Sinking sands

Sand is becoming so scarce that stealing it has become an attractive business model. With residential towers rising ever higher and development continuing apace in Asia and Africa, demand for the finite resource is insatiable.

It’s during the few hours when the sea retreats and reveals its underlying treasure that the people come. At first they appear like ants, small dots on the mountain slope, but the group, perhaps 100, quickly draws closer. The men carry shovels, and the women, buckets. They’ve come to steal Cape Verde’s sand.

A young man jumps into the ocean and wades a few metres out. The water rises up to his chest. He dives under, and when he returns to the surface, his sludgy bounty drips from his shovel. He energetically shovels the mass into a bucket held by a woman waiting next to him.

As she lifts the heavy bucket onto her head, she pauses for a moment, closing her eyes. A wave hits from behind and rolls over her. Once it passes, she clenches her teeth as she wades back to the sandy shore.

The sand robbers are in a hurry. The ebb here lasts six hours and they can only mine the sand during low tide. Very few of the people here can swim, and the task can be life-threatening even at low tide as the waves break over their heads and the currents tug at their legs.

The sand has long since disappeared from the high-tide shorelines at beaches like this, with only dirt and stones left to mark the coastline. Once the sand disappeared on the shore, the people began venturing into the water to find it. They've since been mining away their island's sand, one bucket at a time.

Diminutive Cape Verde, located around 600 km west of Senegal, comprises nine inhabited islands in the Atlantic Ocean formed by volcanoes. It’s a beguiling land, one where papayas, mangoes and pineapples grow between canyons.

The sun shines year-round, the waters of the Atlantic foam on its shores and rare turtles bury their eggs on beaches. Cape Verde is considered one of the safest and most stable regions in Africa. It would be a dream destination for tourists if it weren’t for the fact that the Cape Verdeans are hard at work destroying their beaches.

Of course, there are still intact shorelines on Cape Verde – places where luxury hotels serve guests from Italy, Germany and Portugal. But in other areas, the beaches are disappearing.

A global problem
The phenomenon of disappearing beaches is not unique to Cape Verde. With demand for sand greater than ever, it can be seen in most parts of the world, including Kenya, New Zealand, Jamaica and Morocco. In short, our beaches are disappearing. “It’s the craziest thing I’ve seen in the past 25 years,” says Robert Young, a coastal researcher at Western Carolina University. “We’re talking about ugly, miles-long moonscapes where nothing can live anymore.”

The sand on our ocean shores, once a symbol of inexhaustibility, has suddenly become scarce. So scarce that stealing it has become attractive.

Never before has Earth been graced with the prosperity we are seeing today, with countries like China, India and Brazil booming. But that also means that demand for sand has never been so great. It is used in the production of computer chips, plates and mobile phones. More than anything, though, it is used to make cement. You can find it in the skyscrapers in Shanghai, the artificial islands of Dubai and in Germany’s autobahns.
‘Sand is like oil, it is finite’

In 2012, Germany alone mined 235 million tons of sand and gravel, with 95 per cent of it going to the construction industry. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) estimates global consumption at an average of 40 billion tons per year, with close to 30 billion tons of that used in concrete. That would be enough to build a 27m X 27 m wall circling the globe. Sands are “now being extracted at a rate far greater than their renewal,” a March 2014 UNEP report found. “Sand is rarer than one thinks,” it reads.
At times, the paucity of sand has even forced workers to put down their tools at construction sites in India and China. It has also halted fracking-related drilling in the United States because the process requires that sand be mixed in with the water pumped into the ground in order to keep open the fissures from which gas is extracted. “Sand is like oil,” explains Klaus Schwarzer, a geoscientist at Germany's University of Kiel. “It is finite.” Western Carolina University’s Young adds, “If we're not careful, we'll run out of sand.”

Failing efforts
In 2012, the environmental organisation Global Witness released satellite images showing how Singapore has expanded its territory by 22 per cent over the past 50 years. The group provided evidence that the sand used to enlarge Singapore came from neighbouring countries like Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia and had, in some instances, been extracted illegally. One country after the other then issued a ban on mining sand. Singaporean dredging vessels responded by setting course for Cambodia. Phnom Penh responded by likewise banning exports of the resource.

The Ganges River stretches for 2,300 km across India. It runs from high in the Himalayas down toward Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal. It passes through Indian cities like Kolkata (Calcutta) and Kanpur, which are growing quickly and have voracious appetites for sand. “The only thing that still reaches Bangladesh is a mixture of clay and silt,” says geologist Dill. “People even fish for stones.”

With laws prohibiting the extraction of sand from rivers in many places, it has become a black market good. Hardly a day passes without Indian newspapers reporting on the dealings of the “sand mafia.” “We only hear of the consequences when a textile factory collapses in Bangladesh,” Dill says. “People aren’t building on sand there anymore,” and without sand, the ground isn’t stable enough.

Not all types of sand are identical. For microchips, lenses and glass, pure quartz sand – of the type found in Germany for example – is required. The construction industry also uses gravel, which by definition has grains measuring between 2 and 63 mm. It is mixed with cement and water to make concrete.

In reality, there is plenty of gravel in the world. It’s just not always where construction companies need it most. One might think that the Arab Peninsula, with its high sand dunes, would have the largest reserves, but desert sand isn't suitable for every purpose. It contains a surfeit of chalk, clay and iron oxide. And while the countries have considerable amounts of marl, quality sand is also necessary to produce cement.

Paradoxically, then, the desert region is suffering a shortage of sand.
The Arab Emirates want to continue growing – both vertically, with their massive skylines, and in area. Construction crews in Dubai, Qatar and Bahrain are all busy erecting the world's tallest residential towers and massive airports. Dubai reclaimed land using 385 million tons of sand for its Palm Island project, which was then followed by a second one.

Now work is continuing on another artificial archipelago project called The World. Nearby Saudi Arabia possesses sand reserves, but it has repeatedly restricted supplies to neighbouring countries – forcing construction cranes to come to a grinding halt.
NYT