Every year, 65 million new people become city dwellers drawn by
the economic promise in cities that are expanding
or springing up from scratch across Africa,
Asia, the Middle East.
All of these new cities are built with cement,
the main ingredient of which is sand.
It's the critical ingredient to a global building boom and we're running out of it.
For every ton of cement you make,
you need another 67 tons of sand to produce it.
We're talking about a lot of cement.
China used more cement in three years than the United States used
in the entire 20th century building out its modern roads and cities.
Singapore has imported over 500 million tons of sand.
It's increased its territory by 20 percent since
the 1970s through a process called land reclamation.
A lot of that sand was illegally mined from Malaysia, Vietnam,
Cambodia, and Indonesia where two dozen islands have simply disappeared.
There's sand mined away until they sink into the sea.
Dubai is known for ambitious projects like these artificial islands,
which took 385 million tons of sand.
Projects like this have made
the United Arab Emirates one of the world's biggest importers of sand.
Isn't Dubai in the desert?
Why is a desert country importing sand?
Desert sand shaped by wind is more rounded than sand shaped by water.
That rounded shape means it doesn't bind together well.
If you want to make good cement,
you've got to get the good sand from riverbeds and beaches,
and the ocean floor.
The problem is we're using sand at a rate that nature can't keep up with.
Marine sand is formed over thousands of years of erosion.
But worldwide, we're using 50 billion tonnes every year.
By weight it's the most extracted natural resource in the world and
the pace at which we're using it far outstrips the natural rate of replacement,
which is wreaking havoc on people and the environment.
It's extracted from beaches and riverbanks,
sometimes by locals with buckets and shovels.
Other times it's done by multinational corporations using dredgers,
the size of aircraft carriers.
Removing millions of tonnes of sediment from a river,
we'll really do a number on it.
It can make floods more frequent and more intense.
It can cause riverbanks to collapse taking
homes and farmland with them as on the Mekong Delta.
This ruins farmland in a region where a lot of Southeast Asia's food is grown.
Lowering the water table makes droughts worse and more frequent.
It's also destructive to local ecosystems.
In Cambodia, fishermen are having to leave their villages as the crabs and
fish that used to support them are wiped out by illegal sand mining.
Beaches that have been mined to become barren pits,
reefs and fish populations are killed.
Mining speeds up the natural process of coastal erosion
making those coastal communities more vulnerable to storms and floods,
and the much of the tide.
Governments have tried to regulate sand mining with little luck.
That's because it's a perfect black market commodity.
It's easy to get to.
It fetches a high price and demand is highest in countries where locals need
the money and governments are either too weak or too corrupt to stop the practice.
Forty-year-old journalist brutally murdered for
allegedly taking on the sand mining mafia, exposes the chilling-
Horrific murder that's been caught on camera.
A journalist mowed down by the sand mafia. [inaudible]
In recent years, the sand mafia has killed at least 70 people.
Villagers who complain about the environmental effects of the mines,
police and government officials who have tried to conduct oversight,
and journalists who have dared to report about it.
While the problem is most acute in developing countries, it's happening everywhere.
Germany, Canada, the UK,
the US have also reported environmental concerns linked to sand mining.
The demand for sand is only going to grow.
Construction will be a 15 trillion dollar industry by 2025.
These emerging markets are set to see
their construction industries grow by three to six percent a year.
So, are there solutions? Kind of.
The UN Environmental Program suggests using alternative materials or taxing sand,
which would make cement more expensive,
which would have ripple effects throughout the construction industry.
That UN report suggests though that nothing's really going to get done about this,
until it starts hurting the economy.
But by then, it might be too late for the environment. Thanks for watching.
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