Crazy little thing called sand

Crazy Little Thing Called Sand

And crazier still is sand mining.

No, I don’t mean crazy as insane or things like that, but the great and tremendous characteristics and use of sand in our life is remarkably wide-ranging with massive amount globally.

Sand is defined as unconsolidated particles with diameter between 0.063 to 2mm. The loose grain that looks so simple and humble under our feet in those relaxing time we spend at our weekend trips to the beach contains assorted components. It might contains previously living organisms, mineral particles, or rock fragments.

Biogenic sand contains the external skeleton of dead water creatures such as corals, molluscs, foraminifera, algae, sponges and many others. This type of sand is usually light-coloured: whitish to pink, while the shape and the components are influenced by the adjacent environment.

Sand can also be originated from a rock. In nature, rocks undergo breakdown processes to form smaller rock fragments and the mineral components contained in the parent rock. This process is called weathering that can be spanned over thousands and even millions of years to reach a grain size particle. The sand colours that were formed by these weathering processes, either chemically and/or mechanically, are varied greatly: from black volcanic sand to white Quartz sand, and even pure white Gypsum sand. There are also green, reddish, blueish, orange-brown and many other mixed colours of sand, depending on the minerals it contains.

Unfortunately this natural resource is considered as a scarce commodity nowadays due to the immense increase of demand worldwide. Not only as building material, sand is also used for glass making, sand blasting processes, water filtration and hydraulic fracturing in drilling technique. Quartz sand is mined to get the high-purity silica sands to produce solar panels and computer chips.

With the increase of development around the world, the need of sand is soaring high. In its latest report, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) stated that sand and gravel are the second most used nature resource after water. Our usage of sand is up to 50 billion tonnes of sand and gravel annually, increased greatly from around ‘only’ 9 billion tonnes in the 1970s. This is a massive amount: sufficient to build a wall 27 metres wide and 27 metres high around planet earth.

Sand is extracted from riverbeds, lakes, deltas and coastal environment. This might cause environmental damage, changing the course of the rivers, endangering natural habitats, putting livelihood at risk, and sometimes initiating conflict in society, such as due to illegal sand mining. Small islands are disappearing, river banks are badly degraded, leading to collapse and endangering the adjacent agriculture land and settlement, river deltas are eroding, exposing coastal communities in more severe coastal flooding.

Sand demand is continually increasing as the global population increased. This obviously is not an encouraging outlook because sand is being extracted far more quickly than it can be provided naturally. The ‘crazy’ part of it is the official report of sand being extracted is not necessarily what it is occurred. There are the so called ’sand mafia’ in operation in some area of the world. The global community need to create a mechanism to monitor sand extraction and its impact. There is also a need in a global effort to substitute sand by other materials in construction that it is more sustainable such as recycled material. Surely this has to be within strict regulation so that it is not compromising the required quality.