A run-on for sand leads to a creeping crisis worldwide

Every day, miners remove 5,500 to 6,000 truckloads of sand (about 20 tons each) from the scenic beachfronts and 17 river basins of Tamil Nadu in India, according to the state government. India is hungry for sand. Fueled by a real estate boom estimated to generate $180 billion annually by 2020, India is digging 500 million metric tons of sand every year, feeding an industry worth more than $50 billion. And India’s hunger is bound to increase, as the government plans to build about 60 million new affordable homes between 2018 and 2024. But this sand boom has left locals and ecosystems hurting: river and beach-dependent communities in Tamil Nadu see their livelihoods continuously threatened, while habitats and local food chains lose their balance. “Beach sand mining is taking place within the high tide line, inside the sea,” says Sandhya Ravishankar, an independent journalist from Chennai, the state capital, who covers illegal sand mining in the region. She adds that the mining occurs within the coastal regulation zone, an area ostensibly off-limits for such activity. The World’s Disappearing Sand Castle India isn’t alone. Massive sand mining operations stretch across Southeast Asia and Morocco, South Africa and as far as the United States and the Caribbean. At a global level, the amount of natural resources used in building real estate and transportation infrastructure in 2010 was 23 times higher than in 1900, almost 80 percent of it sand and gravel, according to a recent study in Science. “The community researching sand…

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