2024-08-26 11:12:28
A few months ago, a shootout between two mafia groups took place in northeastern India, during which several earthmoving machines were destroyed. The cause was disputes over one specific natural resource.
Last March, in another part of India, other criminals shot dead three people, including a police inspector, over the same material. And this March, another Indian lawman lost his life in a crackdown on another mafia-based illegal mining group. In all these cases, the gangsters or the police were not fighting each other for diamonds, gold or oil: They were shooting each other for sand.
As surprising as this may be at first glance, there is no reason to be surprised. Tiny grains of sand are the second most used natural resource in the world after fresh water. According to a five-year-old report by the United Nations Environment Program, about 50 billion tons of it is consumed annually – twice as much as is produced by the breakdown of rocks over the same period – and demand is still growing.
A scientific study by researchers from the American Michigan State University, for example, estimates that, compared to today, the demand for sand will triple worldwide by 2060. However, in developing countries, due to the much faster pace of construction of cities and infrastructure, it will grow significantly faster. This is also why experts estimate that if we do nothing about the current development, the world will run out of building sand by 2050.
That’s because sand is used in a huge number of things that people use every day: mixed with cement in concrete, glass, or in the silicon chips in our laptops and phones. China is the biggest “eater” of sand. Between 2011 and 2013 alone, it consumed more cement (6.6 gigatons) than the US did in the entire 20th century (4.5 gigatons), columnist Vince Beiser writes in his book The World in a Grain.
By far the largest exporter is the United States, which exported almost 6.3 billion tons of sand in 2022. This represents approximately 31.5 percent of global exports, more than double the volume of other leading exporters such as the Netherlands (12.4%), Germany (8.2%) and Belgium (5.9%). In short and well, although we rarely realize it, our modern civilization is literally made of sand.
Sand mafia
If the demand for sand is huge, its extraction is very weakly regulated. This is partly because, unlike other resources such as oil or coal, sand is relatively readily available. In addition, the largest consumers are rapidly developing countries with weak environmental policies and insufficient law enforcement. How little the trade with this material is regulated is evidenced by the following figure. Of the total 80 million tons of sand that Singapore imported from Cambodia between 2009 and 2019, less than four percent was properly documented.
When the huge demand for sand is combined with the weak regulation of its extraction, it creates an ideal mushroom for the criminal mafias who mine it illegally. This is a problem especially in Cambodia, Kenya, Nigeria and India. In the latter country, illegal sand mining is the largest organized crime ever. In inland villages, armed sand mafias steal plots of land to remove topsoil and mine the layers of valuable sand beneath. On the coast, pirate dredgers pump out sand from the seabed. The looted raw material is then sold on the black market to construction companies, which use it to create high-rise buildings in megacities such as Mumbai.
Most of the total sand consumption will be swallowed by fast-growing cities. However, sand is increasingly being used to expand territory. Giant dredging ships extract millions of tons of sand from the seabed each year to create new land. Since 1985, more than 13.5 square kilometers of new land has been created in this way on Earth, which is slightly larger than, for example, the island of Jamaica. Probably the best-known case of such activity is Dubai and its artificial islands.
How can sand run out on Earth?
The possibility of the Earth running out of sand seems absurd. After all, on our planet there are huge sandy deserts, such as the Sahara, which itself has an area of about nine million square kilometers. But most of this sand is unusable for industrial purposes. This is because desert sand – smoothed by winds into small balls – is the wrong shape and size. Only the broken particles of sand, which are found at the bottom of (albeit already extinct) rivers, lakes and seas, bind well and enable the production of solid concrete and other products. And so, for example, Dubai, surrounded by endless seas of sand dunes, has to import most of its construction sand from Australia.
River sand is then more suitable for construction purposes than sand from the sea coast, among other things because it does not need to be desalted. However, coastal sand is also used, but buildings made from it have a shorter lifespan and are also of poorer quality. “It was the use of coastal sand that incidentally exacerbated the damage after the catastrophic February 2023 earthquake that shook Turkey and Syria,” Mette Bendixen, a physical geographer at McGill University who has been researching the impacts of sand mining since 2017, told Scientific American.
As it follows not only from her studies, illegal sand mining has enormous social and environmental impacts. When water is extracted from riverbeds, not only does it threaten local infrastructure, but pollution from leaking operating fluids from facilities can also destroy fisheries and threaten water for drinking and agriculture. Along part of the coast of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, whole villages have been abandoned due to the threat of erosion.
Unregulated mining also threatens local fauna and flora, as river sand acts as a sponge to help replenish water throughout the basin after periods of drought; if too much sand is removed, natural water replenishment is no longer sufficient and rivers dry up. This naturally impairs the human water supply and leads to the loss of vegetation and wildlife.
For example, on the Mekong River, the longest waterway in Southeast Asia, large-scale sand mining has caused an alarming phenomenon – the sinking of the delta. According to local officials, it sinks about two centimeters every year. This subsidence leads to salinization of once-fertile land, making it less suitable for agriculture and posing a serious threat to local livelihoods.
Mining is also an environmental threat to the world’s oceans and seas, where, according to data from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), six billion tons of sand are mined annually, threatening marine life and coastal communities. “Some vessels act as vacuum cleaners, dredging up both sand and microorganisms that fish feed on,” UNEP said.
Sometimes the sand is dredged to the very bottom, meaning marine life may never recover. Mining can also increase erosion, which destroys coastal land and increases its vulnerability to extreme weather conditions. The damage caused by sand mining is clearly visible on satellite images – the coast is crushed, ecosystems destroyed and entire small islands in Southeast Asia have disappeared from the map.
Písek will also be missing in the Czech Republic
In the Czech Republic, we do not have any mafias illegally mining sand, and as a result, there is no mass looting of natural resources. But this does not mean that the lack of sand will not be a problem in the future.
As Josef Godány from the Czech Geological Survey, who has been dealing with the situation regarding the availability of natural materials for a long time, says, due to the lack of aggregate and sand, problems with securing the raw material base of the Czech construction industry may arise within ten years.
According to him, there were a total of 131 active sand pits in the Czech Republic last year, in which around 20 million tons of sand are extracted annually. However, if within 10 years the territorial prerequisites for the opening of new deposits are not gradually created to replace mined locations, it can be assumed that mining will end on 45 to 50 percent of functional gravel-sand deposits in the Czech Republic.
This is of course a problem, because possible imports from neighboring countries will be difficult to implement – there is not much from where. In addition, transportation by road freight for distances exceeding 50-60 kilometers significantly increases costs and, according to Godány, such delivery usually becomes inefficient from the point of view of economy.
It is therefore obvious that if we want to build new real estate in the Czech Republic, roads. railways or new nuclear power plant blocks, we will have to extract natural materials. But as is unfortunately the custom in the Czech Republic, even in the case of sand pits, the permit procedure is a matter of many years. According to Godány, it takes roughly seven to ten years. This is partly due to conflicts of interest between landowners and miners, partly due to very strict requirements for nature protection and the negative attitude of the public.
For example, in the Pilsen region and the Vysočina, there is already a significant disparity between the demand and supply of gravel and sand. Gravel and sand must be brought to Vysočina from the South Bohemian, Central Bohemian and South Moravian regions.
What to do with this situation? According to Godány, the solution is, on the one hand, the opening of new deposits located near the planned buildings and, on the other hand, the simplification of the conditions for the expansion of existing establishments and in the promotion of economic replenishment of stocks.
The state should also support the affected municipalities in the vicinity of which the planned establishment or quarrying of gravel, sand or aggregate is to take place. Either by increasing the financial contribution above the existing statutory payments or by another form of support. “Perhaps by speeding up the implementation of the bypass of the village or by finding compromise variants of the way the quarry is opened and the location of the raw material treatment technology so that the village is not significantly burdened by the extraction and treatment of the raw material,” says Godány. As he adds, in short, it would be necessary to set a rule: “If the construction of highways and railways is in the public interest, the provision of building materials for this construction must also be in the public interest.”