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Why something as seemingly minute as sand is as critical to modern life as cells are to the human body

Vince Beiser: Today, your life depends on sand. You are surrounded by it almost every minute of your day.

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Sand has been used for construction since at least the time of the ancient Egyptians. In the 15th century, an Italian artisan figured out how to turn sand into fully transparent glass, which made possible the microscopes, telescopes, and other technologies that helped drive the Renaissance’s scientific revolution.

But at the dawn of the 20th century, almost all of the world’s large structures — apartment blocks, office buildings, churches, palaces, fortresses — were still made with stone, brick, clay, or wood. The tallest buildings stood fewer than ten stories high. Roads were mostly paved with broken stone, IF at all. Glass in the form of windows or tableware was a relatively rare and expensive luxury.

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The mass manufacture and deployment of concrete and glass changed all that, reshaping how and where people lived in the industrialized world. Decades later, digital technology, powered by silicon chips and other sophisticated hardware made with sand, began reshaping the global economy in ways gargantuan and quotidian.

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The World in a Grain.
The World in a Grain. Photo by Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House

Today, your life depends on sand. You are surrounded by it almost every minute of your day.

Chances are good you woke up in a building made at least partly out of sand. Even if the walls are made of brick or wood, the foundation is most likely concrete. Maybe it’s also plastered with stucco, which is mostly sand. The paint on your walls likely contains finely ground silica sand to make it more durable, and may include other forms of high-purity sands to increase its brightness, oil absorption, and colour consistency.

You flicked on the light, provided by a glass bulb made from melted sand. You meandered to the bathroom, where you brushed your teeth over a sink made of sand-based porcelain, using water filtered through sand at your local purification plant. Your toothpaste likely contained hydrated silica, a form of sand that acts as a mild abrasive to help remove plaque and stains.

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Your underwear snapped into place thanks to an elastic made with silicone, a synthetic compound also derived from sand. (Silicone also helps shampoo make your hair shinier, makes shirts less wrinkle-prone, and reinforced the boot sole with which Neil Armstrong made the first footprint on the moon.)

At the office, the screen of your computer, the chips that run it, and the fiber-optic cables that connect it to the Internet are all made from sand. The paper you print your memos on is probably coated with a sand-based film that helps it absorb printer ink. Even the glue that makes your sticky notes stick is derived from sand.

Though the supply might seem endless, usable sand is a finite resource like any other. Grains of sand can be made by glaciers grinding up stones, by oceans degrading seashells and corals, even by volcanic lava chilling and shattering upon contact with air or water. (That’s where Hawaii’s black sand beaches come from.) Nearly 70 percent of all sand grains, however, are particles of quartz, a form of silica. This sand is formed by the erosion of mountains and other rock formations, which are then washed by the rain into rivers, and eventually the sea. The average time for this cycle is 200 million years.

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If at first glance most of these sand grains look pretty much the same, there are many different types, with different attributes, strengths, and weaknesses. Some are prized for their hardness, some for their pliancy; some for their roundness, some for their angularity; some for their colour, some for their purity. Some sands are put through elaborate physical or chemical processes to alter their capabilities, or are combined with other materials to perform tasks they could not in their original state.

Even the glue that makes your sticky notes stick is derived from sand.

Construction sand — the hard, angular grains used primarily to make concrete — is abundant, easily found, and not especially pure. Its grains are mainly quartz, but include other minerals, which vary depending on where the sand was mined. This sand is often mixed with gravel to make concrete, or is used on its own to make mortar, plaster, and roofing components.

Industrial sands are purer — at least 95 percent silica — and are found in fewer places than construction sand. These are the sands you need to make glass, moulds for metal foundries, to add lustre to paint, and filter the water in swimming pools, among many other tasks. Some of the unique properties of industrial sands suit them for highly specific jobs.

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Relatively small amounts of extremely high-purity quartz are made into high-tech equipment essential for manufacturing computer chips. Some are also used to create the sparkling sand traps of exclusive golf courses or to line Persian Gulf horse-racing tracks.

For the most part, the grains found in deserts like those surrounding the Persian Gulf are too round to use for construction. The reason is that wind is harsher than water. In a river, water cushions the impact of the grains tumbling against one another. In a desert, they just bang full force into one another, rounding off their corners and angles. Round objects don’t lock together as nicely as angular ones. It’s like the difference between trying to pile up a bunch of marbles as opposed to stacking up a bunch of blocks.

We summon up these tiny building blocks in many different ways and in many places. In some places, multinational companies dredge sand from riverbeds or gouge it out of hillsides with massive machines. In others, local people haul it away with shovels and pickup trucks. Generally speaking, sand mining is a relatively low-tech industry. The basic machinery involved hasn’t changed much since the 1920s. Sand from the beds of rivers and lakes is dredged up with suction pumps, or clamshell claws mounted on floating platforms, or ships equipped with scoops set on conveyor belts.

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Underwater sands are easier to mine, since there’s no intervening earth, known as overburden, to scrape away. They also come largely cleansed of dust-sized particles. On land, sand is usually quarried from open pits. Sometimes that requires using explosives and crushing machines to break apart sandstone, rock made of sand that has been glued together over the millennia by naturally occurring cements.

Regardless of its source, the raw sand needs to be washed and run through a series of screens to sort it by size. Because sand is so common, there are sand mines all over the place, in almost every country. In the United States alone, 4,100 companies and government agencies harvest aggregate — the industry term for sand and gravel.

Though it’s often carried out on a small, seemingly insignificant scale, there’s no escaping the fact that sand mining is mining; it’s an extractive industry that inevitably affects the natural world. All those thousands of small mines, together with many larger ones, add up to a colossal impact.


The beach near the tiny town of Marina, Calif., a couple of hours south of San Francisco, is a broad stretch of wild, undeveloped sand sloping into the foaming waves of the Pacific Ocean. Much of its miles-long expanse is designated as a state park. Hidden away behind high dunes bedecked with green and orange succulents, it’s a postcard-perfect slice of natural beauty.

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But until recently this postcard-perfect slice of natural beauty was also one of the “the fastest-eroding” shorelines in the state. “We’re losing eight acres a year of pristine shore, some of the most beautiful in the world,” Ed Thornton, a retired coastal engineer and former professor told a crowd of protesters gathered on the beach in early 2017. “It’s because of sand mining.”

In the United States alone, 4,100 companies and government agencies harvest aggregate — the industry term for sand and gravel.

The demonstration was being held near a hulking dredge operated by Cemex, a global construction firm based in Mexico. At the time, this machine was sucking up an estimated 270,000 cubic meters of sand from a tide-filled lagoon every year. The grains were to be bagged and sold to contractors across the country for sand blasting and lining oil and gas wells.

For most of the 20th century there were many such ocean sand mines along the California coast. But in the late 1980s the federal government shut them down because it had become clear the loss of sand was severely eroding the Golden State’s famous beaches. The Cemex operation, however, kept running thanks to a legal loophole: the dredging area appeared to sit above the mean high tide line, putting it out of federal jurisdiction.

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Activists and local legislators fought for years to shut the mine down. And a few months after that demonstration on the beach, they finally won: Cemex agreed to phase out the dredging by late 2020.

But it’s a small victory in a large-scale war — where environmentalists are often pitted against criminals not corporations.

Thieves in Jamaica made off with 1,300 feet of white sand from one of the island’s finest beaches in 2008. Smaller-scale beach-sand looting is ongoing in Morocco, Algeria, Russia, and many other places around the world. Sand miners have also completely obliterated at least two dozen Indonesian islands since 2005. Hauled off boatload by boatload, the sediment forming those islands ended up mostly in Singapore, which needs titanic amounts of sand to continue its program of artificially adding territory by reclaiming land from the sea.

The city-state has created an extra 50 square miles in the past 40 years and is still adding more, making it by far the world’s largest sand importer. The demand has denuded beaches and riverbeds in neighbouring countries to such an extent that Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia have all restricted or completely banned exports of sand to Singapore.

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The sand underneath the water isn’t safe, either. Sand miners are increasingly turning to the seafloor, vacuuming up millions of tons with dredges the size of aircraft carriers. One-third of all aggregate used in construction in London and southern England comes from beneath the United Kingdom’s offshore waters. Japan relies on sea sand even more heavily, pulling up around 40 million cubic meters from the ocean floor each year. That’s enough to fill up the Houston Astrodome 33 times.

Sand extraction from rivers has also caused untold millions of dollars worth of damage to infrastructure around the world.

Hauling all those grains from the seafloor tears up the habitat of bottom-dwelling creatures and organisms. The churned-up sediment clouds the water, suffocating fish and blocking the sunlight that sustains underwater vegetation. The dredging ships dump grains too small to be useful, creating further waterborne dust plumes that can affect aquatic life far from the original site.

Sand mining is also damaging lands and livelihoods far from any coast. Fracking depends on a particular type of especially hard, rounded sand grains to help extract oil and gas from shale rock formations. There are huge deposits of just that kind of “frac sand” in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Result: Thousands of acres of fields and forests have been stripped away so that miners can get their hands on those rare grains.

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Colossal amounts of more ordinary construction sand is dredged up from riverbeds or dug from nearby floodplains. In central California, floodplain sand mining has diverted river waters into dead-end detours and deep pits that have proven fatal traps for salmon. In northern Australia, floodplains that are home to the world’s biggest collection of rare carnivorous plants are being wiped out by sand mining. In Sri Lanka, sand extraction has left some riverbeds so deeply lowered that seawater intrudes into them, damaging drinking water supplies.

In Vietnam, researchers with the World Wildlife Fund believe sand mining on the Mekong River is a key reason the 15,000-square-mile Mekong Delta — home to 20 million people and source of half of all the country’s food and much of the rice that feeds the rest of Southeast Asia — is gradually disappearing.

For centuries, the delta has been replenished by sediment carried down from the mountains of Central Asia by the Mekong River. But in recent years, in each of the several countries along its course, miners have begun pulling huge quantities of sand from the riverbed to use for the construction of Southeast Asia’s surging cities. “The sediment flow has been halved,” says Marc Goichot, a researcher with the WWF. At this rate, nearly half the delta will be wiped out by the end of this century.

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Sand extraction from rivers has also caused untold millions of dollars worth of damage to infrastructure around the world. The stirred-up sediment clogs up water supply equipment, and all the earth removed from riverbanks leaves the foundations of bridges exposed and unsupported. A 1998 study found that each ton of aggregate mined from the San Benito River on California’s central coast caused $11 million in infrastructure damage. In many countries, sand miners have dug up so much ground that they have dangerously exposed the foundations of bridges and hillside buildings. A bridge undermined by sand extraction in Portugal gave way in 2001 just as a bus was passing over it; 70 people were killed.

River-bottom sand also plays an important role in local water supplies. It acts like a sponge, catching the water as it flows past and percolating it down into underground aquifers. But when that sand has been stripped away, instead of being drawn underground, the water just keeps on moving to the sea, leaving aquifers to shrink. As result, there are parts of Italy and southern India where river sand mining has drastically depleted local drinking water supplies.

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Governments around the world have tried, with varying levels of commitment, to regulate and restrict sand mining.

Even after the sand miners are done, the battered landscape they leave behind can be startlingly dangerous. In the United States and elsewhere, mining companies are generally required to restore the land to a certain extent after they are finished. But in less well organized countries, miners leave behind deep open pits that fill with rainwater and trash, degenerating into swampy breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes.

In response to all this destruction, governments around the world have tried, with varying levels of commitment, to regulate and restrict sand mining. But that, in turn, has spawned a booming worldwide black market in sand.

At one end, this includes legitimate businesses overstepping the boundaries of their permits. In 2003, for instance, California filed a lawsuit against Hanson Aggregates, a global mining outfit, for unauthorized dredging of and from the San Francisco Bay. “These sand pirates have enriched themselves by stealing from the state and ripping off taxpayers,” the state’s attorney general declared at the time. Hanson eventually settled, paying the state $42 million.

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At the other extreme are outright criminals, from petty thieves to well-organized gangs willing to kill to protect their sand business. In 2015, New York state authorities slapped a $700,000 fine on a Long Island contractor who had illegally gouged thousands of tons of sand from a 4.5-acre patch of land near the town of Holtsville and then refilled the pit with toxic waste. These “scoop and fill” operations have become common as the area’s legitimate sources of sand have been increasingly depleted, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

In other countries, the black market takes more dramatic forms. One of Israel’s most notorious gangsters, a man allegedly involved in a spate of recent car bombings, got his start stealing sand from public beaches. In Kenya illegal sand miners reportedly coax children into dropping out of school to come work for them. Dozens of Malaysian officials were charged in 2010 with accepting bribes and sexual favours in exchange for allowing illegally mined sand to be smuggled into Singapore.

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Like any big-money black market, sand also generates violence. People have been shot, stabbed, beaten, tortured, and imprisoned over sand mining in countries around the world — some for trying to stop the environmental damage, some in battles over control of the land, and some caught in the cross fire.

In Gambia, security forces recently shot dead two people protesting against local sand miners. In Indonesia in 2016, an activist was beaten into a coma, and another tortured and stabbed to death, by the sand miners they were trying to stop. In Kenya, at least nine people have been killed — including a policeman hacked to death with machetes — in battles between farmers and sand miners in recent years.

In India, where the illicit sand trade is estimated at $2.3 billion a year, battles among and against “sand mafias” have reportedly killed hundreds of people — including police officers, government officials, and ordinary people who get in their way.

At root, all of this is an issue of supply and demand. The supply of sand that can be mined sustainably is finite. But the demand for it is not. Every day the world’s population is growing. More and more of us want decent housing to live in, offices and factories to work in, malls to shop in, and roads to connect them. Economic development as it has historically been understood requires concrete and glass. It requires sand.

From The World In A Grain by Vince Beiser. Published by arrangement with Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Vince Beiser.

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