Earth Is Running Out of Sand, Spurring a Cutthroat Black Market
Earth Is Running Out of Sand, Spurring a Cutthroat Black Market
Sand is the second most-used resource after water, but it’s unregulated and ripping environments apart.
Understanding the Sand Shortage: Why We're Running Out of Sand
The world uses 50 billion metric tons of sand annually.
Sand is a key ingredient in all concrete and glass production.
There are already ongoing reports of a mafia-style black market for sand.
The world is in crisis yet again. This time around, it’s a sand shortage.
The most-extracted solid material in the world, and second-most used global resource behind water, sand is an unregulated material used extensively in nearly every construction project on Earth. And with 50 billion metric tons consumed annually—enough to build an 88-foot-tall, 88-foot-wide wall around the world—our sand depletion is on the rise, and a completely unregulated rise at that.
Naturally occurring over thousands of years—if not hundreds of thousands of years, most sand originates in the mountains and forms as rivers bring it downstream toward oceans. Sure, head to beaches across the world to feel the sand between your toes, but sand does more than delight beachgoers and build cities. Sand also performs key environmental roles; it is a major factor in protecting from storm surges, ensuring healthy natural habitats for a variety of species, and protecting against erosion.
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NoHo Hank saw this coming.
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The article is from 2022 but you can still avenge Cristobal's death.
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lol, such a good show, now I want to rewatch it…
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This is mostly fear mongering. Sand is nothing more than finely crushed rock, and we are fully capable of crushing it ourselves to obtain the sand we need. The only reason we don't is, of course, economics. At the point where we encounter actual scarcity, we'll start producing and using artificial sand.
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Why the world is running out of sand
Our planet is covered in it. Huge deserts from the Sahara to Arizona have billowing dunes of the stuff. Beaches on coastlines around the world are lined with sand. We can even buy bags of it at our local hardware shop for a fistful of small change.
But believe it or not, the world is facing a shortage of sand. How can we possibly be running low on a substance found in virtually every country on earth and that seems essentially limitless?
The problem lies in the type of sand we are using. Desert sand is largely useless to us. The overwhelming bulk of the sand we harvest goes to make concrete, and for that purpose, desert sand grains are the wrong shape. Eroded by wind rather than water, they are too smooth and rounded to lock together to form stable concrete.
The sand we need is the more angular stuff found in the beds, banks, and floodplains of rivers, as well as in lakes and on the seashore. The demand for that material is so intense that around the world, riverbeds and beaches are being stripped bare, and farmlands and forests torn up to get at the precious grains. And in a growing number of countries, criminal gangs have moved in to the trade, spawning an often lethal black market in sand.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is-running-out-of-sand
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At least Anakin would be happy here.
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Guess the Sahara is finally shrinking /s
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What's next a nitrogen shortage?
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Helium shortage actually. And yet we keep wasting the stuff on filling party balloons. 😞
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No we've solved that one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
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