Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Cristina Bufi-Pöcksteiner
Thank you, thank you.
I've got 15 minutes.
I've got 15 minutes of sand right here.
And, hopefully, in 15 minutes,
the next time you go to the beach,
you look at the beach in a whole new way.
I grew up, the first years of my life,
from zero to eight,
on the Atlantic Coast, in Brittany.
And that's where, I think,
I started to fall in love with the sea and with the beach.
Later, my parents moved to the South of France,
but far from any coast, hundreds of kilometres from any coast.
And somehow, I found my way to the beach each time that I could.
When I was a student, for example,
to pay for my studies,
I worked as a beach boy or as a bartender on the beach.
Later, when I could, I went on a vacation to the beach,
and that is where I gave my first kiss -
I fell in love for the first time.
That's where I made friends that are still around.
And when I reached 30 years old,
actually the day of my birthday, my 30th birthday -
I was living in Paris at the time, I was a journalist -
I said, "I'm kind of tired of seeing this gray sky every day,
and I miss the beach,
and I'm tired of seeing the gray faces every day in the metro."
So I moved to Barcelona,
and I am here since then.
But this whole time,
I looked at the beach and was focusing on the beach,
and I was in love with the beach,
but I never paid any attention to what the beach is made of:
sand.
Until one day, here in this city, in Barcelona,
I was ending a long film production
in Montreal, in Canada.
It was cold; it was the winter of 2010.
And I needed to clear my mind,
I needed to relax.
And what I really needed was to take my shoes off
and walk on the beach.
So that's what I did.
I took my bicycle and went down to the beach here in Barcelona,
but the beach I found was not my beach.
This winter of 2010, this Sunday morning,
the beach had almost disappeared;
the sand had gone.
For the first time in my life,
I asked myself very simple questions:
Where is the sand going?
Or, where does the sand come from?
So I came back home, and I started to investigate.
And the first thing I found when I looked on the internet for "sand"
was a quote, and this quote said exactly this:
"In every grain of sand there is a history of the earth."
This is from Rachel Carson, mother of the Environmental Movement in the U.S.,
and she said that in the 1940s.
What did she mean?
Most of the beaches we know - 90% of the beaches of the world -
originate here, in the mountains.
In this part of Europe,
the beaches we know originate in the Alps or in the Pyrenees.
And that is a process that takes a lot of time.
The weathering, the icing, de-icing,
rain, winds, centuries, millenniums
erode the mountains.
And what they do
is these big rocks fragment into smaller rocks.
Eventually, they fragment into stones.
Eventually, these stones will reach a little stream.
Eventually, these little streams and the stones will reach a larger river.
Eventually, some of these grains will make it to a delta.
And that's where the tides and the waves and the currents
are going to move these grains around.
And sometimes these grains are going to stick in one place for a while,
they're going to move.
And that place, that's what we call the beach.
So that replies pretty much to the first question,
where does the sand come from?
Now, where is the sand going?
And let me ask you one very simple question,
and I want you to answer - don't be shy, okay?
Where do we find sand on the earth today?
Where?
(Audience) The beach.
The beach. Where else?
(Audience) Deserts.
In the deserts. Yes, we're going to talk about that.
(Audience) Rivers.
Rivers. Great. You're all right.
We can find sand in all these places
and sometimes in quarries also.
But there is more to it.
We can find sand right here, around us -
we don't see it, but it's all around us.
Where?
You know we all use sand in glass, for example.
Glass is made out of sand.
But what's in the glass right here?
Wine.
There is one extremely valuable mineral in sand,
and it's called "silicon dioxide."
And silicon dioxide, we find it in the wine,
the wine we drink.
We find it in the foods -
everything that is dehydrated or powdered contains, somehow, sand.
It also is, you know, toothpaste,
you know, cosmetics, hairspray, paper,
microchips we use to make our computers or smartphones.
When you fly on a plane, you're surrounded by sand.
How?
Because we use sand in the plastics,
in the lightweight alloys to make the engine.
We use sand in the paint;
we use sand even in the tires.
But this is nothing.
The world champion of sand consumption,
of course,
is concrete.
80% of everything that is built today in the world is made of concrete.
And concrete itself is made for 80% of sand and gravel.
Sand is the most consumed resource on Earth,
after fresh water and the air.
We consume a lot of sand,
and, actually, the quantities are quite disturbing.
For one average house,
we're going to use 200 tons of sand.
For a larger building like this one, a hospital,
we're going to need 3,000 tons of sand.
Each kilometer of highway
requires 30,000 tons of sand.
And when we build something like a nuclear power plant,
that takes a lot, a lot, and a lot of sand.
I'll let you see how much.
12 million tons of sand.
And, of course, this sand,
we have to find it somewhere.
In the last century,
the industry, the aggregate industry -
that's what we call this industry -
went to the quarries, went to the rivers,
but now those sources are reaching a tipping point.
There's still some sand, but not enough to respond to the demand.
So where does the industry go?
It turns towards the sea.
And the workhorse of this industry is called the "dredger."
And the dredger is a gigantic cargo ship
that goes to the sea and pumps from the seafloor.
And there are three problems with that,
when you take sand from the seafloor.
The first problem is that the seafloor is not covered by sand.
That's what I thought before the investigation.
I thought, you know, the sea is full of sand.
But it's not like that;
it's covered by a very thin layer of sand, and it's mostly rocky.
Second problem with that:
This layer of sand is the base of all the marine life.
All the microorganisms which live in the sand
feed the little fish who live in the bottom of the sea,
who themselves feed the bigger fish and the bigger fish,
and, eventually, they feed us,
at the end of the chain.
And third problem -
and I'm sure you've all experienced this sometimes on the beach.
If you go to the beach, and you dig a little hole with your hand
where the waves come,
after a couple of waves, the hole has disappeared.
Why is that?
Because sand is the most dynamic resource on Earth;
it moves all the time.
When you take sand from the seafloor,
the effect of the gravity, the tides and the waves
are going to have an impact on the beach.
And this beach, little by little, is going to disappear.
And that's exactly what is happening to the world
and to my beach here, in Barcelona, when I went there.
Where was the beach?
Actually, between 75 and 90% of the beaches in the world are shrinking.
They are retreating, meaning that they are disappearing.
Beaches do disappear all the time.
What do we do when we want the tourists to come to the beach?
We take some sand somewhere,
we pump it somewhere,
and we put it back on the beach at the beginning of the summer.
There's another problem:
We need energy, and we build dams around the world.
In the U.S., we've built 80,000 dams already.
In China, by 2020, not one river will reach the sea.
And in the world,
we've built 845,000 dams.
And these dams don't hold just water;
they trap sand.
And half of the sand that could reach the sea someday, somehow,
will never reach the sea,
because it's blocked behind the walls of the dams.
But we need to build, so how do we do it?
I'll take an example.
In Dubai, what have we done?
We've gone to the seafloor and pumped a whole lot of sand.
And with all this sand we've created artificial islands.
The Palm is here.
There is also the World.
And one little problem with that is that we exhausted the sand.
There is no more sand on the seafloor in the Emirates.
Why don't they just go to the desert and take all the sand they want
and build forever?
Well, there's a little problem with that.
And that's the irony of nature.
Desert sand is what the industry calls "bad sand."
Why is it bad sand? Because it's round.
The grains have been polished by the winds and by the time,
and they don't stick together.
To make concrete or to build an artificial island,
you need sand that sticks together, that has rough edges.
And sea sand has rough edges - that's sea or river sand.
This sand is basically worthless.
But, of course, Dubai wanted to make more buildings,
wanted to keep growing,
so they went to Australia to buy sand
because they're out of sand.
Actually, all the countries in the Gulf and many countries in the world
have to buy sand because they're out of sand,
and they need to import the sand.
And it's a big business; it's about 70 billion dollars a year.
And there is a problem with sand -
you can go to the beach, right here,
you can load a trailer,
and you can sell the sand.
You can go at night.
You can steal the sand.
And that's what happens in the world.
Illegal sand mining.
Illegal beach-sand mining happens in about 70 countries,
and beaches disappear.
In India,
the sand mafia is the most powerful criminal organization of the country;
people kill for sand, in India.
And it happens very often.
People kill for sand.
By 2100, when you want to see a beach,
the only thing you will be able to do is to open a history book.
Because they all are going to have disappeared.
But now, I have good news:
we can turn the tide,
it doesn't have to be that way.
We can make things differently;
we can build things differently;
and we can think differently.
There's many options.
In Florida, where 90% of the beaches are disappearing,
they had this problem and had another problem,
they had all this glass.
When you go to the recycling container,
you throw this glass - you want to recycle.
But 30% of this glass is never going to be recycled,
because of color or because it is going to be broken,
because of several reasons.
They said, "We've got this glass and we've got this lack of sand.
What do we do?"
And one guy said, "Let's try to crush the glass and see what happens."
And that's exactly what they did.
They crushed the glass and created one thing
which is the recycled-glass sand.
And this sand, you can put it on the beach to replenish the beach,
and people love it, they don't get bloody feet there;
it's just like sand.
You don't even see the difference.
And even the sea turtles,
who had abandoned the beaches in Florida,
are coming back, and they lay their eggs on those beaches.
There's many measures that could be taken, of course,
but they require people to know there is a problem, first,
and they require that the message goes up and reaches, of course,
the spheres of decision-making and the politics, etcetera.
Just ending with one personal thing.
I have a daughter, her name is Ines, she's five years old,
and she loves the beach.
And she loves to run on the beach, and to make sand castles
and to play in the sand.
So for her,
for us,
for all the children in the world,
for all the generations to come,
we need to start to understand how the beaches work,
to respect the sand,
and to spread the word.
Let's not let the beaches disappear.
Thank you.
(Applause)