How to stop the world from running out of sand

We use sand a lot more than we realise. It’s used to make our roads, our computer screens, and the windows and concrete in our buildings. In fact, sand is one of the most extracted solid materials in the world today. Together with other construction aggregates such as gravel and crushed rock, it’s played a key role in satisfying our needs for more factories, bigger and better housing, and greater mobility. However, these growing needs are damaging the planet’s ecosystems, triggering social conflicts and fuelling concerns that the world is running out of sand.

An international team of scientists have now provided new insight into the sustainability of the global sand system and offer solutions for more sustainable sand consumption. Their approach focuses on the entire sand supply network (SSN) of a region viewed as a coupled human and natural system created solely to supply materials for building what society needs. The research was published in the journal ‘One Earth’.

“With this paper, we look forward towards what we need to do as a society if we want to promote a sustainable consumption on global sand resources,” observed lead author Dr Aurora Torres of Belgium’s Catholic University of Louvain in a ‘EurekAlert!’ news release. “A drastic problem calls for drastic solutions - truly doing this differently to put aside problems and create pathways to sustainability,” emphasised Dr Torres, who is coordinating the EU-funded SANDLINKS project that partly funded this research.

In pursuit of these “drastic solutions,” the team focused on SSNs, analysing the material stocks and flows of construction aggregates in terms of sustainability outcomes: security of supply, environmental accountability and socioeconomic development. The SSN approach integrates material flow analysis and telecoupled human-natural system theory to provide a clearer picture of the global sand system and the associated stresses on humans and nature.

Telecoupling analyses the spatial relationships and interactions between distant coupled human and natural systems from a socioeconomic and environmental perspective. “Simple views cannot solve complex sustainability challenges,” noted co-author Dr Jianguo Liu of SANDLINKS project partner Michigan State University. “New ways like the telecoupling framework help untangle and embrace the complexity of global sand challenges and point the way toward effective solutions.”In their paper, the researchers introduce the idea of transitions in sand production from subsistence mining towards larger-scale regional supply systems that include mega-quarries for crushed rock, marine dredging and recycled secondary materials. According to the authors, proper management of sand resources requires a good grasp of the construction aggregates cycle. “[T]he physical system is key for linking local impacts of natural resource extraction to global development trends,” states co-author Dr Mark Simoni of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Besides providing better insight into the physical system, the authors also propose spatial mapping of the links between consumers, traders and places of production as an avenue to sustainable transitions. This paints a picture of how supply streams are linked to specific environmental and social outcomes, allowing stakeholders to understand the risks and create policies that optimise trade-offs in SSNs. Another course of action proposed is understanding the decision-making processes that drive changes in SSNs.

SANDLINKS (Framing sand sustainability in a telecoupled world) is coordinated by the Catholic University of Louvain. The 3-year project ends in 2022.

For more information, please see:

SANDLINKS project