Sierra Leone: Beaches under attack from sand miners
Twenty-four hours a day, seven-days-a-week, truckloads of sand are being hauled from the beach into Freetown to satisfy the needs of construction companies and contractors. Hundreds of tonnes of sand from the beaches is mined and sold to builders as construction material. The activity is technically illegal but laws, as is often the case, are not being implemented or enforced.
Ugandan children abandon school for sand mining
More and more Ugandan children drop out of school, lured into sand mining on the banks of River Nile in Busaana Sub-county, and joining what seems a lucrative venture to earn a living.
Jobless Cape Coast youth venture into illegal beach sand winning; Ghana
The youth at Bakaano, a suburb of Cape Coast, have taken to illegal mining due to the unavailability of jobs.
Schoolboys employed in sand mining, Tamil Nadu, India
Poverty and proximity to riverbeds have been weaning away a number of children studying in government schools and pushing them into sand mining. The sand mafia, in a bid to find cheap labour, has been using schoolchildren to lift sand from the riverbeds. The unsuspecting youngsters fall prey to the designs of the mafia, tempted by the money on offer.
Sand mining ravages African beaches
Sand is a natural resource that is more and more exploited. Worldwide, beaches are mined for sand. As many other countries in the world, African States have legislated to better protect their coastal environment, but this did not put an end to illegal beach sand mining and its detrimental effects on the ecosystems.
The Market For African Beach Sand: Who’s Buying, Selling And Mining It?
Sand mining on beaches and in riverbeds is a source of income for unemployed Africans, but it’s often an unregulated — or under-regulated — business. Environmental impact is a growing concern.
Why Sand Is Disappearing ; By John R. Gillis
To those of us who visit beaches only in summer, they seem as permanent a part of our natural heritage as the Rocky Mountains and the Great Lakes. But shore dwellers know differently. Beaches are the most transitory of landscapes, and sand beaches the most vulnerable of all.
Sand Thieves Are Eroding World’s Beaches For Castles Of Cash
The pillaging of sand is a growing practice in the world. Taken by hand, three or four meters deep in the Maldives archipelago, or transported on a donkey, or sucked up by huge sand boats in Asia, coastal sand mining, authorized or unlawful, is exploding.
Sand Mining Database
Coastal Care has an extensive list of Sand Mining resources.