PARIS — The tides are turning: after water and rare earths, sand has officially joined the club of Earth’s resources in danger. “Our use of sand brings us up against the wall,” the UN Environment Programme warned on April 26, calling for sand to be recognized “as a strategic resource and its extraction and use needs to be rethought.”
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The intensity of its extraction is “simply not sustainable,” according to the UNEP Director Pascal Peduzzi, who launched the Marine Sand Watch observation platform this winter to monitor extraction in seas and oceans. “Its extraction rate now exceeds its renewal rate,” Peduzzi warns. Our sandpile is shrinking.
The reason is that the consumption of sand has tripled in two decades, to reach 50 billion tons per year. That is nine times more than oil and enough to build a wall 10 meters high and 10 meters wide all around the equator, Peduzzi notes.
As a fundamental pillar of our concrete societies, sand is the second most consumed natural resource in the world after water. About 200 tons are needed for a house, 3,000 for a hospital and 30,000 for 1 km of highway. The construction of the 828-meter-high Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai required 45,000 tons. This yellow gold is also used in the manufacture of glass, detergents, washing powders, paper, toothpaste, cosmetics and microprocessors. “It shapes the world,” Peduzzi says.
Not all sands are equal
With the economic development of Africa and Asia, global sand consumption could grow by another 45% between now and 2060, according to predictions by Xiaoyang Zhong of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. “If we don’t act now, we may not have enough sand to develop our cities,” he warns.
Only 5% of the world’s sand resources can be used to make concrete.
The situation is all the more critical because not all sands are equal. Desert sands, the most abundant, are too smooth and round to aggregate effectively. Only 5% of the world’s sand resources can be used to make concrete. That explains why Dubai has to import sand from Australia to build on its dunes.
The most prized “premium” sands are sourced from quarries, rivers, beaches and seabeds, loaded with mineral particles and shell fragments. They contain no more than 3% impurities (silt, dust) and consist of grains of different sizes, making them very effective for filling the voids between other aggregates. Once washed of its salt, ocean sand offers the most appreciated diversity. Although it is mainly used to make concrete, asphalt and mortar.
Marine gold
The quest for this marine gold is raising tensions in many seas around the globe, where thousands of extraction dredges are now found, vessels capable of lifting up to 500,000 tons of sand per day from the depths and are often operating illegally, according to the UN.
China and Taiwan are embroiled in a true sand war around the Mazu archipelago. In 2017, the 13,000 inhabitants of this Taiwanese island near the Chinese coast began to see the first sand dredgers arrive. There were 70 the following year, 700 two years later, and over 4,000 last year.
China’s sand needs have considerably increased, from 4 to 18 billion tons per year during this period, even as dredging has been banned or restricted in some of the country’s river and alluvial areas, such as the Yangtze River.
The area of Singapore has increased by 20% in 20 years, requiring 517 million tons of sand.
In some parts of the world, this appetite is further amplified by the scale of urban projects. The area of Singapore has increased by 20% in 20 years, with an expansion of 130 square kilometers into the sea, requiring 517 million tons of sand. This catastrophic tally of 5.4 tons per inhabitant does not, however, deter the city-state.
On the contrary, it plans to expand by another 8% by 2030 and remains the main driver of sand extraction in Southeast Asia. Surrounding hills and several islands have already been exploited, as have neighboring extraction sites in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia, now banned from exporting.
The end of sand?
According to NGOs, illegal extractions facilitated by corruption are multiplying. Global Witness, for example, counts nearly 75,000 men in India working illegally as sand fishers at the mouth of the Ulhas River in Vasai Creek for local mafias. Nearly 2 billion tons of sand are stolen there, feeding a parallel market worth several hundred million euros, out of the 70 billion euros that the global official aggregates trade represents (4 billion euros in France alone).
In addition to the considerable ecological damage caused by these extractions, the disappearance of islands and changes in coastal morphology raise territorial questions that international maritime law has yet to resolve.
What are the consequences for the limits of territorial waters and exclusive economic zones (EEZs), determined from the coasts? What about archipelagic countries whose islands are disappearing? And what about the management of reserves? At the current extraction rate, experts estimate that marine sand could run out by 2100.
