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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about a common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Ellie and I'm joined by Laura, Antonia and my cat Sparkles to talk about the world sand sortage and the impact this has Sparkles you don't know that much about the world sand shortage I'm afraid so you can't be in the episode as much as you would like to be but Antonia you brought this topic to the table what do
we need to know about the world sand shortage sand seems abundant it's course rough and gets in everywhere so how could we possibly be short of it sorry I forgot to State my source of that quote that was Anakin Skywalker from one of the prequel films is that actually his quote that's hilarious yeah he's he was talking about hating sand like didn't want to go to a beach that's cuz he grew up on a Sandy planet is it hang on am I think of the right person yeah yes yes
no he did he came from tattin which is Desert Planet this is Star Wars let's carry on I'm all about all things sustainable development so I was interested to see in what way is is sand a limited resource it was interesting you mentioned development because we'll find out later that much of sand is used for construction and concrete and building materials Laura you know something about concrete and glass much more and sparkles would have us believe she's so loud I can only
apologize she's got a be in her Bonnet it's quite entertaining there's no way around it we can't just wait for the cat to finish talking to you so we'll just carry on I just find it quite funny she does she does have a a voice in this one yeah special guest starring Sparkles who is apparently a world Authority on Sand mining she did come from a Sandy country though didn't she yeah she came from Dubai so ah well there you go maybe she knows but answer your question now what
do I know about concrete and Sandy related things so I supervised quite a few PhD research projects that were looking at structural concrete or glass both used in the nuclear industry uh and the glass in particular was quite interesting I think because we were using it to immobilize nuclear waste so you have to understand the chemistry and how it would evolve with time quite well uh I suspect that's a little bit outside of this topic so uh I'll be interested to see what Anton's thoughts are on
sustainability and sustainable development yeah Antonia I believe you have a very exciting fact to start us off behind water the most used resource across the globe is sand and gravel it is estimated that 50 billion metric tons of sand and gravel is consumed annually which is enough to cover the UK wow that's a ridiculous number is then cover the UK like there's a thin layer now that I wasn't sure about this came from a BBC article which was good at presenting these facts and then putting
it into some sort of context yeah but then you scratch the surface and and yeah I like the attempts to make this really quite big number into something a bit more tangible though 50 billion tons is a phenomenal number and you said it was the most mined resource after water is that what you said or consumed yes yeah it's not necessarily mind as you don't go into the ground to dig it up it's just kind of there on River beds and you scoop it up or dredge it up so
what are we using all of this for then where does all this sand go it's mostly for construction so maybe not so much in the UK cuz we were a little bit behind on uh construction projects you quite welldeveloped country now and you know the UK doesn't have that much uncovered land anymore well most of it Green Space isn't it it's mostly used for farming on National Parks I think only about it 5% of the land area is built on I think but it's mostly got some sort of impact of
humans now yeah right so it's more about developing countries where population growth is exponential and so improving quality of life people wanting houses people wanting to be in places where there are jobs so what we call urbanization people are moving away from rural areas to be in cities because there's more opportunity so lots more buildings are happening that estimate of 50 billion tons of I think they said aggregat or sand and gravel it's it looks to me like
it's a very Rough and Ready estimate it came from a United Nations report I think there were a few versions of it I found one from 2014 that seemed to be the first mention of it and it did say here are a few sources that cite different Global amounts we don't really know I'm going to estimate it from what the construction industry tells me because they tend to track some of their building materials what I read in the 2019 un environmental program report was countries do track how much concrete
they use and so you using a sort of rough percentage of how much sand and gravel that made up they worked backwards from concrete to get to this 50 billion tons yeah see I find that a little bit strange in a way in that there's not a lot of information about where these natural resources come from and where they go yeah stuff just kind of happens but then again on a global scale it probably is quite difficult to keep track of all these things the UK is like really highly regulated for most
things that we do but other nations not so much so they wouldn't necessarily be interested in the bureaucracy that the UK creates yes we've seen what happens there we don't want to copy that do we also it comes from it being a cheap resource people really care about gold and how much gold is available oh I see what you mean so in comparison people care less about sand because it is seemingly abundant yeah yeah not all Sands equal though is it that's true construction sand needs to have certain
properties it's called sharp sand because it has these rough edges so it can help bind the concrete or the grout or whatever it is whereas I think we'd read that sand that comes from the desert because it's subject to weathering from the wind and rolling against each other little sand grains they become really smooth so they don't make good concrete so you can't just go to the Sahara where there is abundance of sand and start scooping it would seem not which seems odd doesn't it seems
very odd cuz I thought if you need lots of sand let's go to the sandiest place in the world start shoveling I also read that most sand now that is mined or extracted or scooped up from River Banks is going to Asia that seems to be the world's highest demand of sand yeah the interesting thing about this sort of idea of a shortage is more that the sand isn't available in basanes locally so there might be a good amount of sand across the world but we don't always need that sand there right now so
there's a lot of sand being mined one place to rebuild or build more land like in Singapore something like 20 square miles that might be wrong or they had like increased their land area quite significantly by using sand from different countries that had been ship there to reclaim lost land on the sea which is I mean fascinating but also not a use I would have considered the sand it kind of makes me of the nursery R the man who built his house on Sand oh gosh
that's taking me right back they're not literally just like piling up sand and saying look we increased our land mass they must be incorporating it into something similar to how you make concrete you know you mix the sand with um Portland cement and water into some other type of aggregate yeah there must be something more to it I don't think they're just pouring sand into the ocean in the hopes that it will rise up to a level above where it is now I would expect it would just get washed away but
then I suppose it depends on the local currents but what you were asking about Asia seems to be one of the biggest importers I guess that ties into what Antonio was saying about the countries that are still they're developing right and they're growing housing stock and apparently land mass by quite a lot to account for growing populations and growing Industries absolutely yeah this is it Singapore has expanded its land area by 22% using sand primarily from Malaysia Cambodia and Indonesia as Phil
which is absolutely wild to think you could reclaim that much of one country extend one country I don't know what even you would call that until they Bridge a gap and merge with another country and then something else happens there are some smaller well slightly less bigger slices of the pie chart of sand use that we know about as well all right what is the slice the slice weren't we saying it before about solar panels I guess I don't think I really explained at the start so I talked about
making glass and glass is made from silica silicon dioxide uh which is a component of sand so yeah solar panels are also they're made from Silicon and not necessarily because they've got glass in them but because they're made from a silicon wafer which is basis for a lot of electronic components oh and again you need a source of silica for that so it's something Sandy but when I was looking into it they need like really pure silicon dioxide or silica to begin with so they tend to use I think a
raw material called quartzite a form of quartz Sandstone rock type thing so it's essentially made by Sandstone being compressed over time so you wouldn't necessarily be digging it out of rivers or wherever else you would find a deposit somewhere like you would with other minerals you like lithium to make batteries or rare earth metals to make other electronics so it needs to be pure in theory I assume you could scoop something off the beach and purify it but that would incur an extra cost and
lots of extra processing Steps From The Glass industry again not necessarily solar panels but glass accounts for about 1% of that 50 billion tons of sand extracted every year so it's quite a small very small slice of the pie I guess yeah one thing I did wonder though when I was reading about courtz site is most solar panels from what I've read and made in China also from what I've read China doesn't seem to have a court site deposit so either they do and they're not telling anyone about it oh
sneaky interesting or they're importing it and then I start to wonder what happens to the court site and what happens to the other materials that they need where do they come from this is turning into a much bigger picture than just sand it's about resource use in general yes absolutely I 100% agree with that I also read which I didn't know that sand can be used in some sort of combined liquid form as fracking material correct injected into the Earth it's part of the um fracking fluid is
what they call it you put in High Press water sand and essentially make fissures where you know there is more natural gas or oil available and Blasting it at high pressure you kind of force it to open more and hopefully when you bring it all back you get some useful stuff like oil and gas that was also not a huge use of sand though no but it is one of the uses of sand so this leads to where does all this sand come from because we mentioned that we can't get it we can't just go to
the suara and scoop so which countries do we think are shipping out the most amount of sand one of the points the the UN report was getting at was that a lot of it comes from areas that don't necessarily have a lot of legislation around human rights or environmental conditions I want to say they effectively use slave labor but that might be taking it a little bit too far but I don't know which countries that then applies to I don't know if you've got any ideas Antonio no I don't know
where the sand is coming from I did have a look at if we were to mine for it in the UK what are the rules around that it's subject to any other sort of mining regulations got to have permission from the landowner and the British Geological Society looks at sort of the scarcity of the resource so they know are you going to mine above what is available in the UK and things like that but if that's what the UK does is that we have elsewhere so yeah maybe slave or child
labor can come into it in other countries cuz I read that Britain we do mine our own sand or we mine some of our own sand and we get up to a quarter of our sand from the sea floor 10 million tons of it come from sand banks off East Anglia near me in the North Sea and of the sand that we were talking about for Singapore so this is interesting it says that most of the sand has come from Indonesia where 24 small Islands have reportedly been removed from the map as
a result of all of this sand mining which is absolutely wild so wasin those islands got flooded because you know the removal of the sand meant water flow was different around there or did they literally just dig up that island and move it to Singapore I think that's probably almost more likely that they've completely I don't say wiped out the island but yeah it doesn't exist anymore because they've mined it away I suppose but all of that activity must have some effect on the
local environment whether it's changing water currents or affecting the wildlife or something else in that area that I can't think of cuz it's not my area of expertise the only thing I I knew about this before we started researching it for this episode I wrote an article for work about the world's only freshwater po bo they're also called The Smiling poo because they if you Google them they're smiling um but they're really called the yangi river finless P Bo you
won't be surprised to learn that they live in China's yansi river they are one of the world's most critically endangered animals and one of the reasons why they're so endangered is because they live in this river which is being destroyed due to the sand industry these Poes breed in quite shallow Riverbank areas where they raise their little finless poost babies but those Shor side habitats are where the sand mining is sort of most active and without those areas it's really
decimated the population wow see I think that's the sort of thing that probably should be taken into account so like you know he said in the UK that you have to check that you're not taking more than is available presumably there is also some sort of environmental impact assessment that says you're not harming any species that can't get nutrients or breeding grounds or whatever somewhere else in the UK so they won't have a significant effect on their population
whereas that is completely the opposite yeah so apparently illegal sand mining has become more closely monitored uh since 2017 and they think that that will massively help the Yan SE from this PO voice but also people are still trying to make money there's always going to be a bit of sort of shady Shady sand going on in that area they think and there is still legal sand mining um on the anxi river anyway so yeah that's pretty sad I also read cuz what I was saying about
the UK being Marine dredging whatever you want to call it um but that causes a lot of problems with things like turbidity like the cloudiness of the water which is really affecting um seagrass and corals because the water's too cloudy you can't photosynthesize that becomes a big problem and then it's having a KnockOn effect if there's no seagrass animals like dugong look a bit like manatees um in Southeast Asia are suffering because they can't they don't have enough to eat because they eat the
seagrass so it's heartbreaking really huge effects on ecosystems and I think that's the sort of thing that should probably be understood in more detail I can also see how it would be really difficult to understand it because there's an awful lot we still don't know about the natural world necessarily and not the interconnectedness of all the species in a particular environment but you would think before you do anything you would look at the existing knowledge
and say well there's nothing there that says that we shouldn't do this so let's try it and we'll monitor it and we'll put some monitoring in place but it sounds like that doesn't happen in a lot of parts of the world yeah there was also a study I read that said they were getting it from I think a lake area and this Lake Area was critical in the migration of cranes and because the cranes only come at certain times of the year they didn't necessarily realize taking all the sand from this area was
going to massively upset one of the world's largest populations of cran I think one of the bigger challenges in a lot of environmental issues is the resource for monitoring is because we're trying to monitor such large areas even if you had someone to go check the area like how how far can the I see I think if you start messing with any ecosystem generally things don't go well for the animals in that area so I I was reading an article about our tributary of the ganga River in
India and how there was a legal mining license except they were going beyond the times when the license was allowing them to mine so they were supposed to only mine like 2 or 3 meters into the river and at some places they M 18 M deep but from the surface you can't necessarily tell so in fact some children went to the river to wash and then they got pulled into these deep pits and died oh my goodness so there sort of a community impact as well then the local people living in this area not
just the workers and the wildlife yeah but then also because these issues are also managed on the local level if say you know who the local official is they are say uh what's the word more pable I was going to say more open to corruption yes that was the word and so the locals had started reporting that this was an issue and the local authorities kind of said it's not an issue there is a lot of illegal sand mining that seems to be a big problem as well that you can get a
lot of money by selling it to concrete makers sort of on a much more small scale level within your own town or within your own City I find that a bit weird that there's like effectively illegal construction practices going on and I guess it kind of points to some of the work where that Anton has mentioned before where you try and look at where all your resources come from and how sustainable are they and have you done due diligence on your supply chain to make sure that everything is meeting
with the UN goals for sustainable development as much as possible and if they don't then you just don't use that company I can also see that sustainable development is less of a priority in a lot of parts of the world though and I think um supply chain transparency is still a huge issue you know you just kind of go down to if if you were just a construction work you go down to your local yard hopefully the closest one to away building and you just ask for sand and how much sand can
you get to this spot and you don't necessarily care where the sand came from you just needed the material what about alternative sources if we say that this you know sand mining from places like the Yan SE or off the coast of Southeast Asian Islands isn't sustainable or is causing a lot of eological impacts is there anywhere else that we could be getting this sort of sand I read a few research papers a while ago now that we published that looked at using the LCD screen so the
glass from the screen I guess is a replacement for the sharp sand that's used in construction oh wow I think that was quite a niche research paper I don't know how how much effort it would take to collect up all the LCD screens in the world and what massive silica that would be so how much of this 50 billion tons are we replacing if we start using waste Electronics I like that idea because I feel like waste electronics are a huge I was going to say gold mine because they
are a liter of precious metals I'm also I'm not entirely sure that using quite a high value item like a smartphone say to stick in some construction project is the best use of resources necessarily I don't know I don't know either and also CU we were saying before about how the sand has to be a particular type of sand reclaimed LCD screen sand is it even going to work so one thing that people are saying when they couldn't find the natural sand being as sharp as they want
it is just crushing up rocks so hopefully if we can Crush rocks we can Crush glass to be similar but I think there's a lot of other sources of what we call aggregate just stuff that we put into concrete that's generally Stone um based stuff so when you mine you don't necessarily get you know just straight up gold bullion you have to get gold or and in the process you dredge up a lot of material out of the ground and often they're just kind of dumped so if we got
those what they call tail mind tailings you can use those as an alternative source for sunand True assuming you know what's in your mind tailing there's a few mines around here that aren't in use anymore that they've had to cap them and seal them because the M tailings are full of stuff like cadmium that's become really concentrated and it started leaking into rivers we don't want the cadmium type sand you don't want those mind tailings no I guess the reason that
the illegal sand extraction and the reason for extracting sand from riverbeds and wherever else is such a prevalent thing is because it's so easy to do it doesn't necessarily introduce any extra processing steps that these words no that's true I think the concern is is that because it takes thousands of years to create a sand with that particular sort of properties because it's been washed through a river that it's being depleted faster than it's being created exactly what that rate is
no one knows though no I think there's a lot of unknowns about this sort of mysterious s extraction industry but we don't massively understand the numbers do we we've only got sort of a best guess estimate based on concrete and it seems like there's a lot of it still happening that isn't well not monitored even but sort of known about in the first yeah and I think it's quite a new environmental SLS social issue that's been highlighted because most of these un reports that we've seen the earliest
one you said Laura 2014 kind of says it's just not something we've tracked or realized up until recently well I would say i' never even thought about it until two weeks ago three weeks ago and yet it's one of the second most extracted resource in the world so yeah maybe it is all something we should be paying a lot more attention to I know I shouldn't have been surprised urised but um the idea of sand mafias like gangs of people controlling access to sand yeah and and
I just thought you know of all the materials to sort of smuggle I never thought about smuggling sand yeah people think diamonds don't they diamonds gold just purely the logistics of how that works yeah it seems there's a lot more to this than I think we ever really suspected that we were getting into along with every other Environmental issue the main things to do are reduce how much sand you're using and use Alternatives if you can and track sand usage more which leads me very nicely
into my next question Laura if you in charge of global sand mining or sand extraction across the world what would you be your next steps what are you looking to achieve bearing in mind that sand is a necessary needed resource at the moment I think it probably is to what Antonia said I mean I'm a scientist right and I've spanned many different topics of Science in my 20th year since leaving University and you start off with collecting data right so you want to understand just how widespread this
challenge is so how much sharp sand is there in the world still can we quantify that how much are we really extracting every year and then what does that mean for how quickly is it actually going to run out and where can we find other sources that are easy to access whether it is LC CD screens or mind tailings or something else I also think it sounds like there needs to be a really easy way to do this cuz it's taken not 10 years to get to the point since that first
United Nations report of making people realize that this is starting to be a problem yeah I would imagine it would take at least another 20 years to start to get the global sand industry to even think about doing anything about it because all they really want to do is keep doing what they're doing and keep making money yeah absolutely so is there some intelligent way of doing that I mean given advances in AI or machine learning if you prefer in other technological inventions could there be
an easy way of figure out how to do this and using satellite imaging as a starting point maybe I think people have started using satellite images to see land loss and land changes or river and water changes kind of two sides of the same Co seeing how things have changed over time kind of tells them it's being extracted there was even this tiny tiny on a picture which was the little digger but who who's looking at those images at least it's easier than physically going
to all those places Antonio what would you do do you have any points to add to Laura's in control of all Global sand development position CEO I've just given you I would like to say just common sense because there was a story about how One River got mined so much that the river flow went the wrong way so they got sea w water mix them into their fresh water and started getting what was it an alligator or crocodile crocodiles and I just think there's got to be a
smarter way maybe let's not do that yeah I'm not necessarily sure that's something I would have considered though if I were in control of operations in the area and I'm like just keep extracting it keep extracting it let's make more money keep extracting it I wouldn't have thought oh we're going to get crocodile yeah we just created an inland sea now oops definitely we definitely don't want Inland Sea we want our fresh water to stay fresh water water to stay sea water it is very
multifaceted it'll be really interesting to see where this goes what the next sort of 10 20 years reveal will it just be greed and unke keepable building and construction across developing nations or will there be a push for more sustainable sand practices it's very hard to just generate sand we have an abundance of sand because for millions of years we've had rivers and they away true but then it's one of those things that the more research you do and the more you scale up whatever operation
you've created that can industrially create sand or aggregate with the same properties then the cheaper it becomes so it might at some point in the future become cheaper and more favorable to just manufacture the sand than it is to go and dredge out of a river oh we have to think about what is the use of the sand in the first place if you've ever redone a kitchen everyone just Chucks out whatever was in the kitchen goes into a Skip and then what happens to it
right wash your hands of it you knock down a wall where does that go what what do you do with all that broken brick I'm pretty sure no one is recovering those Broken Bricks they just make new bricks same with like concrete there are examples in the construction industry of this happening I'm sure Rua who's our resident civil engineer has mentioned this to me before but I don't think it's all that widespread no so I think there needs to be more of reusing of what is
considered waste so essentially circular economy as we've discussed in an earlier episode Antonia I hope we can get to that point of a much more sustainable way of doing this with much less social and environmental economic impacts well I think maybe that is a good place to leave it we've covered pretty much everything from what is the world sand shortage where all that sand is going where is it coming from and what potentially could we do instead if you like this episode please stay tuned for
our next one and we'll see you next time the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed list to these views it would really help us out if you could rate US leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to continue to have Frank discussions about science and engineering please get in touch [Music]