Sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and yet we just can’t get enough of it.
In 2018, Singapore was the world's biggest importer of sand by value.
Each year, the country consumes over 5 tons of sand per resident.
Over the past twenty years, they have imported over 500 million tons of sand.
And with these sand imports, Singapore has created massive amounts of wealth
for itself and its people.
But the sand has to come from somewhere. Its mass removal has big environmental impacts,
and has opened the country up to criticism.
But is it even possible to replace sand? That’s what we are going to talk about in this video.
## Making Wealth with Land
Over the past 100 years,
Singapore has used land reclamation to remake its shores and unlock vast wealth for its people.
In 1965, the city-state was about 585 square kilometers large.
By 2014, extensive land reclamation projects have expanded the city out
to 718 square kilometers. As of this writing, the country measures 728 square kilometers.
In such a small country, land is valuable. Some land reclamation projects turn into housing.
In 1973, Singapore opened the Marine Parade HDB complex out of reclaimed land on its east coast.
What before had been nothing but sea became a sought-after residential neighborhood.
Marine Parade HDB apartments now regularly sell for millions of Singapore dollars.
Alternatively, the government can reclaim land out
of the sea in order to meet its strategic economic needs.
I talked about how the government constructed a thriving petrochemicals and energy industry.
The initiative's flagship project was Jurong Island.
They linked together seven smaller islands to create one big island
that can serve as an integrated platform for all levels of the energy supply chain.
Land has long been the engine of the Singaporean economy. Molding it,
making more of it, and crafting it has been a cornerstone economic strategy to build wealth.
## The Power of Sand
I want to pause here and talk a little bit about sand itself. Sand is the result of natural rock
erosion over thousands of years. It is the second most consumed natural resource after freshwater.
People use sand for a variety of purposes. It is a critical ingredient in the production of cement
and concrete - which makes it very important for construction. It also makes up 90% of asphalt.
Altogether, it is estimated that over 40 billion tons of sand and gravel
are consumed each year for construction purposes alone.
But even with all that, consider the fact that you need far more sand
for land reclamation than construction.
To reclaim one square kilometer of land out of the ocean,
you traditionally needed over 70 million tons of sand.
This amount is more than 3 and a half times the volume of the entire Empire State Building.
Considering in the future that Singapore intends to reclaim
up to 100 more square kilometers of land from the ocean - and in waters
far deeper than what had been done before - they are going to need a lot more sand.
## Finding Sand
China consumes half the world's supply of concrete,
which means it is also the world's biggest consumer of sand and aggregates.
However, most of their consumption appears to be domestically sourced - dredged out of Lake Poyang.
And their sand is being used for making concrete
and not for land reclamation - with a few notable exceptions.
Singapore unfortunately does not enjoy that luxury. Early on, Singapore flattened its
hills to source the sand for its land reclamation projects. But they ran out
of that very quickly and have thus started purchasing and importing sand from abroad.
In 2017, UN Comtrade data shows that Singapore imported about $100 million worth
of sand - listing its sources as Malaysia, Australia, Myanmar, and the Philippines.
For its part, the Singaporean government doesn’t disclose where that sand is
from - considering the potential geopolitical tensions which we will talk about later.
I do want to add here at this point that the global sand markets are very opaque.
The numbers of exports and imports do not match up.
In the world of sand sales, solid information is hard to come by.
## Impacts
It should be acknowledged that sand dredging has disruptive effects on
the environment that can last for years on end.
Regardless of whether the sand is mined out from the rivers or the sea, there is observable damage.
Acquiring river sand is known to be particularly damaging. It leads to decreased soil quality,
soil erosion, habitat loss, and the deformation of riverbeds and river banks.
In China, sand dredging in the lower Yangtze and Lake
Poyang - China's largest freshwater lake and conservatively the world's
biggest sand mine - have resulted in a 50% reduction in the number of local species.
As well as up to a 99% decrease in total biomass at the dredged locations.
Until 1997, Singapore got most of its sand from Malaysia. But that year,
sand exports to Singapore were banned. The Singaporeans then turned to purchasing its
sand from Indonesia - dredged out mostly from around the waters of the Riau Islands.
## Riau Islands
In 1999, Indonesia passed new laws granting local governments more autonomy in their affairs.
This led to the sand dredging activities in Indonesia to drastically
expand. The number of legal sand firms rapidly grew from 10 to 100.
By 2002, it was estimated that 168 firms had licenses for sand
exploration and 115 had licenses for sand exploitation.
It is widely acknowledged that scraping sand off the beaches and sea floor
directly messes with water quality and leads to widespread beach erosion - turning beaches into
rocky landscapes - which in turn affects the breeding habitats of certain animals.
Beach erosions also have long-lasting effects on tourism and local economies. Nobody likes seeing
the beach on which they've grown up turned into a rocky wasteland. Those are reasons
enough for local governments in Riau to reverse their decision and crack down on sand mining.
Drawing a direct line from sand mining to declines in fisheries and coral reefs in the area, however,
is a bit more difficult. That issue is heavily debated, emotionally charged, and controversial.
Anecdotally, fishermen say that dredging has damaged
some reefs. One can also argue that dredging makes the seawater
less transparent, reducing the amount of sun that living corals need to survive.
But surveys of the shallow water reefs surrounding Riau a few years after the industry's escalation
found the reefs to still be in a generally good condition.
The fisheries issue is even touchier. The Islands did see a substantial decline in fisheries catches
after the start of the sand mining era. And a logical argument can be made that
sand dredging hurts local biodiversity and reduces biomass in oceans as it does for rivers.
But one can also make an equally compelling argument that the drastic declines seen in
Indonesian fisheries are more due to local overfishing and other forms of habitat destruction
rather than sand mining alone.
Of course, we need to digest each circumstance on a case by case basis.
Ecosystems suffer differing amounts of damage based on their location.
We are also not accounting for illegal sand piracy - which likely far outclassed
what was above-board. With sand becoming increasingly valuable, the practice soon
turned violent - with sand smugglers and mafias going the extra mile to gather their product.
## The Sand War
Eventually, Singapore's massive sand imports became a geopolitical issue. In 2002,
the exports erupted into the open, leading to a "Sand War" as it was called in the media.
In July 2002, the Indonesian Navy deployed two warships to capture seven dredgers - including the
world's largest at the time - as they transported sand from the Riau province to Singapore.
The Indonesian government accused these foreign dredgers of smuggling and stealing sand,
which led to a February 2003 ban on all sea sand exports. Then in 2007,
Indonesia expanded the ban by banning all land sand exports as well.
## Replacing
As I mentioned earlier, Singaporeans draw a direct connection between the creation of land
and their continued socioeconomic development. They see the challenges
of sand mining as a pragmatic part of pursuing their style of economic growth.
Sand is a critical ingredient in creating that land and thus vital to its very survival.
So the country has turned to other places to get its sand.
After Indonesia closed down, it was Cambodia and then Vietnam.
However, sand mining is a charged subject and those supplies saw political pressures too.
Cambodia ended river sand exports in 2009.
Vietnam also imposed a temporary dredging ban of its own - though with exceptions.
Both countries made those export bans "permanent" in 2017.
Despite this, newspapers and third party sources in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam,
and Cambodia continue to report the presence of illegal sand mining.
And Singapore continues to acquire tons of sand each year - mostly from
unlisted countries. That sand has to come from somewhere.
Maybe not all of that illegally mined sand is going to Singapore - there are other
major land reclamation projects going on in the area too - but at least some of it is.
## Technical Replacements
The challenges of finding enough sand have spurred investment and research
into possible alternatives.
In 1988, Singapore reclaimed an island. At its foundation was an 8 meter thick layer
of lumpy clay and rock debris left over from the construction of underground facilities
elsewhere on the island. This clay was then covered with 10 meters of sand.
Singapore has also used marine clay dredged out of its nearby seas to reclaim land for an expansion
project at its Changi airport. This did require consolidation efforts however to firm it up.
The industry has also started tried metal and copper slag.
Slag arises as a result of impurities during the refining process.
It is usually thrown away, so using it for land reclamation kills two birds with one stone.
Tests imply that slag can work,
but there remain concerns about metal and acids leaching into the ground and water.
Some developed countries have used trash to reclaim land out of the sea.
I used to live in Foster City down in the California Bay Area
and those multi-million dollar homes are sitting on literal trash.
This has resulted in some sinking issues, but the idea still stands.
Singapore for their part incinerates their trash into what is called incineration
bottom ash - a mishmash of metals and glass.
It's sometimes used for paving roads or making concrete, but the industry is hesitant to use it
for land reclamation because again, the concerns of toxic chemicals leaching into the water.
## Desert Sand
How about the deserts then? Some 20% of the earth is covered in deserts
and up a third of deserts are covered in sand. What about that?
It might surprise you then to learn that the UAE and other Middle Eastern countries are some of the
world's biggest importers of sand and gravel. In 2014, the UAE imported $456 million worth of sand.
On the surface, this does not make all that much sense. Isn’t it like
penguins needing to import ice? But not all sand is alike in nature and usefulness.
Desert sand is not competitive in the market. Because it has been blown
about by the wind for so long, desert sand grains end up being smaller and smoother.
About 25% of the grains in dune sand are smaller than 150 micrometers
in diameter. In river sand, this number is less than 6%.
When used in concrete, desert sand does not bind all that well, making its concrete not as strong.
Workers then have to add plasticizers to decrease the water to cement ratio.
Attempting to use desert sand for land reclamation
makes it vulnerable to liquefaction and unexpected collapses when shook.
While there has been some recent work done by scientists to make desert sand more commercially
acceptable. For instance, mixing new binders or even first sintering the sand to make the
grains bigger. These all impose cost, making it less competitive against the alternatives.
## Polder Land Reclamation
There are other ways to reclaim land to simply dump sand into the sea. Something people have been
doing for centuries are polders - first building perimeter dikes and then pumping out the water.
It has been done in South Asia and China for decades,
but Holland is especially well known in the West for this.
26% of the area is under sea level - land reclaimed from the sea without any fill-in.
When sand reaches a certain price, it is more economical to use the polder
method - though there are, of course, flood risks.
I also have some concern about the viability of these polder methods as Singapore pushes
further out into deeper waters. Some of the latest projects are in waters 20 meters deep or deeper.
## Conclusion
The Singaporean government has come down
pretty hard in favor of sand imports. And it makes a lot of sense that they would.
Importing sand helps make more land. And more land means more economic growth.
Fortunately, Singapore has the financial and technical resources to eventually wean itself
off sand imports - if they desire it. But it is worth noting that they
are not the only country using land reclamation to develop their economy.
In the past few decades, there have been big projects in the US,
India, the Middle East, and East Asia. The projects in South Korea, Japan and China alone
are both numerous and massive. Considering this, the demand for sand will likely remain robust.
And with that, the environmental and social concerns of sand mining will continue.