The World in a Grain

by Vince Beiser

  Shoddy concrete was also likely a key reason for the disintegration of several buildings in a 1999 earthquake in Turkey and the collapse of an eight-story factory in Bangladesh in 2013 that killed more than 1,000 people. According to The Financial Times,29 as much as 30 percent of Chinese cement is so low-grade that it produces dangerously flimsy structures known as “tofu buildings.” Cheaply made concrete is one of the reasons so many schools collapsed in China’s 2008 Sichuan earthquake, killing thousands.

  Vaclav Smil estimates that worldwide, as much as 100 billion tons of poorly manufactured concrete—buildings, roads, bridges, dams, everything—may need to be replaced in the coming decades. That will take trillions of dollars, and billions of tons of new sand.30

  “Almost all the concrete structures you see today are doomed to a limited life span,” writes Robert Courland. “Hardly any of the concrete structures that now exist are capable of enduring two centuries, and many will begin disintegrating after fifty years. In short, we have built a disposable world using a short-lived material, the manufacture of which generates millions of tons of greenhouse gases. Most of the concrete structures built at the beginning of the twentieth century have begun falling apart, and most will be, or already have been, demolished.”31

  We have built our world out of sand in the form of concrete—and it is starting to crumble.

  CHAPTER 11

  Beyond Sand

  Armies of sand have built our cities, paved our roads, shown us distant stars and subatomic particles, spawned the Internet, and made our way of life possible. But extracting and deploying them on the immense scale of the twenty-first century has also brought destruction and death.

  Since 2014, scores of people around the world have died, and many others have been injured, in accidents connected to sand mining1—run over by sand trucks, drowned in pits left by miners, or buried alive in sand avalanches. Most of them were children. Hundreds, likely thousands, more were driven from their homes by floods or river bank collapses brought on by sand mining, or threatened, assaulted, and injured while trying to stop illegal sand mining.

  At least seventy people were murdered in violence related to illegal sand mining over the same period. The victims include an eighty-one-year-old teacher and a twenty-two-year-old activist who were separately hacked to death, a journalist burned to death, at least three police officers run over by sand trucks and another who had his throat slit and fingers chopped off, all in India. In Kenya, a police officer was slashed to death with machetes, two truck drivers were burned alive, and at least half a dozen other people were killed in fighting over sand.

  And all the while, more than 100 billion tons of sand and gravel2 were ripped, scraped, and sucked up from floodplains, riverbeds, beaches, and the ocean floor, damaging rivers and deltas, killing coral reefs and fish, and bankrupting people who depend on those resources. Not to mention the damage caused by the other industries that put all that sand to work: the concrete makers, the land builders, the frackers.

  All of that is just what I know about, from my own reporting and from tracking local media. There is no official tally of sand mining damage. There’s no telling how much more is not reported or is deliberately kept out of the media.

  So what is to be done?

  Stronger government regulations can prevent, or at least mitigate, much of the harm caused by sand mining. They do in most of the developed world. Most restrictions on sand mining are relatively recent, however. Europe only got serious about regulations in the 1950s, after some of Italy’s northern rivers were badly damaged by aggregate mining to build the highway network. France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland have banned river sand mining completely.3 New York State passed its first laws regulating sand mining only in 1975. “Before that, it was up to municipalities or no one at all,” said Bill Fonda, spokesperson for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

  Of course, there are plenty of questions about whether existing regulations adequately address sand mining, especially for frac sand. And sometimes those rules are simply ignored. Remember the $42 million fine that Hanson Aggregates had to pay to settle charges that it had stolen millions of tons of sand from San Francisco Bay?

  Still, there are lots of safeguards in the system. In much of the United States, more than a dozen county, state, and federal government agencies have a say in determining who can mine sand where and under what circumstances. Mining companies are also generally required to restore the land, to a certain extent, after they’re finished. (C. Howard Nye, the CEO of Martin Marietta, one of America’s biggest construction aggregate companies, denounced all this regulation as “excessive” in testimony he gave to Congress in 2017.)4

  Some agencies are waking up to the larger importance of sand. In 2011, Washington state authorities blew up a century-old dam because it was starving downstream ocean beaches of sand needed for clam habitat. The clams had all but disappeared. Now they are returning.5

  Activism can make a big difference, too. Aggrieved citizens living near existing or proposed mines can and do lobby to keep them smaller, quieter, cleaner, and safer—or to keep them out of their backyard altogether. There are at least two proposed sand mining sites within an hour’s drive of my home in Los Angeles that locals, unabashedly concerned about their views and property values as well as environmental impacts, have for years prevented from opening.

  All of us have to recognize, though, that there is a price to be paid for protecting the environment and local residents’ aesthetic sensibilities. If you forbid sand mining in your backyard—as many American communities do—then the sand to build your highways and shopping malls will have to be brought in from somewhere else. There still has to be a mine, somewhere. “It’s like a garbage dump or a prison,” said Ron Summers, former chair of the National Stone, Sand, and Gravel Association. “Everyone wants one, but no one wants one near them.”

  In some situations, well-intentioned efforts to protect the local environment end up simply exporting the damage to somewhere with looser laws and less privileged citizens. In California’s San Diego County in the early 1990s, federal, state, and local government officials cracked down on miners pulling sand out of the San Luis Rey River, after it became clear that all the digging was despoiling the river. Most of the mines soon shut down. With their local sources gone, San Diego concrete makers turned to importing sand from the nearby Mexican state of Baja California. That sparked a surge in mining in Baja—both legal and otherwise—that ravaged riverbeds, created a shortage of sand for local construction, and sparked street protests by villagers who blamed the mining for causing respiratory problems in their children. In 2003, Mexican officials resorted to temporarily banning exports of sand to California. Tempers have calmed down somewhat since, but the local press reports that illegal sand mining continues.6

  Similarly, environmental concerns in North America and Europe are pushing sand mines ever farther from populated areas. Ironically, that is creating new environmental hazards.

  The San Francisco Bay Area used to get much of its construction aggregate from the Livermore Valley, the place Henry Kaiser started mining. But the area gradually ran low on sand, and filled up with buildings that got in the way of mining. Aggregate miners found a new source north of the city, in the picturesque Russian River Valley in nearby Sonoma County. But as that area evolved from a rural backwater to a hub of wineries, organic farms, and outdoor tourism, the locals no longer wanted their landscape pocked with gravel pits or their roads filled with noisy trucks. So county supervisors banned mining along the river, forcing San Francisco to haul its sand from ever farther afield.

  The same process is happening all over California and in many other places. The distances sand is hauled are increasing as quarries close to the big cities become depleted or are forced to close. About 80 percent of aggregates are hauled by truck; the rest goes by rail or barge. California of
ficials estimate that if the average hauling distance for sand and gravel increases from twenty-five miles to fifty, trucks will burn through nearly 50 million more gallons of diesel fuel every year in the state alone, spewing more than half a million additional tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.7 Not to mention all the extra traffic and wear and tear on highways.

  Pushing sand mines farther away also incurs financial costs. Sand is tremendously heavy, which makes it expensive to transport. The price of sand rises rapidly with each mile it travels. The increase in haul distances is one reason the inflation-adjusted price of construction sand in the United States has more than quintupled since 1978.8 In major urban areas like San Francisco and Los Angeles, the price of trucked-in aggregate has risen so high that it now makes economic sense for developers to import some 3 million tons of sand and gravel by boat every year from a mine in Canada, almost 1,000 miles away.

  The cost of aggregate is similarly being driven up internationally. “As efforts to curb illegal mining activities have been largely unsuccessful, sand and gravel reserves in many countries are expected to be depleted at a rapid pace through 2019. This will result in price hikes, especially in urban centers,” noted a 2016 report by the Freedonia Group, an Ohio-based business research outfit. Developers in the Indian state of Telangana were forced to put several construction projects on hold in 2015 because a shortage of sand caused prices there to triple. A crackdown on illegal sand mining in Vietnam in early 2017 similarly sent prices skyrocketing. Worldwide, the average cost of a ton of construction sand has gone up nearly 50 percent in the last ten years, according to Freedonia’s research.9 That in turn makes concrete more expensive, which helps explain why housing prices have gone up so much in so many cities in the last couple of decades.

  That might just be the beginning of the impact of dwindling sand supplies on the world economy. One key reason everything is made of concrete is that it’s relatively cheap. If the cost of making a new building or road were to spike, it could hit regional and even national economies like an oil shock. In places like India where there are already severe housing shortages, a concrete price hike would only exacerbate the grim divide between those with means, who get to live in stable, waterproof structures, and the millions of others who have to make do in slums.

  Tightening supplies are turning sand into more of a global commodity. Some $10 billion worth10 of construction aggregate is sold across borders each year. It’s one of North Korea’s few exports.11 Canadian sand is being barged even farther than California, all the way to Hawaii, where rules protecting beaches and inland sand dunes have cut off local supplies. Parts of Germany are so starved for sand that contractors import it from Denmark and Norway. In India, restrictions on sand mining have forced developers to import sand from Indonesia, the Philippines, and even the nation’s archrival, Pakistan.

  Things got especially weird in the Caribbean island nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the 1990s. Alarmed by how thoroughly their own beaches were being plundered by the local construction industry, in December 1994 the little country banned beach sand mining and decreed that beginning the following year, all construction sand would have to be imported from nearby Guyana. Contractors, home builders, and truckers panicked, figuring prices would skyrocket. The result was an orgy of sand hoarding. Heavy machines dug away at island beaches around the clock, right through Christmas and New Year’s Day. So much sand was stockpiled that it turned out to be more than anyone could use; the piles gradually blew away, the waves of grains clotting up roads and drainage pipes.12 The ban was lifted and mining resumed. Many of the archipelago’s dunes and beaches have since been decimated.

  A key problem in much of the developing world is that all the regulations under the sun won’t make any difference if no one enforces them. “There are very good laws on the books, but they are not applied,” said Marc Goichot, a water issues researcher with the World Wildlife Fund. “The demand is too great and the ability of governments to enforce the laws is too low.”

  Which brings us to the issue of corruption. Bribes and payoffs, officials on the take, are probably the main reason illegal sand mining continues on such a massive scale—and why, at the time this book is being written, Paleram Chauhan’s killers still haven’t been brought to trial.

  It’s a worldwide problem. Corruption in the aggregate business—as in most extractive industries—runs the gamut from villagers slipping the local magistrate a few banknotes to turn a blind eye to an illegal pit, to employees of giant multinationals participating in major-league villainy. In 2010, two French nationals working in Algeria for Lafarge, one of the world’s biggest cement and aggregate firms, fled the country one step ahead of police who were after them on money laundering and corruption charges.13 The same company admitted in 2016 that its Syrian subsidiary had paid off armed groups, possibly including ISIS, to leave one of its cement plants alone; their CEO resigned in the ensuing scandal.14

  In some places, illegal sand miners have the added protection of powerful people who are involved in the industry. According to Global Witness, a British research activist group, two extremely wealthy members of Cambodia’s senate15 run many of that nation’s sand mines. Members of national and provincial governments of India and Sri Lanka also reportedly have their hands in the trade.

  It’s often local officials, the very people who are supposed to be protecting the interests of their communities, who are the worst offenders. In 2015, on the Indonesian island of East Java, two farmers—Salim Kancil, fifty-two, and Tosan, fifty-one (many Indonesians use only one name)—led a series of protests against an illegal beach sand mining operation. The mine operators threatened to kill them if they kept interfering; the farmers reported the threats to the police and asked for protection. Soon after, at least a dozen men attacked Tosan, ran him over with a motorcycle, and left him for dead in the middle of the road. Then they moved on to Salim’s house. They beat him and hauled him off to the village hall, where he was battered with clubs and stones and finally stabbed to death. His body was left on the street with his hands tied behind his back.

  Police eventually arrested thirty-five people. Two of them were sentenced to twenty years in prison for masterminding the attack—both of them local officials. One was the village chief.

  (The sand industry really seems to attract some of the worst people in all of Indonesia. There’s also Chep Hernawan, an Indonesian businessman involved in real estate, plastics recycling, and sand mining. The founder of an organization dedicated to imposing Islamic law on Indonesia, he is also a vocal supporter of jihadi terrorists. He offered to donate land for the burial of three men executed for their role in the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, and in 2015 he told CNN that he had paid the travel expenses of 156 of his countrymen who went to Iraq and Syria to fight with ISIS.)16

  A few months before the East Java murders, I made my way to a sand mine on the neighboring island of Bali, far inland from the tourist beaches. It looked like Shangri-la after a meteor strike. Smack in the middle of a beautiful valley winding between verdant mountains, surrounded by jungle and rice paddies, was a raggedy fourteen-acre black pit of exposed sand and rock. On its floor, men in shorts and flip-flops swung sledgehammers at rocks and hoisted shovelfuls of sand and gravel into clattering, smoke-belching sorting machines.

  I wandered around the place for a couple of hours, trying to find out who was in charge. No one seemed to know—at least, no one was willing to give any names to a foreign journalist. What are the odds this mine was operating legally? “Seventy percent of the sand miners have no permits,” Nyoman Sadra, a former member of the regional legislature, told me later. As an article in The New York Times Magazine recently put it, “the sand trade is . . . sustained by a devilishly inbuilt chain of plausible deniability. . . . Sand mining is executed by an endless array of small, independent, often temporary players, largely working at night and in secret. And each step of the line of produ
ction is separated from the rest: The sand moves from diggers to truckers to dealers to builders with each link in the chain knowing as little as possible about where the sand they’re buying comes from or who mines it—for obvious reasons, they don’t want to know.”17

  It just takes a few handfuls of strategically distributed cash to get the local police to leave the sand miners alone. Even companies with permits spread money around so they can get away with digging pits wider or deeper than they’re supposed to. “They just bribe government officials,” Suriadi Darmoko, an activist with the Indonesian Forum for the Environment, said. “It’s an open secret,” The village chief convicted of Salim Kancil’s murder, for one, admitted to paying off police officers to protect the mine.

  I got a good look at how this plays out on the ground while I was in India. I spent several days there with Sumaira Abdulali, India’s foremost campaigner against illegal sand mining. Abdulali is a decorous, well-heeled member of the Mumbai bourgeoisie, gentle of voice and genteel of manner. For years she has been traveling to remote areas in a leather-upholstered, chauffeur-driven sedan, snapping pictures of sand mafias at work. In the process she’s been insulted, threatened, pelted with rocks, pursued at high speeds, had her car windows smashed, and been punched in the mouth hard enough to break a tooth.

  Abdulali got involved when sand miners started tearing up a beach near Mumbai where her family has vacationed for generations. In 2004 she filed the first citizen-initiated court action against sand mining in India. It made the newspapers, which in turn brought Abdulali a flood of calls from others around the country who wanted her help stopping their own local sand mafias. Abdulali has since helped dozens file their own court cases and keeps a steady stream of her own well-documented complaints flowing to local officials and newspapers. “We can’t stop construction. We don’t want to halt development,” she says in British Indian–accented English. “But we want to put in accountability.”