2356. The World’s Disappearing Sand

By Vince Beiser, The New York Times, June 23, 2016

MOST Westerners facing criminal charges in Cambodia would be thanking their lucky stars at finding themselves safe in another country. But Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson, who is half British and half Spanish, is pleading with the Phnom Penh government to allow him back to stand trial along with three Cambodian colleagues. They’ve been charged, essentially, with interfering with the harvesting of one of the 21st century’s most valuable resources: sand.

Believe it or not, we use more of this natural resource than any other except water and air. Sand is the thing modern cities are made of. Pretty much every apartment block, office tower and shopping mall from Beijing to Lagos, Nigeria, is made at least partly with concrete, which is basically just sand and gravel stuck together with cement. Every yard of asphalt road that connects all those buildings is also made with sand. So is every window in every one of those buildings.

Sand is the essential ingredient that makes modern life possible. And we are starting to run out.

That’s mainly because the number and size of cities is exploding, especially in the developing world. Every year there are more people on the planet, and every year more of them move to cities. Since 1950, the world’s urban population has ballooned to over 3.9 billion from 746 million.

According to the United Nations Environment Program, in 2012 alone the world used enough concrete to build a wall 89 feet high and 89 feet wide around the Equator. From 2011 to 2013, China used more cement than the United States used in the entire 20th century.

To build those cities, people are pulling untold amounts of sand out of the ground. Usable sand is a finite resource. Desert sand, shaped more by wind than by water, generally doesn’t work for construction. To get the sand we need, we are stripping riverbeds, floodplains and beaches.

Extracting the stuff is an estimated $70 billion industry. It runs the gamut from multinational companies’ deploying enormous dredges to villagers toting shovels and buckets. In places where onshore sources have been exhausted, sand miners are turning to the seas.

This often inflicts terrible costs on the environment. In India, river sand mining is disrupting ecosystems, killing countless fish and birds. In Indonesia, some two dozen small islands are believed to have disappeared since 2005 because of sand mining. In Vietnam, miners have torn up hundreds of acres of forest to get at the sandy soil underneath.

Sand miners have damaged coral reefs in Kenya and undermined bridges in Liberia and Nigeria. Environmentalists tie sand dredging in San Francisco Bay to the erosion of nearby beaches.

People are getting hurt, too. Sand mining has been blamed for accidental deaths in Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Gambia. In India and Indonesia, activists and government officials confronting black-market sand mining gangs have been killed.

Stronger regulations can prevent a lot of this damage, and do in most developed countries. But there’s a downside. Sand is tremendously heavy, which makes it expensive to transport. If you forbid sand mining in your backyard — as many American communities are trying to do — then it has to be trucked in from somewhere else. That drives up the price. Concrete is relatively cheap; if the cost of making a new building or road were to double, it could hit the economy hard.

Not to mention the extra truck traffic and pollution. California state officials estimated that if the average hauling distance for sand and gravel increased to 50 miles from 25 miles, trucks would burn through nearly 50 million more gallons of diesel fuel every year.

We can make more sand, but crushing rock or pulverizing concrete is costly, and the resulting sand is ill suited for many applications. We can use alternative substances for some purposes, but what other substance can we possibly find 40 billion tons of, every year?

The fishing villages in the mangrove-rich estuaries of Cambodia’s Koh Kong province might be the canaries in the global sand mine. For years, villagers have complained that rampant sand mining is wiping out the crabs and fish that provide their living. Locals told me on a recent visit that families have had to send members to work in Phnom Penh garment factories, or have simply moved away. The dredging also threatens endangered native dolphins, turtles and otters.

Last year, members of Mother Nature, an environmental group led by Mr. Gonzalez-Davidson and others, began a campaign to rein in the mining, organizing villagers to blockade and board the dredging ships. The government, which had expelled Mr. Gonzalez-Davidson a few months earlier for blocking road access to government officials trying to reach a hydropower dam in the province, arrested three of the activists, charging them with threatening to damage dredging boats, an offense that could mean two years in prison (Mr. Gonzalez-Davidson was charged in absentia as their accomplice a few months later).

Mr. Gonzalez-Davidson, who lives in Barcelona, is petitioning to be allowed back to attend his own trial. Meanwhile, the three jailed Cambodians have been denied bail for the past 10 months. Their trial has finally been scheduled for the end of June.

There’s an urgent question of justice for them. For the rest of us, there’s a profound lesson. Hardly anyone thinks about sand, where it comes from or what we do to get it. But a world of seven billion people, more and more of whom want apartments to live in and offices to work in and malls to shop in, can’t afford that luxury anymore.

It once seemed as if the planet had such boundless supplies of oil, water, trees and land that we didn’t need to worry about them. But of course, we’re learning the hard way that none of those things are infinite, and the price we’ve paid so far for using them is going up fast. We’re having to conserve, reuse, find alternatives for and generally get smarter about how we use those natural resources. That’s how we need to start thinking about sand.

Vince Beiser, a journalist, is working on a book about the global black market in sand.

2093. The Next Resource Shortage?

By David S. Abraham, The New York Times, November 20, 2015

Rare Earth elements

WHEN world leaders gather in Paris later this month to forge an agreement on climate change, they will discuss ways to use less fossil fuel, expand energy-efficient technologies and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Yet even as our leaders are pushing us to use fewer resources, their vision will force us to use more.

Though energy from the sun and wind appears boundless, the resources needed to turn it into power are not. And as we move away from oil, gas and coal, there is increasing demand for the rare metals that are at the heart of green technology. In the process, we are trading one resource dependency for another, and unleashing a new set of economic and environmental ramifications.

These rare metals — a group of roughly 50 that includes indium, rare earths and gallium — are produced in small quantities, often several thousands of tons annually or less; blended with other metals; and traded in back-room deals. But don’t let their obscurity fool you. They are critical to green technology. Their unique properties make the products we buy smaller, faster and more powerful.

They are embedded in the tallest wind turbines, the smallest computer chip and in every battery. If we succeed in meeting the International Energy Agency’s minimum recommendation of nearly quadrupling wind power capacity by 2030, growing electric vehicle use more than 100-fold by 2025, and increasing battery efficiency, specialty metals like dysprosium and cobalt will take center stage.

The Department of Energy and the European Union now fret over potential shortages of these metals because the speed of technological innovation may soon outpace our ability to develop sustainable supplies to support them. The American Chemical Society reports that nearly half of naturally occurring elements face supply risks. But a sole focus on geologic supply is misguided.

The greater concern is that miners cannot quickly ramp up production. Supply lines can take 10 to 15 years to develop, resulting in part from challenging mining regulations, the high costs of opening a mine and environmental concerns. And finding the right mix of heat and acids to produce some of these metals can take years, if it can be done at all. Having the minerals in the ground doesn’t mean these metals can be produced.

Specialty metals are rarely mined for themselves. They are byproducts of more lucratively mined metals like copper. This means that even if prices of a rare metal were to skyrocket, companies often have little economic incentive to produce them if it means sacrificing some base metal production or investing in new processing equipment. If supplies cannot be produced in a timely way, these specialty metals will become more expensive, limiting their use.

This is not an abstract issue. Fears of resource shortages, caused by uncertain supply, have led companies to abandon promising technologies. Wind power manufacturers, like General Electric, shifted away from using technologies requiring rare earths, a set of rare metals produced almost entirely in China. Fear persists in the market that Beijing would again restrict access, as it did in 2010 when it cut off supplies to Japan. When one mine or country dominates production — as China does for nearly half of all critical metals — supply risks abound.

Substitution can have a hidden but profound environmental impact. For example, air-conditioners built without a rare earth magnet motor are significantly less efficient. In the United States, which expends 5 percent of all the electricity it produces on air-conditioning, less efficient machines can mean significantly more energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.

Until 30 years ago, many rare metals were mere chemistry curiosities. With the advent of green technology and the proliferation of electronic gadgets, we have produced more of most rare metals over the past three decades than we did from the beginning of time to the 1980s.

Manufacturers will most likely discover ways to become more efficient with rare metals, using less in each product. But even if electric cars, for example, use 50 percent less rare metal per car, the increase in vehicles needed to meet green energy goals will lead to vast demand.

Rather than predicting which metal we need, we must turn rare metals into commodities, by making them cheaper, more abundant and produced with minimal environmental impact. A good first step is government investments in science to develop a cadre of mineralogy and material researchers who can help unlock the powers of rare metals and produce them with greater ease. Governments can also foster investment in rare metals by establishing faster permitting systems for their extraction with clear, stringent environmental standards.

Companies, too, have a role to play. Manufacturers must make products easier to reuse and recycle. Internationally, the establishment of a materials agency to publish research and data can help bring transparency to the opaque market. And funding for international development initiatives should support environmentally sustainable rare metal operations.

Over a century ago, we jumped into fossil fuels without understanding the ramifications of their use. We would do well to realize the resource implications of our green ambitions and develop a resource plan with them in mind.

David S. Abraham is the author of “The Elements of Power.”