Time.news – The most affected and targeted in Italy are the beaches of Sardinia. Those of Alghero, Stintino, Cala Luna, Costa Smeralda, where the sand is finer, more colorful and precious.
Thefts, thefts of sand. From a few handfuls to a few kilos, even 50. As a simple souvenir. Which is then regularly seized at the airport, identified in the suitcases. With consequent administrative sanctions to the unlawful possessors, as provided for by art. 40, paragraph 2, of the regional law 16/2017, the amount of which varies from a minimum of 500 euros to a maximum of 3,000. In 2008 alone, 10 tons of beach sand, seized from boarding, including shells and pieces of rock, were retained in the Olbia airport deposits.
The thousand uses of sand
“Every stolen grain of sand is a piece of our future that goes away,” they say. In fact, sand is the most consumed natural resource in the world after water. Widely used in construction, in recent years it has seen its consumption increase significantly. Sand is found everywhere, often without us noticing it: in glass, in cosmetics, in the electronics industry, but above all in concrete. Population growth and rampant urbanization, especially in Asian and African countries, are leading to an increase in its consumption. Which, in twenty years, must be multiplied by three. With devastating impacts on the environment. As well as on local populations. So much so that we have to ask ourselves: is a disappearance of the sand to be feared?
But thefts are not only in Italy, it happens everywhere in the world. And even worse often happens. For example, a young civil servant who dared to challenge the powerful ” sand mafia ” and was suspended from work for this, then became a heroine in India, a country where corruption is rampant. In India, the sand mafias, for example, have power, money, weapons. The grains of sand are instead the wealth and at the same time also the “curse” of the Maldives because in the name of development the archipelago is aggravating its vulnerability.
While in Greenland the sand is like a new horizon, a new perspective “to be able to diversify one’s economy and also distance oneself from Denmark”; as for Florida, it is in constant struggle for the survival of its beaches, squeezed as it is between currents and hurricanes, on the one hand, and continuous erosion due to construction reasons, on the other. For this, it must be continuously supplied with the raw material. Cape Verde, on the other hand, is hostage to real looters: far from the edifying tourist postcards, some beaches of the archipelago are now reduced to real quarries. The French capital, Paris, also has its own insatiable and inexhaustible appetite for sand to power four new metro lines, 68 stations and 12,000 hectares of offices and new homes.
The numbers
Cell phones, cosmetics, detergents, glass, paper, computer chips, but also, and above all, homes, roads and public works. However discreet it may be, the sand interferes in every little corner and sector of our daily life. A study published in the spring by the journal New Scientist, quoted a few weeks ago in a report by Le Monde, estimates that global demand “could grow by 45% by 2060”.
Basing their calculations on demographic projections and the expected pace of economic growth, researchers at the University of Leiden (The Netherlands) concluded that needs, in the order of 3.2 billion tons per year in 2020, could jump. to 4.6 billion tons a year over the next forty years, driven in particular by the rampant urbanization of Asian and African countries. Africa, on the other hand, is home to the largest expanse of sand on the planet, the Sahara, which exceeds 9 million square kilometers.
Ma the grains of desert sand are not usable, too round and too fine for the composition of the concrete, which, on the other hand, requires multi-sized angular grains in order to better guarantee the compactness and solidity of the dough. It is therefore only along the coasts, in the riverbeds but also in the basins that the “sand merchants” collect the precious material.
The truth is that it is not known exactly how much sand is taken in the world. The data from this point of view are discordant, because for example a report by Focus magazine in September 2017 referred to a report by the UNEP, the United Nations program for the environment (“Sand rarer than you think”), in which it was written that in 2012 about 27 billion tons of sand were used for the construction sector alone and tens of millions of tons for other uses, destined for the Asian, European and North American markets, as well as quantities imprecise not declared in the illegal market. A figure far superior to that quoted by the researchers of the University of Leiden, referred to above, which speaks of a requirement of 3.2 billion tons per year in 2020. So much so.
Anyway, the legal business of sand would have been estimated at around 9 billion dollars for 2016 for the United States alone, and considered to grow by 5% per year. Also according to the Focus report, geologists define sand “a material with grains of diameter between 1/16 of a millimeter (0.06 mm) and 2 millimeters” while larger or smaller materials “belong to other categories” (gravel, silt). However, sand is so widespread on the surface of the Earth that “almost all peoples have used it in construction, as an abrasive and for hundreds of other practical purposes”. It is added to mortar, concrete, structural clay products, asphalt.
Sand as an element of political tension between countries
In any case, in recent years, the demand for sand would have exceeded that for fossil fuels: it is a very rich market but one that no longer manages to stay within the boundaries of legality. This massive extraction, through excavation in quarries or during dredging operations, no longer spares any region of the planet and would now represent 85% of the mining activity. “Sand is involved in over 70% of everything that is built in the world. A particularly greedy sector: construction consumes almost 200 tons of aggregates to build a single-family house, 3,000 tons to build a hospital. There is no road network even without the use of this mixture: each kilometer of asphalt swallows up, for example, 30,000 tons ”, reads the report from Le Monda in the first days of September.
The point is that sand and its import to replace the “exhausted” sand from intensive cultivation is not news but some problems arise:he “sand issue” has become an element of political tension between Singapore and neighboring countries, such as Cambodia, Malaysia and Indonesia, because exports are slowing down.
Vietnam has instead taken note of the problem in an official way, so much so that Pham Van Bac, director of the Department of Construction Materials which reports to the Minister of Infrastructure, has declared that the “national sand” is no longer able to support the request and that In the absence of alternatives, from 2020 it will no longer be possible to build anything that requires the use of sand.