Cambodia’s banned sand trade with Singapore appears to be back – Mongabay

Unauthorized sand mining at the Tatai River in the Koh Kong Conservation Corridor,Cambodia 2012 (by Wikirictor CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia).

“Most countries don’t grow 10 km or 20 km [6-12 mi] every single decade, but Singapore does,” said William Jamieson, a postdoctoral research associate at Royal Holloway, University of London, who works on the global sand crisis. Between 1965 and 2025, the country’s total land area increased by 28%…

Why is the World Running Out of Sand? – ABC Radio National

"Sand Rainbow," Dredger depositing sand and water just offshore at Mermaid Beach, Gold Coast. Australia. Part of large scale beach nourishment project (by Steve Austin CC BY-ND 2.0 via Flickr).

After water, sand is the most-exploited natural resource in the world, but its use is largely ungoverned, meaning we are consuming it faster than it can be replaced by geological processes that take hundreds of thousands of years. Making sand from ore could solve the looming crisis…

The global impact of sand mining on beaches and dunes – Ocean & Coastal Management

USACE project Sand Replenishment 5.5 mile strech of Anna Maria Island, FL (by Carol VanHook CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr).

Beaches and coastal dunes have always supplied sand for a wide range of uses, and initially the extracted volumes were limited to buckets, wheelbarrows, or small pickup truck loads. However, starting in the late twentieth century, and thanks to urban development, especially for coastal tourism, coastal and river sand has been extracted at an accelerated pace, and on a much grander scale…

Grains of Sand: Too Much and Never Enough – EOS Magazine

Sand dunes in Kernel - Sydney, Australia (by Bea Pierce CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr).

Sand is a foundational element of our cities, our homes, our landscapes and seascapes. How we will interact with the material in the future, however, is less certain…

“The use of sand is now faced with two major challenges,” said Xiaoyang Zhong, a doctoral student in environmental science at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “One is that it has caused enormous consequences in the environment,” he explained. “The second challenge is that easily usable sand resources are running out in many regions…”