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Crime Earth

Crime Rings Are Trafficking in an Unlikely Treasure: Sand 53

Posted by msmash from the growing-concern dept.
Organized crime is mining sand from rivers and coasts to feed demand worldwide, ruining ecosystems and communities. Can it be stopped? Scientific American reports: Very few people are looking closely at the illegal sand system or calling for changes, however, because sand is a mundane resource. Yet sand mining is the world's largest extraction industry because sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. The only natural resource more widely consumed is water. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded that we are dredging river sand at rates that far outstrip nature's ability to replace it, so much so that the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. The U.N. report confirms that sand mining at current rates is unsustainable.

The greatest demand comes from China, which used more cement in three years (6.6 gigatons from 2011 through 2013) than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century (4.5 gigatons), notes Vince Beiser, author of The World in a Grain. Most sand gets used in the country where it is mined, but with some national supplies dwindling, imports reached $1.9 billion in 2018, according to Harvard's Atlas of Economic Complexity. Companies large and small dredge up sand from waterways and the ocean floor and transport it to wholesalers, construction firms and retailers. Even the legal sand trade is hard to track. Two experts estimate the global market at about $100 billion a year, yet the U.S. Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries indicates the value could be as high as $785 billion.

Sand in riverbeds, lake beds and shorelines is the best for construction, but scarcity opens the market to less suitable sand from beaches and dunes, much of it scraped illegally and cheaply. With a shortage looming and prices rising, sand from Moroccan beaches and dunes is sold inside the country and is also shipped abroad, using organized crime's extensive transport networks, Abderrahmane has found. More than half of Morocco's sand is illegally mined, he says.
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Crime Rings Are Trafficking in an Unlikely Treasure: Sand More

Crime Rings Are Trafficking in an Unlikely Treasure: Sand

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  • I know that desert sand is not useable because the sand grains are too worn down. But can't we just crush or etch rock to make sand that is usable for concrete? Or does that just produce the same type of sand as that found in deserts?

    • No, I think that works fine it just significantly increases the production cost over "stolen for free." As you well know, pirates are notoriously thrifty spenders.

      • It's not the free part though, it's that mining sand is basically just putting a vacuum cleaner and slurping it up. With rocks you're already behind as soon as you pick them up, much less also crushing them.

      • As you well know, pirates are notoriously thrifty spenders.

        Well, not really, the Pirates Expense and Per Diem Code is is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules. In particular they're more than generous in their spending when it comes to women and rum.

    • It would be prohibitively expensive. Rocks are quite hard and crushing them wears down the tools quickly. It's easier and much cheaper to let erosion do the work.

      • The movement of Greenland on the arctic shelf actually causes a large percentage of the oceans sands to be created, and interestingly enough, the meltwater alone creates rivers accounting for at least 10% of the sand found in rivers world wide. Easy to pick up, freshly created sand, where the locals are even happy to build businesses around it. https://news.mongabay.com/2022... [mongabay.com]

        That said, erosion or similar natural elements need not be the only way to find the sand we need. In theory, if we could club togeth

    • Appropriately crushed rock is actually superior> to the vast majority of river/lake sands out there. It's not the same as desert or coast sand, which is typically too worn down for ideal strength concrete. China has experienced building collapses because of illegal sand, by the way.

      If you look at sand grains under magnification, you don't want stuff that looks like a smooth pebble. The ideal sand would look a lot like freshly mined coal or such, coarse with lots of jagged bits.

      Same idea as with glues

    • Desert sand is also full of gypsum. Not always what you want.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by matmos ( 8363419 )
      You can break it down, but it's extremely energy intensive and therefore expensive relative to "mining" preexisting sand.

    • Itâ(TM)s actually the opposite. Desert sand is ground down by the winds and water over millions of years, smooth like pebbles and only have 55% silica by weigh. River sand is irregular and larger, having larger surfaces for binding/interlocking with other materials and itself and have specific natural impurities which make it more reactive, it has 85% silica by weight. In some cases you get higher ratios of silica (near quartz deposits) and that silica sand is both rare to find and also what you would

  • China, which used more cement in three years (6.6 gigatons from 2011 through 2013) than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century (4.5 gigatons)

    Yes, and it shouldn't be too hard to understand why. China is aware that the world is likely to run out of construction-grade sand, and that concrete may become either very expensive or infeasible in the future. They've been building large, mostly-empty cities in preparation for that future, while most of the rest of the world has been ideologically incapable of that kind of long-term investment.

    • China is trying to buy all the sand? The only thing the world is running out of is rate, not availability. River sand used to be a nuisance, not a resource, because no matter how much you dig out the pebbles, nature keeps filling up your precious navigable channels with more.

    • Citation needed. In the 80s all the rumors said that China was buying all our lumber, coating it with wax, and sinking it in the ocean so they could sell it back to us after we cut all our trees down. Cities require a lot of upkeep, even if they're empty. Why do that when they can just make a giant pile of sand until it's needed? Much more likely is that they used that sand in the huge push they were making to modernize.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      That's a really silly way to convey the massive empty cities strewn across China. That isn't why they exist at all.

      https://interestingengineering.com/culture/chinas-ghost-cities-and-its-65-million-empty-homes

      If what you said had any basis in fact, they'd not be using the cheap and unsuitable sands for their construction. But they are.

      No, their massive uninhabited cities exist merely due to the idea of 'creating wealth'. With China's rapidly shrinking population, there is no possibility of those cities being

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Potor ( 658520 )

        That's a really silly way to convey the massive empty cities strewn across China.

        I took it GP was joking.

      • I was sure you were way off the mark. I pulled up my spreadsheet and did a calculation. I figured the worst case decline would be the 0.15% drop last year after COVID. Extrapolate that over 75 years and you have a total decline of 11 percent. Pretty much a recipe for stagnation, but not for catastrophe.

        Then I looked up the UN figures. First I looked at Japan's population decline. It's not holding steady. It's accelerating every year. Odd. Then I looked at their prediction for China. They're predicti

    • they'll be worn into nothing by then. You can't just not live in buildings you know.

      The building boom was China keeping their population busy so they don't start asking why nobody has any civil rights. It's idle hands/devil's plaything bullshit.

    • Re: long term planning and investment (Score:5, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Friday January 19, 2024 @04:31PM (#64173885) Homepage Journal

      Those empty cities were part propaganda and part jobs program.

      We're so great we need all these new cities/we have achieved low unemployment... By building things we don't need.

      The reason the idea that they are stockpiling cities for later use is dumb is twofold. One, China doesn't give stuff away, and nobody can afford to move in. Two, uninhabited buildings ROT. Both literally, in the case of organic materials, and figuratively in the case of metals which can oxidize and/or corrode. Inhabited buildings a) stay dryer inside due to heating and b) have people in them to notice they are degrading and do something about it.

      Those cities will produce more jobs later, though... Mostly in tearing them down. Or in the few cases where they ARE eventually inhabited, medical care for mold exposure.

      • One other thing :

        As I understand all land is leased to the developer by the local governments. I heard of 20 to 50 years length. Not sure if they have anything longer.

        So empty buildings are burning thru the leasehold and will eventually be repossesed by the government.

        At least if it's freehold you still end up owning some land (or share of a piece of land, if an apartment building).

  • It';s everywhere! Get used to it!

  • I don't like sand, it's coarse, rough, irritating, and gets everywhere.

  • I bought some black "Tahitian Moon" sand from a company called CaribSea for my aquarium several years ago. The pH kept going very alkaline and everything in the aquarium was dying after a few months. I lost hundreds of dollars of tropical fish. Turns out the sand was recalled because of contamination, but no notifications were posted regarding the recall. I replaced the sand and the tank is fine now.

    I wonder where that sand came from. Probably harvested from a toxic waste dumping ground. Buyer beware, I gue

  • This was part of the plot in the Elementary [wikipedia.org] episode Sand Trap [fandom.com] (S8.E6) from 2018 -- a company illegally sucked out sand from a river bed, endangering the pilings for a bridge.

    • Re:Not so unlikely (Score:4, Informative)

      by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Friday January 19, 2024 @04:58PM (#64173991) Journal

      This was part of the plot in the Elementary [wikipedia.org] episode Sand Trap [fandom.com] (S8.E6) from 2018 -- a company illegally sucked out sand from a river bed, endangering the pilings for a bridge.

      It was also a subplot in the HBO series Barry; Hank and Cristobal's syndicate trafficked in sand for construction. When you see that, you go "What? Who the hell traffics in sand?", but when you see that China stat, it starts to make sense.

  • The greatest demand comes from China, which used more cement in three years (6.6 gigatons from 2011 through 2013) than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century (4.5 gigatons)

    • They want us to hate china one way or the other. They have been trying to blame them for everything from eating giant alien amoeba babies, to doing forced prostate exams on female ostriches...
      • No   USA  hate ... just  self-interest. Trade with CCP is not in USA citizen workers self-interest.  Reserve all retail and hi-tek production for USA mainland firms & guilds. ZERO IP transfer zero trade excepting medicines .  Tufftitty for CCP producers and pure-play investors  supporting their military ... but FMPOV that's a good thing. 

  • Because dredging operations generally require heavy equipment for gathering and hauling the sand. Making it easy to catch perps in the act. If you have no functioning law enforcement in your area then that's another story altogether.

  • And wastes it (Score:4, Informative)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Friday January 19, 2024 @03:26PM (#64173613)

    The greatest demand comes from China, which used more cement in three years

    Fueled by lax government policies and limited regulation, Chiese developers, such as EverGrande, built apartment complexes like there was no tomorrow. However, things didn't work as they thought and tens of millions of vacant apartments litter the Chinese countryside when developers ran out of money [aljazeera.com]. Millions of Chinese paid money up front to get into one of the buildings, and now have nothing.

    So what do you do with all those vacant, unfinished buildings? You blow [vice.com] them up [telegraph.co.uk]! At some point in the future they'll start all over again, using tons and tons of sand for their cement. How much cement, and consequently sand, did Chinese builders use in two years (2011 - 2013)?

    At first glance, the structures look like a testament to China’s awe-inspiring construction boom, which saw the country use more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the United States did throughout the entire 20th century.

    • Re:And wastes it (Score:4, Informative)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Friday January 19, 2024 @05:18PM (#64174075)

      Fueled by lax government policies and limited regulation, Chiese developers, such as EverGrande, built apartment complexes like there was no tomorrow.

      Oh you got that completely backwards. It wasn't lax government policies that caused developers to build such apartments, they were acting directly on strong government policy. Actually policy is the wrong word since the Chinese government didn't so much enact policy as they did enshrine the goals of mass urbanisation in law, starting with the National Urban Planning Law in 1989.

      EverGrande was the right arm of the government in this case, not sidestepping them.

  • I never expected to read "The U.N. report confirms that sand mining at current rates is unsustainable".

    Is it just me or does anyone else feel like this is hard to get worked up over?

    • Is it just me or does anyone else feel like this is hard to get worked up over?

      Depends. How structurally-secure do you prefer your large buildings to be?

  • I first became aware of it over fifteen years ago. I ran our company's volleyball league and our rec center had four outdoor sand courts. When it came time to add more sand the only that could found at a reasonable price was rough/course and a lot less comfortable on bare feet. I thought sand, really? It had not been of issue a few years before that. Rec center turned into houses and the league switched to a rented grass patch.
  • China did, was to build enough buildings to fill a city and then demolish them. That is not proper use of sand

  • This is especially a shame because crushed glass can easily be rough and jagged enough to meet the same requirements as high-quality sand.

  • This falls under the law of unintended consequences for those who think we can easily add billions more people to the planet.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by matmos ( 8363419 )
      If you believe in the deep state and illuminati wouldn't that be "the law of intended consequences"? asking for a friend...

  • Elementary, season 6, episode 8 (2018): Sand Trap [fandom.com]

  • Yes, knew this was a thing from the HBO documentary series Barry. :-)

    Definitely worth watching if you haven't seen it.

  • Just too granular for their own good.

  • Not really news (Score:4, Informative)

    by BishopBerkeley ( 734647 ) on Friday January 19, 2024 @06:05PM (#64174189) Journal
    Deutsche Welle has reported on this fairly extensively well over a year ago: https://youtu.be/0eVT7iB2BDA?s... [youtu.be]

    https://youtu.be/1iuQjyMP8_c?s... [youtu.be]
    • The only part that is somewhat new is the role of organized crime. Pretty much every nation in Southeast Asia has implemented a ban on the export of sand. That's contributing to the growth of a black market. The article is just plain wrong about nobody paying attention to the issue. This is a geopolitical conflict issue. China is even stealing sand from Taiwan's waters and using it to build a land bridge from the mainland. https://thegeopolitics.com/gra... [thegeopolitics.com]

  • Who would have thought that a plot line in Barry, of all shows, would end up predicting the future?

  • Is it really a secret to anyone else that people always destroy the place where they live? Always. They suck out all the juices and scoop up everything they can reach. There are generally several billion more people than nature can support. But what can we do? We are ordinary students, we have no influence on the masses. Maybe we can use https://edubirdie.com/research-papers-writing-services [edubirdie.com] to write quality work about the sand problem and influence public opinion? The fact that this time it was not the loc

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