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Defining a sustainable future for sand
Defining a sustainable future for sand
What links the building you live in, the glass you drink from and the computer you work on? Sand. It is a key ingredient of modern life and yet, astonishingly, no-one knows how much sand there is or how much is being mined. Every day, every person on the planet consumes around 20 kg of sand, that's roughly 50 billion tonnes globally each year, mainly for making concrete, glass and electronics.
In a piece in Nature in 2019, we set out seven components that are essesntial to ensure a sustainable future for global sand resources. They are:
Sustainable sources of sand
Replacing sand with alternative materials
Reusing sand-based materials (e.g. concrete) where possible
Reducing our need for sand by changing designs and using more efficient materials
Governance of sand at an internatioinal level
Education around the issues of the global sand industry to raise awareness
Monitoring and data sharing to quantify the locations and extents of sand mining activities.
Tracking mining operations from space
Tracking mining operations from space
Globally estimates of sand extraction from large river systems is lacking, in part due to the pervasive and distributed nature of extraction processes. In the Mekong River, current basin wide estimates of sand extraction are 50 Mt, and based on estimates from 2013. In recently published work (https://esurf.copernicus.org/preprints/esurf-2021-39/), we demonstrate the ability of high-resolution satellite imagery to map, monitor and estimate volumes of sand extraction on the Lower Mekong River in Cambodia. We use monthly composite images from PlanetScope imagery (5 m resolution) to estimate sand extraction volumes over the period 2016–2020 and show that rates of extraction have increased year on year from 24 Mt in 2016, to 59 Mt in 2020 at a rate of ~8 Mt yr−1. This represents a doubling of previous best estimates for sand extraction for Cambodia (32 Mt), which are now greater than current best estimates for the entire Mekong Basin (50 Mt).
The physical impacts of sand mining
The physical impacts of sand mining
The extraction of sand from rivers and seas leaves visible marks in bed morphology (right). Sometimes these pock-marks can be up to 7 meters deep and nearly 70 m in diameter. Cumulatively they can lead to a reach-wide lowering of bed elevations of up to 50 cm a year. In work published in Nature Sustainability we show that this lowering can trigger major system wide instabilities in river banks, threatening infrastructure and livelihoods of the communities who reside along major rivers.
Recent publications on sand mining
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