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A sand mafia — that’s what they call them — in Sierra Leone in the process of stealing a beach. With just a little more finesse, they do it in Miami, too.
The human industrial complex requires enormous inputs of natural resources to build and extend itself. If you rank these raw materials by volume used, number one will be water. Number two will be sand.
Hard to accept? Go anywhere in the world and look around. If you’re in a city looking at a high-rise building, it’s probably mostly concrete (sand), just like the streets, sidewalks, bridges, and the freeways with their interchanges and ramps. The windows in the skyscrapers and storefronts are glass (sand). Some buildings are made of brick (sand) or block (sand). And some of the highways are asphalt (sand). Out in the country most houses may be framed with wood, but they rest on foundations and basements of concrete and block, and many of them are roofed with asphalt shingles. I’m finding this out, and telling you about it, using computer chips made of sand.
The world uses a lot of sand; 50-60 billion tons a year, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, and the demand curve continues to climb precipitously in Asia. China poured more concrete in two years, 2011-13, than the United States poured in the entire 20th Century. The fracking revolution that recently gripped the US oil industry is built of sand, as well; by 2012 frackers were using 30 million tons of sand a year, nearly overwhelming the existing supply chain.
Of course, we are running out of sand. Like fossil fuel, it takes thousands of years to produce, and we are using it far faster than the world can replace it. As with everything else, our response to this rapidly approaching existential crisis is to use the stuff faster.
One additional supply-limiting factor is that desert sand, rounded and smoothed by wind, cannot be used for most purposes, only water-shaped sand, which retains its jagged edges and binds well with others. All over the globe, sand is being dredged from the ocean floor, scooped up from river beds and scraped off beaches; it’s a 70-billion-dollar-a-year industry, most of which is either unregulated or flatly illegal.
The environmental damage being done is immeasurable. The thousands of large dredge boats working the coastal oceans of the world are disrupting ecosystems, killing marine life and altering the ocean’s currents and tides. Sand in the ocean doesn’t just lie there, it moves constantly, coming off one beach and fetching up on another, moving off shore and then into shore and along the shore. Always it tries to stay in equilibrium as it reacts to storms, construction — and dredging.
Sand dredging off the Florida coast, to provide raw material for more tourist hotels and residences, is the main reason Miami’s beaches “erode” so much every year that they have to be replenished with dredged sand — so the tourists in their sand buildings will have sand to walk on as they contemplate the timelessness of the ocean and the majesty of unspoiled nature.
The sand industry (setting aside ocean dredging) is unusually accessible to poor people, and can be practiced on a small scale that is difficult to detect and regulate. But the easily accessible deposits, on land and along stream beds, are almost all gone now and the competition for what remains is fierce. In the coastal countries of Africa, such as Morocco and Sierra Leone, “sand mafias” have sprung up that fight each other for their sand the way the real Mafia fights for its drug territories.
The good thing about these sand wars is that although they will get worse toward the end of the human industrial complex, they will expire with it. We will not have need of skyscrapers and superhighways after the crash. We will be fully occupied seeing about food and water.
The Bible calls us foolish if we build our house upon sand. What do you call people who build a global economy made of sand?
Fascinating, Mr. L.
I had no idea of the complexities surrounding sand.
You mention that only water washed sand is applicable to industrial production, yet what of that sand that once was water washed, and currently resides on land? I’m thinking of places like Utah, that have traded between ocean floor and arid desert over geologic history.
Regardless, it’s yet another testament to the heedless abuse of the natural world. These examples continue to multiply, and like the Lorax, continue to be heartily ignored by those with their hands on the wheel.
We get to watch it all fall apart.
I’d seen an article about this “unseen” sand problem about a year ago (somewhere) and thought that, like climate change, nobody is going to “do” anything about it. In fact, I doubt anyone is paying attention to much of anything that continues to deteriorate as we go merrily along, day by day, doing what we do, oblivious to any and all effects these actions have on the interacting system as a whole.
Our trash is another monumental problem. All the unnatural chemicals we continue to manufacture, use and then dispose of, not to mention nanoparticles, brake (and all the other) dust and vehicle tires also come to mind. We can lump the whole lot under POLLUTION, but it’s a bit more nuanced than that.
Civilization seems to be in the act of terminating itself through multiple vectors: resource depletion, heat production, and ecological devastation which, like pollution, are not experienced on a daily personal level (unless you’re paying close attention) and thereby “there’s no problem!” Beside that, the powers that be keep this omnicidal situation going because it benefits them and there’s no incentive to do otherwise. Once again we arrive at the conclusion that we’re witnessing the end of the “movie” of life on Earth but have no power to change course or alter the result.
Thanks for another eye-opening essay Mr Lewis.
Sand, fosssil fuels are only two of the roughly ninety natural materials resources that are being irreversibly used up by the ssystems of industrialized civilizzation in an unsustainable process. The best that society can do is adopt measures that with ease the inevitable powering down for a small proportion of the global population.
Without the energy to run all that heavy equipment to dig it up, the copious quantities of sand being used will drop off rapidly.
The Stone Age did not end for lack of Stones, and the Industrial Age will not end for lack of sand. It will end for lack of energy.
RE
A voice of contrariness here. The article says we are running out of both sand and fossil fuels. However, the supply/demand curve tells me that is not true. If we were running out of sand, the cost of sand (and, hence, concrete, windows, and the rest) would be climbing parabolically. Same with fossil fuels.
True, neither sand nor oil have gone to scarcity pricing yet. So should we wait and have this conversation only after they have? Does the fact that they’re not there yet mean they will never get there? Or that we’re not really running out and can safely ignore the whole thing?
In conversation with an underground mining tech that travels world-wide, he mentioned an underground aggregate mine. I skipped a couple beats before I woke to the fact that aggregate (sand & gravel) doesn’t naturally occur underground; it’s made by glacial activity on the surface thousands of years ago.
I asked him how does aggregate form underground? He said it doesn’t but aboveground sand and gravel quarries are depleted and transportation costs become prohibitive shipping aggregate long distances from the remaining quarries. For instance, sand is barged from Vancouver Island to California. So, they drill blast, crush and screen granite into various sizes. Because of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) they can’t do this on surface (dust and noisy blasts) and so they do it underground.
Welcome to ‘peak sand.’