The world is running out of sand
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 9 September 2019
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The global construction boom is fuelling an illegal trade in sand used to make concrete, causing environmental degradation and spawning sand mafias in parts of the world. Manuela Saragosa speaks to Prem Mahadevan of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, on what is becoming a global phenomenon. Campaigner Sumaira Abdulali, founder of the Awaaz Foundation NGO in India, recounts how she confronted illegal sand miners who were destroying a stretch of beach she owns south of Mumbai, and John Orr, Cambridge University lecturer in concrete structures, on how we could use less sand in construction.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Photo: Illegal sand mining in Senegal, Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, this is Business Daily from the BBC and I'm Manuela Saragossa. |
| 0:06.1 | In this edition, the world is running out of sand. |
| 0:09.6 | In two years, just between 2011 and 2013, China consumed more sand for construction than the United |
| 0:16.7 | States did during the entire 20th century. |
| 0:19.0 | So high is the demand for sand. |
| 0:21.4 | Some will even resort to violence to get at it. |
| 0:24.7 | So they came out and they couldn't make me move. |
| 0:27.6 | So with their fists, they hit me on the head. |
| 0:30.9 | They brushed up the car, picked it up physically and pushed it to the side and left. |
| 0:36.2 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:42.5 | Anyone who's been to or seen the deserts of the Sahara or Saudi Arabia |
| 0:47.4 | will find it hard to believe that the world is running out of sand. |
| 0:51.3 | But consider this. |
| 0:52.9 | Modern civilization is literally built on sand. Sand is an |
| 0:56.4 | essential component of concrete. That's Prem Mahadevan of the Global Initiative Against Transnational |
| 1:02.7 | Organized Crime. The problem, as he and a UN report published several years ago note, |
| 1:08.6 | is that sand in the Sahara, or in Saudi Arabia, is the wrong |
| 1:12.6 | kind of sand for construction. Take Dubai's Burj Khalifa Tower, the world's tallest building. |
| 1:19.0 | Dubai imported sand all the way from Australia to build it. In fact, the global building boom has |
| 1:25.4 | unleashed an apparently insatiable demand for the right kind of sand. |
| 1:29.8 | The kind you find on riverbeds, the kind that's got a high gravel content, the kind that you can make concrete with. |
| 1:36.9 | And that demand has also unleashed illegal sand mining. |
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