by Vince Beiser
Abdulali took me to the rural town of Mahad, on India’s western coast, where sand miners once smashed up her car. Sand mining is completely banned in the area because of its proximity to a protected coastal zone. Nonetheless, in the jungle-draped hills not far outside town, we came to a gray-green river on which boats, in plain view, were sucking up sand from the river bottom with diesel-powered pumps. The riverbanks were dotted with huge piles of grains, which men driving excavators were shoveling onto trucks.
Soon after, back on a main road, we found ourselves behind a small convoy of three sand trucks. They rumbled, unmolested, past a police van parked on the side of the road. A couple of cops idled next to it, watching the traffic going by. Another was inside the van taking a nap, his seat fully reclined.
This was too much for Abdulali. We pulled up alongside the van. An officer who appeared to be in charge was lounging inside, wearing a khaki uniform with stars on his shoulders and black socks on his feet. He had taken his shoes off.
“Didn’t you see those trucks carrying sand that just went past?” Abdulali asked.
“We filed some cases this morning,” answered the cop genially. “We’re on our lunch break now.”
As we drove away, we passed another truck filled with black market sand, parked just a few hundred yards down the road.
Some time later I told a local government official about this encounter. He wasn’t surprised. “The police are hand in glove with the miners,” said the official, who asked not to be named. “When I call the police to escort me on a raid, they tip off the miners that we are coming.” Even in the cases he’d brought to court, no one was convicted. “They always get off on some technicality.”
It’s clear citizens can’t rely only on governments to enforce the laws that should control sand mining. Another way to approach the problem could be via collective consumer action, following the model of the fair-trade movement. There are many international programs that certify whether your coffee, diamond ring, or wooden table was created without causing undue environmental damage or exploiting workers or funding warlords. None of them is a complete or foolproof solution, of course, but they’re better than nothing. Why not set up a similar independent consumer watchdog for the sand industry?
Technology might also offer some help. There are many researchers and scientists around the world who are working on ways to make concrete that lasts longer, which would cut down on the amount of sand needed every year.
One of concrete’s key shortcomings is its vulnerability to cracks through which moisture seeps in, corroding the rebar inside. What if the concrete could just fill in those cracks all by itself? It turns out self-healing concrete is actually possible. Researchers in Europe are working with bacteria that excrete the mineral calcite and can also survive dormant for decades encased in concrete. When a crack forms, the encroaching water wakes up the bacteria, which starts to excrete calcite, filling up the crack. The process works just fine in the lab and is under development for real-world use.18
Another approach is to embed hydrogels, polymers that expand as they absorb moisture (they’re used in baby diapers, among other products); when water seeps into a crack, the hydrogel expands, filling it in. Scientists in South Korea are also experimenting with a protective coating containing microcapsules full of a solution that turns solid on exposure to sunlight. In theory, a crack in the concrete would break open the capsules, releasing the solution, which would turn solid in the sunlight. There are several other methods of getting things to automatically ooze into cracks being researched in labs in several countries.
There’s also what’s called geopolymer concrete, which replaces cement with a binding agent made of natural materials and industrial by-products like fly ash, a powdery leftover from burning coal in power plants. Cement is the component of concrete that requires by far the most energy to produce, and the production of which generates even more greenhouse gases as a waste product, so removing it from the mix would be a huge help to the atmosphere. Versions of this geopolymer concrete are already being used in a few places around the world, mostly as pavement. Other researchers are also looking into a range of additional ways to reduce emissions from cement making.
Since the steel rebar is the component most likely to fail in reinforced concrete, what about replacing it with something more dependable? A Norwegian company is marketing bars made of basalt fibers that it touts as a corrosion-proof alternative to steel rebar. Other researchers are trying to replace rebar with woven strips of carbonized bamboo. Concrete reinforced with fiberglass is also stronger and longer lasting, though it’s not in widespread use. Meanwhile, a Danish company claims to have developed a technique for using desert sand to make concrete, though it has yet to bring it to market.
All of these ideas sounds great in principle. Whether they can be made to work at a reasonable price in the real world is a question as yet unanswered.
What about recycling sand after it has been turned into something else? It can be done, but only on a relatively small scale. Glass can be effectively recycled, but the glass industry makes up just a tiny fraction of overall sand use. Most sand goes into making concrete. It is possible to crush up and reuse concrete, but it’s not cheap—it requires removing the rebar, for one thing—and recycled concrete is considered good enough to use only for low-quality applications like road base and sidewalks. The market for recycled concrete is growing, but it’s still just a tiny slice of the pie. Asphalt is much easier to recycle, and about 73 million tons of it is reused each year.19 But again, that’s a relative drop in the bucket.
In any case, buildings and roads aren’t bottles. They’re not meant to be used once and then tossed. They are meant to be used continuously for decades. They stay put. The sand that goes into them is frozen in place, taken out of circulation perhaps forever.
It is possible to make more sand, but it’s not easy or cheap. Crushing rock or pulverizing concrete down to small grains can work. Japan, for one, has relied heavily on such man-made sand since it banned marine dredging for construction sand in 1990.20 But making artificial sand is more expensive than harvesting the natural kind, and the resulting grains are ill suited for many applications; the freshly shattered grains are often too angular, among other shortcomings. We can dredge up some of the sand that’s trapped behind dams, but that’s also costly.
We can use alternative substances for some purposes. Fly ash, copper slag, and quarry dust, for instance, can replace the sand in some kinds of concrete. In India, there’s a project under way to use shredded plastic trash instead of sand to make concrete, which offers the opportunity to reduce both the amount of sand taken from riverbeds and the amount of trash that goes into landfills. In Australia, an engineer is working on a method to make pavement from a combination of coffee grounds and waste products from steel production.
All of these efforts can and hopefully will help. But the sheer volume we need to build our cities makes it all but impossible to replace aggregate on a large scale. What other substance can we possibly find 50 billion tons of, every year?
Ultimately, there’s only one long-term solution: human beings have to start using less sand. For that matter, we have to start using less of everything.
You’ve heard it before. Human beings are eating up the planet. We’re living way beyond our environmental means. We’re burning too much oil, catching too many fish, cutting down too many trees, pumping too much freshwater. We’re using too much phosphorus, for God’s sake; it’s a crucial ingredient in crop fertilizer that comes only from certain types of rock, and supplies of those rocks are running low.21
We’re even running out of commodities you’ve never heard of but rely on every day. Today’s high-tech gadgets, from smartphones to solar panels, use a bevy of rare, obscure metals like tantalum and dysprosium. There are very few sources for most of those things, and supplies are getting alarmingly tight, as David S. Abraham
details in his book The Elements of Power. “At no point in human history have we used more elements, in more combinations,” writes Abraham. “The future of our high-tech goods may lie not in the limitations of our minds, but in our ability to secure the ingredients to produce them . . . our ingenuity will soon outpace our material supplies.”22
The amount of raw material—the sheer tonnage of stuff—used by human beings has ballooned eightfold in the past century. The amount of construction materials has grown thirty-four-fold.23 The World Wildlife Fund calculates that humans have been using up natural resources faster than nature can replenish them for forty years now—that is, we’re cutting trees down faster than new ones can mature, harvesting fish faster than new stocks can be bred, and so on. The same, of course, goes for sand. New sand is constantly being created as the elements erode mountains, but the amount we use far exceeds the amount being made. It would require one and a half Earths to sustainably generate all the materials we use each year.24 If everyone on Earth had an American standard of living, we’d need four and a half Earths.25
In the island nation of Cape Verde, ironically, overconsumption of other resources is forcing people to turn to sand mining. The 2013 documentary Sandgrains tells the story of a village where families have turned to digging up sand by the bucketload from the ocean floor and selling it, because industrial-scale fishing has decimated the marine life they used to depend on.26 The villagers still rely on the sea to survive, but now they take its sand instead of its fish.
Consumption of almost every important resource—everything from wheat to paper to copper—is headed only one way: up.27 The size of typical new American houses has increased by more than 1,000 square feet since 1973, according to the US Census Bureau, to an all-time high of 2,679 square feet. At the same time, the number of people living in those houses has declined from an average of 3 to 2.5. Combined, those figures mean that the amount of living space the average American takes up has nearly doubled in the last forty years.28 Think about how much wood, wiring, energy, and sand went into making all those extra rooms.
The Western world invented the modern good life, with its car-dependent suburbs, oversize houses, SUVs, and TVs in every room. It is not physically possible to replicate that lifestyle worldwide. Already, according to a recent study by Austria’s Alpen-Adria-Universität, fully industrialized countries of the West use up one-third of all global resources, and more than half of all fossil fuels and industrial minerals, including sand. Nonetheless, resource consumption in China, India, and many other countries is catching up fast.
How could it not? Economic growth is raising standards of living all over the developing world. Since 1990, nearly a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty, and 1.2 billion have risen into the global consuming class—people with money to spend on things beyond daily necessities. In the coming decades, as many as 3 billion are projected to rise into the global middle class.29
Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, some 1.6 billion people around the world live in inadequate shelters, the United Nations estimates.30 More than 100 million have no homes at all. Providing a decent place to live for those people will require a gargantuan use of resources. By 2030 the world will need to add 4,000 new affordable housing units every hour to meet the demand. India alone will need housing and urban infrastructure for more than 400 million people by 2050. That’s more than the entire population of the United States.
Sooner or later, all of this will inevitably lead to shortages of sand. In fact, that’s already happening. A 2012 report by California’s Department of Conservation warns that the state has access to only about one-third of the sand and gravel it will require over the next fifty years. The United Kingdom has increasingly turned to the seas as its land-based sand mines have come under pressure; ocean-floor sand now provides about one-fifth of the nation’s needs. But those supplies are predicted to last only another fifty years.31 Vietnam’s Ministry of Construction warned in 2017 that the country was on track to run out of sand completely in less than fifteen years.
The very structures we’ve made out of sand are now getting in the way of our getting more. “Our high-quality aggregate is getting covered with shopping centers,” said Larry Sutter, the concrete expert at Michigan Technological University.
Of course, there is still a lot of sand on the planet. We’re not going to literally use it all up. We won’t have tribes of biker mutants battling each other for the last truckloads of the stuff any time soon. But the sand situation is in many ways comparable to that of other crucial natural resources. There is plenty on the planet—but it’s often found a long way from where the people who need it live, or it can be extracted only at the risk of severe environmental damage.
Consider what’s happening with fossil fuels. There’s still plenty of oil and natural gas left in the ground. But a lot of the easily accessible hydrocarbons close to the surface are gone. That has forced the energy industry to turn to fracking and to subsea fields like the one so disastrously tapped by the Deepwater Horizon, the BP rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. In other words, we can still get all the fossil fuels we need, but at an ever-growing environmental and social cost.
Or think about freshwater, which is in frighteningly short supply from the Middle East to the American Southwest. Worldwide, there is plenty. But getting water from somewhere that has lots, like Canada, to somewhere that has little, like Jordan, would be a tremendously expensive proposition—and that’s assuming Canada would be willing to part with it. As the battles over beach sand in southern Florida show, even neighboring counties can be selfish when it comes to sharing their sand.
How much nastier could this get? Would countries with surplus sand hoard it at the expense of their sand-starved neighbors? Yes, they would. In 2007 China did exactly that, temporarily suspending exports of construction sand to Taiwan. In 2009 Saudi Arabia did the same, briefly banning sales of construction sand to other gulf countries because of domestic shortages.
You read that right: Saudi Arabia is worried about running out of sand.32
Meanwhile, the armies of sand that we continue to mobilize are abetting what may soon be everyone’s biggest worry: climate change. Transforming sand into concrete and glass requires energy—enormous amounts of it from power plants fired by coal and natural gas. More important, sand is the symbiotic partner of fossil fuels, the unsung but essential partner of the oil and gas industry. Sand makes the roads that make gasoline- and diesel-burning automobiles useful. Sand makes the suburbs and shopping malls and office parks that make automobiles indispensable. Sand makes it possible to unlock billions of barrels of once-inaccessible oil and natural gas.
It’s easy to wax self-righteous about corporations ravaging the natural world. But when it comes to some natural resources—prominently including oil and sand—all of us need the things those corporations produce. Aggregate industry professionals like to gripe about LICAs—“low information community activists”—and CAVEs, “citizens against virtually everything.” To a certain extent, they have a point. No one who has grown up with the comforts and conveniences of modern life really wants to give them up. Without oil and gas, we have no cars and trucks, and much less energy (at least until wind and solar ramp up). Without sand, we have no modern cities, no modern life. It’s flat-out impossible to extract those resources from the reluctant earth without inflicting some damage, without making some changes to the natural world. It’s dishonest or naive to pretend even a fraction of the 7 billion of us can have any sort of reasonable standard of living without doing any harm to the planet. So the question really is, how far are we willing to go? How much damage are we willing to do, and where, and to what?
Whenever someone says that population growth is putting the world in danger of running out of some critical natural resource, optimists (and self-interested industrialists) usually respond by pointing out that people have been warning about exac
tly this scenario since the days of Thomas Malthus in 1798—and it still hasn’t happened. Technological breakthroughs, policy adjustments, and new discoveries have always carried us through predicted crises, from the ozone hole to peak oil.
That’s true. But it won’t necessarily always be true.
Many of the disasters we’ve been warned about were avoided because we were warned about them and took action to prevent them. The ozone layer didn’t magically start replenishing itself. It has been replenished because the nations of the world recognized that ozone holes were a huge problem, and agreed to stop using chlorofluorocarbons and other gases that were gouging out those holes.
It’s also crucial to bear this in mind: The speed and scale of change in today’s world is utterly without precedent. It’s miles beyond anything ever seen in 4 million years of human history. “Britain took 154 years to double economic output per person, and it did so with a population (at the start) of nine million people,” write the authors of No Ordinary Disruption, a recent report on world economic trends by the McKinsey Global Institute. “The United States achieved the same feat in fifty-three years, with a population (at the start) of ten million people. China and India have done it in only twelve and sixteen years, respectively, each with about 100 times as many people. In other words, this economic acceleration is roughly 10 times faster than the one triggered by Britain’s Industrial Revolution and is 300 times the scale—an economic force that is 3,000 times as large.”33 Economic growth across the developing world, they add, means that by 2025, the consumer class—those with enough extra income to buy nonessential items—will grow to a total of 4.2 billion consumers. Fifty years ago, there weren’t even that many people on the planet, let alone that many shopping for smartphones.
