Half life 2 keep off the sand
In 2011, 20 million cubic meters of sand was dredged from the sea floor on the coasts of the Netherlands to form a natural barrier protecting against erosion and climate change. Most of the demand comes from China, which made more cement in the three years from 2011 to 2014 than the US did in the entire last century. India, the next-biggest cement producer, is projected to overtake China as the world's most populous country by 2027.Īs people across Asia and Africa move to cities and the world population swells to 10 billion people by the middle of the century, demand for sand is projected to keep rising.Īnd it's not just for making concrete. "At the same time, I remember seeing hundreds and hundreds of trucks filled with sand flying up and down the roads, supplying all the construction sites."Ĭhina used more than half the cement the world made in 2019 to fetch water from a crowded public tap. "As I grew up in Bangalore, I constantly read reports about the rivers being decimated due to sand mining," said Pereira, the researcher, adding that some of her earliest memories involve waking up at 2:00 a.m.
These round balls have less grip than the jagged grains found on riverbeds, beaches and sea floors, which have the friction needed to make concrete strong. When winds blow over dunes, they shape sand particles into spheres. This is because desert sand holds little value for the construction industry. The 830m-tall Burj Khalifa, a skyscraper in the neighboring United Arab Emirates, was built using imports from the other side of the world. Although one-third of the Earth's land surface is classified as desert, much of it sandy, Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia import sand from as far away as Canada and Australia. Sand shortages even sound counterintuitive. "Ask people to name the most important commodity on the planet and sand is probably not the one that gets mentioned."Īsia’s new gold: Sand mining threatens life on the Mekong Concrete boom One reason the damage from mining has been ignored is that although sand is in objects all around us, it's "hidden in plain sight", said Chris Hackney, a geographer at the University of Newcastle in the UK, who studies the issue and co-authored the Nature article. "It certainly is something that is rising to a level that we really need to be paying closer attention to."Īccording to an article published in the journal Nature in 2019, sand mining has helped push fish-eating gharial crocodiles in the Ganges river to the brink of extinction - fewer than 250 adults remain in the wild - and destabilized riverbanks in the Mekong whose collapse could force half a million people from their homes. Worse, much of the impact may not be immediately visible, which makes it hard to know exactly how bad it is, said Stephen Edwards, who leads research on extractive industries at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). "It's definitely not reflected in the cost of sand."Įroded river banks have destroyed the habitats of the critically-endangered gharial crocodile in the Ganges river in India "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. The problem is made worse when dams upstream prevent sediments from replenishing the river. The pollution and acidity can kill fish and leave less water for people and crops. When miners dig out layers of sand, riverbanks become less stable. Sand mining destroys habitats, dirties rivers and erodes beaches, many of which are already losing ground to rising sea levels.
What experts do know, though, is that extracting sand in unparalleled quantities comes at a growing cost to people and the planet. Sometimes we don't even know where it's coming from, how much is coming out of rivers.
"We don't understand the impacts enough of where we're taking it from. "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.