poyang Lake, which was the country’s largest reservoir of drinking water. Now, the lake is dry for several months of the year…