Our mission is to raise awareness of and mobilize people against the ongoing decimation of coastlines and oceans around the world.
North Korea is barred from exporting earth and stone under United Nations sanctions passed in December 2017. Trading North Korean sand is a violation of international law. Despite those measures, North Korea raked in at least $22 million last year using “a substantial sand-export operation,” UN investigators said in a report released in April.
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An unrelenting fleet of China-based dredging vessels are churning up the South China Sea. They are accused of acting illegally, and of causing ecological damage. Satellite images show the incredible scale of the activity.
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The billionaire brothers who control San Francisco-based online payments company Stripe are spending a quarter of a million dollars to import special sand to a remote Caribbean beach.
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Sand is the single most mined commodity, eclipsing minerals and metals by a colossal margin. Around 85% of the material we pull up from the earth is sand, gravel or other aggregate materials. Globally our annual aggregate consumption is somewhere around 53 billion tonnes – the equivalent to every person on earth using 20kg of sand every single day.
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Beyond the direct threat to the littoral, illegal sand mining in Jijel has become a matter of sand mafias, and the numbers of cases handled increased compared to 2018.
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The Delaware River, a major source of drinking water for Philadelphia, is facing an emerging threat as rising seas push saltwater farther upstream. It’s a problem that other places, from Miami to Shanghai, will also confront, especially as increasing drought lowers river flows.
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Until its trade is more closely monitored and regulated, sand will continue to be exploited, threatening the very building blocks of modern society. But surveillance alone may not be enough: the industry urgently needs more alternatives to sand.
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The mining sector in Africa is facing radical change as youth activists take action against the environmental degradation caused by mining industries.
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South Africa’s Environment Minister Barbara Creecy has dismissed most of the appeals against the approval in 2019 of vastly expanded beach mining operations on the West Coast north of the Olifants River.
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