Why are we running out, and why does the illegal sand trade exist?

Contrary to what Anakin Skywalker may have you believe, sand can be coarse or fine, rough or smooth, salty or contain shell fragments, regular or irregular. Because of this, our largest basins of “spare” sand on earth are useless for the tasks for which we demand sand.

And really, we do demand a lot of sand. One source places our usage at 50 billion tonnes per year. That’s equivalent to 18kg per person per day. (UniQueensland 2019) The main sand consumers are construction and infrastructure, followed by land reclamation and beach improvement projects.

The Guardian have just released a piece about the dwindling sand supply, which was good but focused mostly on sand for land reclamation. Over 80% of all sand used is in construction, so, to me, considering sand problems through the lens of “a few countries are building beaches” is a real understatement of the true danger. The danger is that concrete demand is ‘inelastic’, which is to say, even if prices went up sharply, we would still need to grin and bear it if we want to build houses, roads, schools and skyscrapers.

As previously mentioned, most sand is useless for these purposes. Construction-grade sand requires too large a particle size for desert sand to be used, as this has been eroded for millennia into ultra-fine grains. It also generally requires a low quantity of salt crystals and the presence of no seashell fragments. This rules out many beaches as potential sources. The caviar of sand, then, the real good stuff you want your house being made out of, comes from rivers, deltas, lakes and dunes.

​Hopefully, it is therefore not a surprise to you that behind the bureaucratic scenes, a war for sand is playing out globally. Those looking to sell wish to extract more and more from landscapes that local residents wish to maintain. Countries right across the wealth and political spectrums have sand legislations protecting and limiting the amount that may be harvested. The problem is that you can try to control supply, but we are finding it much harder to control demand.

Where the supply does not meet the demand, a void is created. That void is filled by off-record, or illegal mining. When the tools needed are just a shovel and a van, and the areas we attempt to protect are vast, stopping the illegal trade would be very difficult. That is before you even consider resistance to law enforcement, which, rather unshockingly, is something criminal sand gangs put up.

The simplest fact as to who’s buying the illegal sand is that where there is construction, there is demand, and it’s not easy for those who are demanding to ensure their sources are all legitimate. I estimate the failed “The Line” Saudi project on its own to have needed 11.7 billion tonnes of cement. That’s equivalent to around 4 straight years of the global total usage by these estimates. All the largest countries economically and by population (China, India, the USA, etc.) make up a very high demand for cement, and thus sand. ​

A Case Study: indicative of so many others

In this piece, however, we will focus on the sand extracted from the Mekong Delta, and its use both domestically and where it’s shipped to. I am not necessarily suggesting that Vietnamese management of the sand trade is the worst in the world; it is likely indicative of many other scenarios… but this specific region has been studied academically quite thoroughly and allows me to be scathing and say it’s a total disaster without risking a libel complaint.

​ Singapore is one of the special countries that demands both lots of sand per capita for high-quality infrastructure and huge high-rises, and is also a huge per capita user of land reclamation. From 1965 to 2016, the country grew 22% in land area, mostly by doing the simplest form of ‘reclamation’, where you simply infill an area with material (including loads of sand) until the land is above sea level. A significant supplier of this sand is the Mekong, where companies extract and compromise the fishing-based lifestyles of millions in Vietnam and Cambodia. The sand used to improve the well-being of a touch under 6 million Singaporeans is extracted from the lands lived in by many 10s if not hundreds, of millions.

​ The general theme is outcomes suiting the rich and damaging the poor, on both a citizen and nation level. This holds true for most of the sand trade globally, not just in the Mekong/Singapore.

A Case Study: What’s the situation in the Mekong?

Consistently from 2013-2020, around 25-35Million metres cubed per year were extracted. The amount permitted has changed in this period, but the study found that changing the quota from 11 million to 15 million only decreased the ratio that was illegally taken, and did not change the total amount taken. A BBC report placed the number of those impacted as “half a million homes at risk”. The number is significantly impacted by the negative impacts on all marine life, and hence, fishing is likely 10-20x that much.

Much of the dredging, pumping and digging is done by relatively small boats. The permit system is complicated, and it’s impossible to track the vessels throughout the maze of the delta with the limited policing budgets assigned. For residents, many boats go past all day, and a few stop to extract from banks near them and then move on. Residents surveyed living by the river around the city of Long Xuyen consistently reported that they saw more than 30 sand boats a day.

​ The same 2013-2020 study found that tracing where the illegal sand goes is very difficult; they could only be sure that it’s occurring through analysing the damaged/excavated river beds. Recent new data suggests that they may be running out, and already the 30Mn metres cubed has become impossible to extract each year, since they have now become a major importer of Cambodian sand.

​ Nearly all of the sand going into Singapore appears to be on record as from Malaysia, which makes sense given that Malaysia surrounds it. The limited papers available on Malaysian sand extraction seem to suggest that Malaysia physically does not have the capacity to produce the amount of sand it exports, let alone all the amount it uses, as well as the amount that enters Singapore. Accordingly, some very weakly regulated and accounted for web of sand-sprawl is occurring across borders around the Mekong Area.

​Related to the recent need for Vietnam to import Cambodian sand (also extracted from the Mekong), the cost of infrastructure and development in the country has gone up alongside the increasing price of importing. Going forward, they will be forced to choose between increasingly more expensive infrastructure (using imported sand) or increasingly more irresponsible extraction.

A Case Study: A snippet of the very long list of reasons why it’s going so badly.

The first issue, found by a 2023 piece of in-person surveying, is that:

“Only residents directly affected by riverbank collapse were aware of the implications of sand mining and its negative effect on bank stability” from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-43114-w

​ You may be inclined to at first think, well, they should have an idea that someone digging out all of the bank is going to make it less stable. Instead, though, consider what this is like for a local resident who had minimal schooling. Machines turn up and say, “yeah, we’re fine, we’re allowed to do this, don’t worry”… until one day suddenly your house has subsided into the river, or your road or car. It’s a problem that arrives suddenly and catastrophically at the doorsteps of low-income people, long after those who caused it have left the scene.

If the awareness were greater, significant losses and damages could be mitigated, and local residents would be more aware of both the risk and whether their village was ‘fair game’ for dredging. Hence, they would be more able to report illegal mining operations that are threatening their locale.

The next cause of failing is that when Vietnam did attempt a crackdown on illegal sand mining, it drove the price up significantly and negatively impacted their infrastructure projects and to cope economically, the crackdowns were reduced. The failing here is that when weighing up costs, the long-term ecological damage is ignored, the damage to the livelihoods and cultures of rural lower-class people is ignored, and direct price hikes personally affecting the government’s budgets are highlighted. A balanced economic analysis would almost certainly find that for every extra dollar that is spent on infrastructure after crackdowns, there would be several dollars worth of Ecosystem Services gained.

​ I’ve saved the most damning cause of all of the above problems for last… The permitted limits that are set and extracted legally are seemingly totally made up. The academic paper puts this a little more tactfully, saying they may have “been arbitrarily determined” and “the sand supply in the VMD has never been calculated as provincial officials did not have the technical and financial capacity to do so.”

If the latter assertion is true, it is impossible for the quotas to be calculated and correct. If you don’t know how much new sand is produced, you can’t know how much is sustainable to take to balance this. And if you don’t know the total that’s sustainable to extract, you can’t give out around 20 Million Tonnes of permits every year without taking a massive gamble as to whether that number will or won’t destroy the delta.

​ In the above section about the current situation, I mentioned that those who do have the permits are also engaged in illegal sand dredging outside of their permitted zones. The reason for this is that the amount they are allowed to extract from those zones is so high that they know if they do it… the permitted patch will be empty soon, and they might stop getting permits for it. So to keep that permitted region healthy and stable, they fulfil their quota amount with sand from elsewhere. They can then sell this on to other countries as properly permitted within the extraction limit sand and the purchaser is none the wiser about the unsustainable destruction they have just funded.

​ It is only thanks to great satellite work from researchers that we know any of this. Policing the whole of the thousands of km of sub-rivers in the Mekong delta would be ridiculously difficult. Even with some automation and use of drones/cameras and stricter dredging boat licenses, it would be almost impossible to stop illegal sand extraction in the Mekong.

​ Currently, though, it seems clear that just allocating permits based on true sustainable extraction would reduce the amount being taken. Pair it with a range of measures to police exports and all large vessels, and the problem would vastly reduce. But, to put it at its most cynical, it would cost real hard cash money to save the environment and fisheries that don’t have a clear cash value that you can point to on a balance sheet. So for now, until the situation gets too extreme to ignore, the Mekong Delta will continue to be dredged extensively. Sometimes within the stipulations of arbitrary permits, and sometimes outside of them.

​

A solution so interesting, I’m giving it its own separate article.

Sorry to string you along like Dickens writing a newspaper serialised novella, but one of the big, promising answers to this impossible supply demand issue, that is set to double or triple in our lifetimes… Is to just make sand. Ore-sand, Artificial sand and manufactured sand are all terms used for sands made using staged crushers and other machines to turn quarried stone into building-grade sand. Currently, it constitutes a minority of sand used in construction, since it’s much more expensive to make it than just grab what’s already lying around by a river. Progress towards changing that with subsidies, research and recycling of waste rock from processes like mining.

The reason that this solution is so desirable is the following:

• No amount of neat little permits and diligently applied sustainable extraction will remove the fact that we really want to build more things than there is sand to build with

• In places like India, where a very strong and powerful sand mafia exists, attempts to control them and fight them directly have failed on multiple occasions and cost many lives. Undermining their business and making them obsolete with a totally new industry could be a way to take down such groups without having to fight them

• It could use materials currently being produced as a waste byproduct

• It’s not some far-fetched technology that may or may not come to fruition; it already works and is done

​ It does have its problems. Beyond just cost, it could become a case of shifting the problem from unsustainable dredging to unsustainable quarrying, should we start quarrying new rock specifically for the purpose of crushing. It may also become a solution only for the rich nations, while poorer nations still suffer a sand crisis, but one that is now shoved under the rug and getting even less public attention than the current sand crisis. I think the complexity of the potential solution deserves its own long piece, so it will get one.

​ If you do want to know more about manufactured sand, the scaling-up achieved in China, and the scaling-up issues for the rest of the world… it’ll be out soon, and I’ll update this piece with a direct link to it once it’s released.

If you think you can survive just fine without knowing the intricacies of manufactured sand, at least you now know about The Silent Crisis of Sand.