The global construction boom has created huge demand for sand- even in cities surrounded by the coarse commodity.

Sand. We take it for granted. From deserts to beaches to children’s playgrounds, it seems ubiquitous. Yet the abundant resource is feeding a global land grab that’s even bred a sand-smuggling underworld.

I was shocked that people would fight for sand.

While researching beach erosion in Negril, Jamaica about six years ago, scientist Pascal Peduzzi’s conversation with residents in a fishing village left him astounded. Despite the high-tech geospatial modelling and remote sensing tools he was using to survey the damage, he’d never have surmised one reason for erosion on the country’s western coastline. Locals told him about the local mafias — armed men who came to the beach in the middle of night, hauled away bags of sand and sold them for the construction of beachfront developments.

“I was shocked that people would fight for sand,” said Peduzzi, director of science at the United Nations Environment Programme’s Division of Early Warning and Assessment. “I have been working for more than 20 years in the environment sector, but sand came to me as a surprise.”

Demand for sand has led to the emergence of illegal mining of the material – here, a police officer stands guard in a quarry near Bogota, Colombia (Credit: Getty Images)

As a building material, sand has withstood the test of time. In 3500BC, ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians were using sand, mostly formed when wind and water grind rocks into silica-rich grains, to make glass. Today, builders the world over use the natural resource, found in quarries, rivers, lakes and oceans, for many of their materials including paint and cement.

It’s used in everything from swimming-pool filters, metal castings and oil wells to smartphone screens and toothpaste.

With a global building boom and the arrival of hydraulic fracturing technology for oil and gas in the United States, the demand for sand has been skyrocketing. In 2014, 196 million tons of sand and its bigger counterpart gravel were mined around the world, according to the US Geological Survey. After water, it’s the most abundantly used natural resource, Peduzzi said. It’s used in everything from swimming-pool filters, metal castings and oil wells to smartphone screens and toothpaste.

The overall sand and gravel market was valued at $8.3bn in the US last year and £1.7bn ($2.5bn) in the UK in 2013, according to the USGS and the UK’s Mineral Products Association. Global demand for sand is expected to rise 5.5% a year through 2018, according to a December 2014 report from the Freedonia Group. Investors willing to weather the volatility, sift through the fragmented market and take on potential environmental risks could stand to profit from the growing appetite for this global commodity.

For years the sand market had been pretty “boring,” said Sonny Randhawa, a vice president in charge of research for the energy sector at D.A. Davidson, an Oregon based investment firm. But in the past few years the sand market has been more “feast or famine”, he said, particularly in the US.

Uneven global demand
Demand for sand is spread unevenly across the globe.

China has used more sand in the last four years than the US has in the last century

Building booms in China and India have increased the need for sand in those markets. Globally, China accounts for a fifth of the world’s sand imports, according to the Trade Statistics Branch of the United Nations.

Because of the frenzied development of new dams, roads, buildings and factories the country has used more sand in the last four years than the US has in the last century, according to Peduzzi. China has even been piling huge amounts of sand onto reefs to create new islands and expand its foothold in the South China Sea.

China’s construction boom means it needs a huge amount of sand – it currently accounts for a fifth of the world’s imports (Credit: Getty Images)

Even the United Arab Emirates imported $456m worth of sand, stone and gravel in 2014, according to the UN. Despite being in the heart of the desert, imported sand built Dubai, according to Pascal. Wind-formed desert sand is too smooth for construction.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the need for sand has dropped off as new construction cools and recyclables get a political push. Demand for rock, gravel and sand is 25% below 2007 levels, according to the UK Mineral Products Association.

And in the US, the rise of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” has created a huge appetite for sand. In 2013, the production of sand for fracking wells was 19 times higher than a decade earlier, according to the USGS. The process involves injecting water, sand and chemicals down a horizontally drilled well thousands of feet below the earth’s surface into a rock formation to extract oil or natural gas.

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By Renuka Rayasam

Source: BBC