LIKE stars, snowflakes and blades of grass, sand is one of those things that seems to be in infinite supply. It has been a symbol for quantities beyond counting since ancient times. When the biblical hero Joseph faces an impending famine in the book of Genesis he “stored up grain in great abundance like the sand of the sea, until he stopped measuring it, for it was beyond measure”.
Fast forward a few thousand years and things have changed: we are running out of the stuff. “Sand is a lot like oil,” says Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University. “It takes a lot of time to make and it can’t be renewed.”
That’s more than a little troubling, for sand is literally the foundation of modern civilisation. It is a crucial ingredient in concrete, bricks, plaster, glass and microchips. What’s more, efforts to mine ever more sand are damaging ecosystems around the world.
We can’t do without it, and yet now might be the time to stay our shovels. Increasingly, the world is waking up to the sand crisis and trying to tackle it. Learn to use less sand in a smarter way, and we might just stop this most precious of resources from slipping through our fingers forever.
Think of sand and you probably picture the golden-brown stuff on the beach, which is largely made of silicon dioxide. Yet sand is defined not by its composition, but by the size of its grains, which are smaller than gravel and larger than silt. Roughly speaking, that means between 2 and 0.06 millimetres. Within that range there is a huge variety…