Alec Caldwell
Will we soon run out of sand for construction?
Canadian ContractorThis may sound like a crazy idea, but read this article to see how much pressure is being put on world sand supplies.
Sand has become the #1 consumed natural resource on the planet, after fresh water. The annual global consumption of sand is estimated to be 15 billion tons – at a value of $70 billion.
It takes 200 tons of sand to build a medium-sized house and 1 km of highway requires 30,000 tonnes of sand.
Worldwide, China has increased its thirst for sand almost five-fold in the last 20 years, while use in the rest of the world has increased by almost 60 per cent in that time.
Skyscrapers, airports, motorways and artificial islands are massive consumers of sand. These huge projects and the construction boom in many countries over the past 15 years are exhausting sand resources. Concrete cannot be made, currently, with sand substitutes (economically). But massive tracts of desert sand, such as in the Sahara, are no good as a source of construction/concrete sand: their particles are too round.
Sand is also found in products like detergents, cosmetics, toothpaste, solar panels, silicon chips and more.
It’s estimated that if we built a wall around the equator out of the concrete produced every year in the world, it would be 27 metres high and 27 metres wide
Sand wars are happening, as multinational companies dredge it up massive amounts from our oceans using huge machines. As land quarries and riverbeds become tapped out, these sand miners are turning to the seas.
Thousands of ships are vacuuming up huge amounts, wrecking rivers, deltas, and marine ecosystems. Beach sand is such a coveted commodity, as a source of construction sand, that some scientists have even proposed crunching up glass bottles and using this material as replacement beach “sand.”
Its reckoned at least two dozen Indonesian islands have disappeared since 2005 and these islands ended up mostly being shipped to Singapore, as it artificially adds territory by reclaiming land from the sea. The damage to the environmental has been extreme that Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam have all restricted or banned exports of sand to Singapore. China even created recently a new island, reclaiming around 2,000 acres (roughly 1,500 football fields) from the China Sea using sand. This disputed island is currently a hot topic in current world news this week.
Ocean sand is free and its removal by sand companies won’t stop until they’ve exhausted every grain. Fisheries, we try to put regulations on. Sand, obviously (as of now), we have not. Sand may not disappear any time soon, but expect the price of it to go up.
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Wow….interesting little article. I never thought of how many products are related to sand and the quantity that we use in construction.
I was at a construction event dinner about ten years ago. I happen to ask a CBM executive about his job. I said every industry has it’s problems. What do you see as your industries biggest problem. He said something shocking. WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF SAND !!