Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:
It makes up the concrete of our houses, the tarmac of our roads, the glass in our windows and the silicon chips in our phones.
But sand, a building block of modern life that sits at the heart of a destructive and sometimes illegal industry, is in increasingly short supply — and nobody knows how soon it will run out.
Sand is the most used material on the planet but also one of the least well monitored. Unlike most other commodities, policymakers only have rough estimates of how much of it is used each year. A landmark report from the UN Environment Program (UNEP) in 2019 had to rely on data for cement — which sand and gravel are mixed with to make concrete — to land on a ballpark figure of 50 billion tons.
Researchers say that's more sand than can be responsibly used each year, even though more sand can be made by crushing rocks. In some regions, the shortages have already fueled targeted killings and the destruction of habitats.
"The nature of the crisis is we don't understand this material well enough," said Louise Gallagher from the Global Sand Observatory in Geneva, who co-authored the report. "We don't understand the impacts enough of where we're taking it from. Sometimes we don't even know where it's coming from, how much is coming out of rivers. We don't know. We just don't know."
What experts do know, though, is that extracting sand in unparalleled quantities comes at a growing cost to people and the planet.
Sand mining destroys habitats, dirties rivers and erodes beaches, many of which are already losing ground to rising sea levels. When miners dig out layers of sand, riverbanks become less stable. The pollution and acidity can kill fish and leave less water for people and crops. The problem is made worse when dams upstream prevent sediments from replenishing the river.
"It has so many other impacts that are not taken into consideration," said Kiran Pereira, an independent researcher who has written a book on solutions to the sand crisis. "It's definitely not reflected in the cost of sand."
