As resource scarcity continues to hit headlines and resource security gains political prominence, certain facts are increasingly entering the collective consciousness: the world is headed for peak oil, for example, and clean water is becoming ever scarcer, while there are mounting pressures on farmland to produce food and fuel for a growing (and more affluent) population. Many will also be aware that the manufacturing sectors require certain critical raw materials that suffer from supply chain risks: rare earth minerals, platinum group metals, cobalt, and so on.

And yet there’s a resource out there that very few people have been talking about until now – a resource that’s found in everything from the food we eat and the technology we use to the roads we drive on and the buildings we live in. Combined with gravel, it’s the most commonly mined material in the world, and its extraction can cause negative side effects ranging from biodiversity destruction to livelihood loss and even the disappearance of whole land masses. Believe it or not, I’m referring to sand.

Geologist Michael Welland, the man who literally wrote the book on sand (Sand: A journey through science and the imagination) and who was involved in the recent Sand Wars documentary that delves into the problems of sand extraction, explains the many unknown uses of this unsung hero: “One of the surprising things about what seems to be a humble and ubiquitous material is that it’s not only used in concrete, which is of course the major consumer of sand worldwide, but it’s used for filters, it’s used in metal foundries for moulds, it’s used in glass, of course, and it’s a major source of minerals like titanium – which then goes into things like white paint, toothpaste, and all kinds of other things – and silica, which has endless uses as a filler, including in food stuffs, and specialist silica for computing purposes and so on. These days, it’s used in fracking, which in the US has become a major consumer of sand.”

But while sand is vital to both everyday and specialist applications, by far the biggest consumers of sand are the construction and land reclamation industries. A new UN Environment Programme (UNEP) briefing, ‘Sand, rarer than one thinks’, estimates that sand and gravel (‘aggregates’) account for 65 to 85 per cent of the 47-59 billion tonnes of material mined in the world every year, and that, in 2012, the world used between 25.9 and 29.6 billion tonnes of aggregates for concrete alone. (The figures are so inexact because there often aren’t reliable statistics coming out of developing countries, which require large amounts of concrete as they develop cities and infrastructure – the UN document notes that China’s demand for cement has increased by 437.5 per cent in the past 20 years, for example.)

And while the world’s cities are increasingly building up with sand-based concrete structures, many are also building out – creating new land principally through sand itself. Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah project, for example, required 385 million tonnes of sand, while the largely abandoned The World project (a set of 300 artificial islands meant to represent a map of the world) used 450 million tonnes. The tiny city-state of Singapore, though, is the world’s highest per capita importer of sand, having increased its land area by 130 square kilometres (an increase of 20 per cent) over the past 40 years. Officially, the country imported 517 million tonnes of sand during that time, according to the UNEP, but a great deal of illegal sand was also used. Much of the sand came from Indonesia, until a temporary ban was enacted in 2002, after sand extraction was reportedly responsible for the disappearance of 24 Indonesian islands. Sand has since been imported from other neighbouring countries, including Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia – both legally and illegally, as various bans have been in place. Summing up Global Witness’s report, ‘Shifting Sand: How Singapore’s demand for Cambodian sand threatens ecosystems and undermines good governance’, author George Boden tells me: “The sand trade in Cambodia has fuelled corruption, damaged the environment and destroyed livelihoods.”

Singapore is not the only country relying on the illegal sand trade, and Welland explains why this is often the case: “The resource itself is free. Particularly in the developing world, all you’ve got to do is get some local people and provide them with perhaps a rare source of employment and send them down to the beach or the river with a shovel and a truck, and there you go.” And even if countries have regulations on sand extraction, “you can’t put a policeman on every beach”.

Indeed, India’s largest criminal organisation is the sand mafia, and the UNEP briefing estimates that half the sand used in Morocco comes from illegal sources, adding: ‘Sand smugglers have transformed a large beach into a rocky landscape between Safi and Essouira… Sand is often removed from beaches to build hotels, roads and other tourism-related infrastructure. In some locations, continued construction is likely to lead to an unsustainable situation and destruction of the main natural attraction for visitors – beaches themselves.’

As a result of this increased use and extraction – combined with construction too close to beaches, and offshore dredging (which results in sand moving out to sea to replace the sand that has been removed from the ocean floor) – between 75 and 90 per cent of beaches are retreating to some extent, Gary Griggs, Director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Santa Cruz, says in Sand Wars. And the impacts of the sand trade don’t stop with the visible disappearance of beaches. The UNEP briefing charts consequences of sand extraction in a number of areas including: biodiversity, including negatively impacting fisheries; land losses; change in water flows, flood regulation and marine currents; lowering of the water table and pollution; damage to infrastructure; increased carbon emissions through both transport and cement production; and, significantly, ‘decline of protection against extreme events (flood, drought, storm surge)’.

Even though sand is seemingly all around us and you’d think extractors could leave the beaches and seas alone, not all sand is created equal. Welland explains: “We tend to think of sand as sand. The problem is that for all of these speciality uses, you can’t just use any old sand. Every speciality use of sand requires a specific kind of sand, and that specific sand is often not available locally or it’s in relatively short supply. And so when we say there’s plenty of sand in the world, that’s perfectly true, but if we need sand for a particular application, the right kind of sand is not necessarily easily available.”

Desert sand certainly seems to be available in abundance, but Welland explains that for anything “other than just filling in holes, desert sand is not really useful”, adding: “It is essentially the wrong type of sand for concrete, because it’s too smooth and rounded, the grains don’t lock together.” More irregular sand, such as that found in riverbeds, on beaches and under the sea, however, fits the bill for both construction and land reclamation.

Fracking, on the other hand, requires large quantities of “tough and uncrushable pure quartz sand” that is “of the right size and… smooth and rounded” to prop open the fissures created by the high-pressure water. And manufacturing glass requires very pure silica sand. “It has to be extremely free of other minerals, other chemicals – particularly iron oxide and so on”, Welland says, adding: “Both in Europe and in the US, there are just a few places where geological time has cleaned up those sands to the point where they can be used for glassmaking.”

Moreover, these sands are being extracted at a faster rate than the earth can replenish them, with Welland noting: “Half the problem is that we have put so many dams on so many rivers that the supply of sand to the coast has been choked off. The supply simply isn’t there.” Indeed, Sand Wars documents that the 80,000 dams in the United States and more than 845,000 in the rest of the world are blocking the natural flow of sand to the world’s beaches.

So the world is facing a double whammy of increased demand and decreased supply, but there are of course steps that can be taken to mitigate this. The simplest step would be to dredge reservoirs as “all that sand that we might find quite useful is sitting in the reservoirs behind the dam”, according to Welland. This will provide a bit more sand, but won’t meet demand, so I ask what else can be done, and Welland replies: “Certainly finding substitutes in concrete, and expanding the scale of concrete recycling needs to be pursued more vigorously.”

Recycling of concrete does happen on a fairly regular basis in the UK, with The Concrete Centre saying that of the 150 million tonnes of construction and demolition waste produced annually in the UK, 46 million tonnes are recycled. Chris Clear, Technical Director of the British Ready-Mixed Concrete Association, explains: “Provided concrete is separated from material from general demolition, it is reused as crushed concrete aggregate, where a small proportion of this is used for the manufacture of ready-mixed concrete and precast concrete.” Though this type of downcycling for road construction rather than back into concrete isn’t necessarily ideal, Clear adds that “the demand for crushed concrete exceeds its availability, so it is availability that limits its use”.

Improving glass recycling would also play a role in preserving sand reserves, and the rarity of glassmaking sand makes throwing away (or even using as aggregate) our bottles and jars look extremely foolish. In the UK, we currently recycle around 60 per cent of this infinitely recyclable material, with a requirement that 63 per cent goes for remelt. However, the government recently reduced business glass recycling targets from 81 per cent to 75 per cent, representing a substantial loss of 120,000 tonnes for 2014.

And when it comes to substitutes for concrete, there are many; the UN briefing notes alternatives for housing including wood, straw and recycled material, and says that sand could be replaced by quarry dust, some desert sand (‘if mixed with other materials’) or even incinerator ash in concrete. This last idea is an intriguing one as it would solve two problems, given that burning waste can result in up to 30 per cent of the material by weight remaining as ash that can still head to landfill (if it’s not used in aggregates). However, when I ask Chris Clear about this possibility, he is not optimistic, especially when it comes to incinerator fly ash, which isn’t used in cement “because of the risk of leaching dangerous substances into drinking water and the wider environment”.

Substitutes, unfortunately, won’t be pursued until the economics stack up – which remains a distant prospect, as the UNEP briefing states: ‘The current situation will continue unless sand extraction is correctly priced and taxed so that other options become economically viable. Despite the increasing rarity of sand, in the United States the price of sand has remained very stable, fluctuating from US$4.50 [£2.60] to US$6.70 [£3.90] a tonne between 1910 and 2013… Because sand is still very cheap – sand itself is freely accessible; only extraction costs need to be covered – there is little or no incentive to induce a change in our consumption.’

Indeed, the problem needs to be addressed on an international level. Again, the UNEP report notes: ‘Whilst it is critical for political leaders to take appropriate measures, the mining of aggregates has not yet reached their political agenda. This is primarily because sand loss has not yet reached a level of scarcity that would threaten the economy. Few, if any, measures are being implemented… with the notable exception of the European Union, and the United Kingdom in particular… There is a need for regulating sand extraction in both national and international waters.’

Even in the lauded European Union, though, sand extraction is not necessarily getting the attention it deserves to solve the problem. Pieter Depous, EU Policy Director at the European Environmental Bureau, tells me why: “There are no EU regulations that govern sand extraction directly. A number of EU environmental rules do so indirectly: the Habitats Directive, for example, restricts extractions in areas that are designated for conservation and stipulates mitigation and compensation measures in the exceptional cases that it would be allowed; the Water Framework Directive governs extraction from within riverbeds… A proposal for a soil directive that would probably have been the most relevant has, however, just been withdrawn by the commission following a small but persistent blocking minority that included the UK.”

He adds, somewhat dispiritingly: “Given the fate of the proposed soil directive and the fact that mineral extraction is a national competence fiercely protected by member states, I think it is unlikely to make its way up the EU environmental agenda in the short term.” Likewise, Welland concludes: “In certain respects, there aren’t grounds for much optimism, unfortunately.”

Still, thanks to the Sand Wars documentary and efforts of groups like Global Witness, it is at least gaining attention. The sand, as they say, is slipping through the hourglass, though, so the time to act is now.