Global sand mining is destroying the planet and costing lives
NationofChange “The nature of the crisis is we don’t understand this material well enough.” It makes up the concrete of our houses, the tarmac of our roads, the glass in our windows and the silicon chips in our phones. But sand, a building block of modern life that sits at the heart of a destructive and sometimes illegal industry, is in increasingly short supply — and nobody knows how soon it will run out. Sand is the most used material on the planet but also one of the least well monitored. Unlike most other commodities, policymakers only have rough estimates of how much...