- [Narrator] I'll try to make this quick
since we don't have a lot of time.
The world is running out of sand.
Crazy, right?
We have literal tons of it on beaches,
deserts, and under the ocean.
But we're using it up faster
than the planet can make it.
(light music)
We use sand way more than you'd expect.
Worldwide, we go through 50
billion tons of sand every year.
That is twice the amount produced
by every river in the world.
After air and water,
sand is our most-used natural resource.
We use it even more than oil.
We use it to make food, wine, toothpaste,
glass, computer chips, breast implants,
cosmetics, paper, paint, and plastics.
So where does it all come from?
Well, let's ask Vince Beiser.
He wrote a book on it called
The World in a Grain.
- [Vince] So the sand
we use is what's called
marine sand, it's the sand that you find
at the bottom of rivers, and on beaches,
and at the bottom of lakes and oceans.
- [Narrator] I know what you're thinking,
and no, we can't use sand from the desert.
Wind erosion makes the grains too round
for most purposes.
What we need is angular sand
that locks together
like pieces of a puzzle.
You know, like sand broken down
from mountain rocks as they're
pelted by rain, wind, and rivers
for 25,000 years or so.
The major player for
sand usage is concrete.
Okay, just to be clear.
Cement is the lime and clay based glue
that sticks everything together.
And concrete is the final result
that you walk on, drive
on, and live inside.
Concrete is made of 10% cement,
15% water, and 75% sand.
The concrete required to build a house
takes, on average, about 200 tons of sand.
A hospital uses about 3000 tons.
And a mile of highway
requires 15,000 tons.
It makes sense that the world makes
over 4 billion tons of concrete annually.
We need more every year.
The number and size of
our cities is exploding,
especially in the developing world.
This change is most noticeable in China,
now home to the largest
urban area in the world,
the Pearl River Delta.
Between 42 and 60 million people
now call the delta home.
China now has 102 cities with a population
of over a million.
Europe has 38.
All those growing cities,
they need a lot of concrete.
Between 2011 and 2013,
China used more concrete
than the U.S. did in
the entire 20th century.
Again, in three years, China built the
equivalent of every highway, road,
and bridge in the U.S.,
and the Hoover Dam.
So it's not outrageous to hear that
China out-paces the world
in cement production,
by a lot, 2500 metric tons every year.
All that cement is gonna need
a lot of sand to make concrete.
Most of it comes dredging Poyang Lake.
An estimated 236 million cubic meters
of sand is taken from it every year,
making it the largest single
sand mine in the world.
But concrete isn't
China's only use for sand.
They're also using tons of it to build-up
islands in the South China Sea,
expanding its foothold in the region.
And China's not the only nation
building islands from nothing.
You've seen these before.
The Palm Islands and The World
are major island-building
projects in Dubai,
and required 186.5 million meters of sand.
This depleted the sea floor
around the United Arab Emirates,
leaving importing sand from Australia
as the only option while constructing
the world's tallest
building, the Burj Khalifa.
It's no surprise then that sand extraction
is a 70 billion dollar industry.
- [Vince] The easiest and cheapest
and best-quality sand
actually comes from riverbeds.
It's very easy to get.
You just send a boat out into the middle
of a river with a big suction pump on it.
It's just basically like a big straw
that you drop down to
the bottom of the river.
(slurping)
Suck all that sand
right up off the bottom.
- [Narrator] Problem solved? No.
The ocean floor isn't miles of sand deep.
It's a thin layer over rock.
And that layer is home to microorganisms
which feed the base of the food chain.
Collecting all that sand disrupts fishing
in the area and the landscape on shore.
When removing sand from the seabed,
the shore above the water
slides into the valley
to even itself out.
This still leaves shore communities
open to flooding and erosion.
- [Vince] The recent floods in Houston
were actually made worse by sand mining
in the San Jacinto River.
The San Jacinto is one of the rivers
that borders Houston.
It's also an excellent source of sand.
It's been mined very heavily for sand
for the last 10, 20 years.
- [Narrator] Up to 90%
of the world's beaches
have shrunk an average
of 40 meters since 2008.
If you haven't noticed the change
in your favorite beach, you're not alone.
Popular shores replenish
their dying beaches
with even more sand
imported from elsewhere,
usually at taxpayers' expense.
And if we keep it up, almost 70%
of Southern California's
spectacular beaches
could be completely eroded by 2100.
Governments worldwide
have begun to regulate
and restrict sand mining
and concrete production.
So now, problem solved, right?
Actually, it's caused
an entirely new problem,
the black market of sand.
Over 100 billion tons have been stolen
over the past few decades.
Illegal sand mining has led
to the rise of the sand mafia,
India's strongest criminal organization.
This interconnected group of businessmen,
drivers, and criminals use intimidation,
and if that fails, violence and murder
to keep the sand flowing.
Illegal sand generates 2.3
billion dollars a year,
employing 75,000 of India's impoverished
to dive for sand in rivers.
Divers work 12 hour days,
diving up to 200 times
and only making $15.00 a boatload.
Many suffer from bleeding
ears and headaches.
Drownings go unreported.
Worldwide, illegal sand mining
has destroyed entire islands.
Two dozen Indonesian
islands have disappeared
around the same time Singapore imported
17 million tons for its
massive 50 mile land expansion.
It wasn't until 2010
that dozens of Malaysian
officials were charged
with accepting bribes
and sexual favors for
importing the illegal sand.
- [Vince] The first thing
that we're gonna see
in this country, the sort-of
canary in the coal mine
that will really let us know that things
are starting to get bad, is prices.
I believe that this is one of the reasons
that housing costs have gone up so much
in pretty much all of
America's big cities,
because the price of sand has about
quintuples in the last 30, 40 years.
And that's one of the
critical inputs, of course,
whenever you're building a house,
is sand for the concrete.
- [Narrator] We do have some alternatives.
While crushing rocks and
recycled concrete is expensive,
it can be used to create
concrete-quality sand.
Glass bottles can be ground up to make
recycled glass sand to replenish beaches.
Yes, it's totally safe, and no,
it's not gonna affect you.
Finally, U.N. environmental
programs suggest
better pricing and taxing on sand mining
in order to encourage these alternatives.
They also recommend an immediate need
for creating regulations in all countries
as well as international waters.
- [Vince] The question isn't
how can we use less sand,
it's how can we use less of everything.
Trees, water, fish, we're
overusing all of those things.
And sand is just one
thing that we should be
adding to the list.
Well we're on track to be a planet of
at least 9 billion people
in the next 20 years.
Most of them are gonna
wanna consume resources
the way that we do in the western world,
and that is just physically impossible.
- [Narrator] The best move you can do
is just to use less.
The less we need to make,
the less resources we use.
So if we all want to keep
enjoying these things,
while still enjoying this thing,
we need to protect this thing.
Before we run out of time.
