Sand Depletion
We’re running out of sand.
That was an odd bit of news I stumbled across recently by way of a link Tyler Cowen posted at the Marginal Revolutions blog. It left me wondering if the issue was real, since there are claims of scarcity about nearly everything. Those claims have varying levels of plausibility, since they are frequently asserted by special interest groups.
But sand? Surely the beaches are full of it, right? And what about all the deserts where the stuff seems to blow about in infinite amounts?
It turns out that the type of sand needed for industry is more particular, if you’ll pardon the expression. A lot of it is needed to make cement, for instance, and the sand from deserts and coastal oceans—the substance that has been subjected to the wearing effects of wind and water erosion—is too rounded off at the granular level to hold concrete together well. Applications such as glass production, including for solar panels and semiconductors, also have requirements that are more specific than what’s at the beach.
The analyst Conor McGuire at the Value Situations newsletter took a deep dive into the challenges and opportunities sand depletion has meant for sand producer U.S. Silica Holdings in recent years. There are a lot of factors driving global sand demand and these are projected to increase steadily.
What really makes the claim of scarcity plausible is that organized crime is involved in the global sand business. Criminal enterprise reliably steps in where demand is high and supply is constrained, especially by restrictive government regulation. Yet sand is an important part of ecosystems, and its industrial extraction threatens to bring ecosystems to collapse. Governments thus try to limit its mining, with weak governments failing at the task in the face of corruption.
Scientific American has a recent, detailed article titled “Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand” describing the phenomenon.
Louise Shelley, who leads the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University […] realized sand mining could be a natural evolution of organized crime when, five years ago, she was a guest at a NATO lunch conference held near the Pentagon. A top NATO official approached her to talk about illegal fishing off West Africa, saying it posed a serious threat to European and NATO security. They talked about how the low threshold for entry into an environmental crime such as wildlife poaching can draw criminal rings and then lead them into other types of organized environmental crime, such as illegal logging. Sand mining was another case in point. Shelley says in northwestern Africa there is a confluence of trafficking factors: the region offers entry to European markets, and its mosaic of fragile governments, terrorist groups and corrupt international corporations makes it vulnerable.
In addition to social instability, Shelley is concerned about sand mining's “devastating environmental impacts.” Stripping away sand removes nature's physical system for holding water, with huge effects for people's way of life. River sand acts like a sponge, helping to replenish the entire watershed after dry spells; if too much sand is removed, natural replenishment can no longer sustain the river, which aggravates water supply for people and leads to loss of vegetation and wildlife. Harvesting has removed so much sand from Asia's Mekong Delta that the river system is drying up.
As is often the case with such reporting, a real problem can often be blown out of proportion by activists writing the news stories or by journalists interviewing only activists. More balanced reporting would also examine reasons not to be alarmed.
Still, as something entirely outside the realm of public attention, this might be an actual problem.
As a bonus, journalist Vince Beiser published a book all about sand in 2018 that looks rather enticing titled The World in a Grain. Here’s a link to the Kindle version as a gateway to reader reviews and further editions.
I know sand is used in fracking. I went down the rabbit hole (ie Google) to investigate and found out WI is a major supplier of frac sand. Who knew? Not me! https://geology.com/articles/frac-sand/
The think the UN needs to tell those crime rings to go pound sand! 😡