Sand Mining in Global and Local Context

UN Report Warns of "Looming" Sand Crisis; The Importance of Sand, Globally and Locally; Unregulated Mining in Plymouth County

(Kingstown Trucking Sand Mine on the County Woodlot, Plymouth — photo credit, Alyse Bruneau.)

(GENEVA and PLYMOUTH) – A new report from the United Nations highlights the dramatically increasing global use of sand, and warns of an impending crisis unless current trends are reversed.

The report, from the United Nations Environment Program, states that at least 55 billion US tons (50 billion metric tonnes) of sand and gravel is being mined globally each year, as demand skyrockets in the wake of increasing global population and development.

At the current population level, that averages out to just under 40 pounds (18 kilograms) per day per person of sand at current rates of extraction and use (because some countries are far wealthier than others, this use is not evenly distributed).¹

(US Sand Prices, Feb., 1973 to March, 2022, via the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Units Index: 1982 = 100, seasonally adjusted; March, 2022 values = 404.272)²

Sand is the second-most extracted mineral substance in the world, and is mined heavily in Plymouth County, often beyond the bounds of law and the common good. Critical for construction (both concrete and glass require sand), electronics, and, increasingly, hydrocarbon production via hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, sand, the report argues, is increasingly a strategic resource for governments around the world.

Yet sand is largely unregulated, including in places in the developed world, like Plymouth County, that have, at least in theory, robust structures of local government (as we shall see, it is getting local governments to actually enforce laws that are on the books that is sometimes difficult). Increasing demand means that “active” sand deposits, that are located in rivers, bays, deltas, beaches, and geologically-vulnerable aquifer recharge zones, like much of southeastern Massachusetts, are especially threatened.

Because sand grains from deserts bounce up against one another in the wind for eons, they are generally far too smooth for industrial uses; they simply will not act as a binding agent, e.g. Coarser-grained sand, as in rivers, beaches, and glaciated deposits like our own, are a sine qua non (“without which nothing”) of concrete, glass, and other industrial production.

As global growth approaches planetary limits, the report’s 22 authors, from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, from economics through ecology to local government, were stark in their warnings. Supplies of sand around the world are coming under increasing pressure, with serious consequences for human health, happiness, and well-being, they said.

Growth in Asia, Fracking, Push Global Surge in Demand

  China is a major driver of the demand for sand, with its decades-long economic expansion sending global demand surging. In fact, as reported by The Washington Post, China used more concrete in three years, from 2011 through 2013, than the United States used in the entirety of the 20th century.³

( Chinese GDP per capita, 1000-2018; Construction in China. Both images via Wikimedia Commons. )

Nor is China alone in this. Vietnam, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, India, and other Asian economies have grown at breakneck speed in recent decades.

     In Sri Lanka, according to the report, so much sand was mined from one river that it reversed its flow, flooding previously arable land with saltwater and rendering it useless for agriculture.  

    The Mekong Delta, familiar to many Americans as the scene of vicious fighting during the Vietnam War, is increasingly plagued by dangerously unregulated and harmful sand-mining, including in the river channels themselves. The delta as a result is literally sinking into the sea, as demand for its precious sand and rampant unregulated sand-mining causes the land itself to subside, sometimes actually causing villages, fields, fishponds, and other human structures to collapse into the water. In 2017, it was reported that Vietnam’s relevant government authorities believed the country had gone through about 95% of its usable sand.

( Dredging sand from the bottom of the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, 2017. Photo Credit — Sim Chi Yi, National Geographic)
   

According to one French study, in 2011 alone, 50 million tons were extracted from just the Mekong Delta – enough to cover the entire City of Denver in two inches of sand.⁴

  In addition, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for oil and gas in North America has dramatically increased demand for sand; the sand is blasted in a solution with water into shale beds in places like Pennsylvania and North Dakota, allowing formerly trapped hydrocarbons to be extracted. Not only are these regions often thereby destroyed — driving through the Northern Tier of Pennsylvania, some of the most beautiful and wild country east of the Mississippi, is a tragic experience, with methane emissions from fracking so overwhelming that one nearly without exagerration retches — but the need for sand is hugely increased (not to mention the effect of so much carbon on the climate).

Plymouth County: Geology and Sand Mines

    Plymouth County is not Vietnam – one is an authoritarian, one party state in Southeast Asia, the other a collection of mostly directly democratic Towns in a North Atlantic, post-Calvinist democracy (New England, though I could also be describing Scotland, the Netherlands, or Switzerland). Yet for all the differences, both places share a problem with unregulated sand mining.

      Indeed, the geological conditions that make Plymouth County a natural wonderland and a conducive environment to cranberry agriculture, also make it a valuable prize for sand mining interests.

( The surficial geology of Plymouth County, via nesoil.com. Areas in both dark pink and in black are significant deposits of sand and gravel. Photo credit — nesoil.com)

During the last Ice Age, glacial advance and recession created a landscape dominated by deposits of glacial till, a mixture of sand and gravel, shaped into hills and hollows (moraines and kames and eskers, on the one hand, and kettles, on the other).

    The glacier created our beautiful kettle ponds⁵ that are so characteristic of our region. There are more ponds in Plymouth alone – 450 by one good count — than there are days in a year, and thousands dot the pine-clad landscapes of Southeastern Massachusetts as a whole. These are essentially the places where these fields of ice-age created kettles intersect and meet the Plymouth-Carver sole source aquifer, the largest aquifer in the region, and provider of drinking water for seven towns (Plymouth, Kingston, Carver, Bourne, Wareham, Middleboro, and Plympton). 

( Campsite above Curlew Pond in Myles Standish State Forest; photo credit — Friends of Myles Standish States Forest )

( Swimmers at Charge Pond in Myles Standish State Forest; photo credit — Friends of Myles Standish State Forest )

   When the aquifer is disturbed, as it is by sand-mining, it becomes extremely vulnerable to contamination; because it is a sole-source aquifer, pollution in one area threatens the entire aquifer.

    Likewise, what are today cranberry bogs were historically Atlantic white cedar swamps, peatlands where the water table is essentially just at the level of the surface of the Earth.

    Finally, the kettles are called “dry kettles” when they are above the water table, as any hiker of Myles Standish State Forest will attest.

    Meanwhile, the recession of the glaciers created a series of moraines, essentially huge mounds of glacial till, many hundreds of feet deep, that the glacier bulldozed, and then deposited here as it retreated north. The Pine Hills (the geographical feature), Manomet Hill, the Hog Rock and Ellisville Moraines in southern Plymouth, are all fine examples of these.

These large sand deposits, along with a consistent supply of freshwater, are essential for cranberry agriculture, as domesticated cranberries generally require sand to aid in their growth and keep other plants down. The three major cranberry growing regions in the United States – Southeastern Massachusetts, southern New Jersey, and central Wisconsin – are all characterized by geologically-similar landscapes of moraines, kettles, glacial lakes, and peat wetlands.

And that’s the rub.

Under the guise of permits for cranberry agriculture, certain powerful, local economic actors, such as the A.D. Makepeace Company, are engaged in vast and unpermitted sand-mining operations.

This is not just my opinion, either — at a meeting of the Plymouth Zoning Board of Appeals on April 20th, 2022 [article forthcoming], Attorneys Jonathan Polloni and Meg Sheehan ably and convincingly demonstrated that Makepeace is removing far more sand than is necessary for cranberry agriculture on one South Plymouth property near Frogfoot Brook — raising the question of where, precisely, that sand is going (there is a formula, from Makepeace themselves, of how much sand is required per acre of cranberry agriculture, and it is far exceeded by the sand that is removed from that site).⁶

Not only does this threaten the drinking water for essentially the entire southern half of Plymouth County, it also raises questions about the health and well-being of neighboring communities and the sand-miners and truckers themselves. Breathing in large amounts of silica dust is extremely damaging for the lungs and respiratory system; a new study from Michigan State University shows that sand and gravel miners show elevated levels of doctor visits for shortness of breath compared with other workers.⁷

The UN Report is clear — unless we start to seriously reuse and recycle our supplies of sand, there is a real chance we could run out. Such a thing seems impossible, but the experience of recent decades shows that the impossible has a funny way of becoming, quickly and frighteningly, possible.

The fundamental reality is that we live on a finite planet, and despite some dreams about space travel, it is really the only one we have. It is critical if we want it to be habitable for future generations that we live within limits, and practice those same principles of conservation, frugality, and good stewardship that have guided both the several bands of the Wampanoag Nation and the several English Towns for centuries — indeed, millennia — in this neck of the woods.

  Whether in the Mekong Delta or on Manomet Hill, sand deeply affects us all, and has to be managed responsibly for the common good — in Plymouth County, and around the world.

1. Pascal Peduzzi et al., for the United Nations Environment Programme, 2022 Sand and Sustainability: 10 Strategic Recommendations to Avoid a Crisis (Geneva: 2022).

2. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Producer Price Index by Commodity: Nonmetallic Mineral Products: Construction Sand, Gravel, and Crushed Stone [WPS1321], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPS1321, April 28, 2022.

To clarify, the 1982 = 100 index is a tool used by economists to show changes in price over time. Thus, with the 1982 price of sand as a baseline, sand today is a little over four times more expensive than 1982; as the chart indicates, sand is about twice as expensive today as it was around the year 2000.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has a background on economic indexing here: https://www.dallasfed.org/research/basics/indexing.aspx

3. Ana Swanson, “How China used more cement in 3 years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th Century,” The Washington Post, March 24th, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/24/how-china-used-more-cement-in-3-years-than-the-u-s-did-in-the-entire-20th-century/

4. Chi Yin Simh and Vince Beiser, “Dramatic Photos Show How Sand Mining Threatens a Way of Life in Southeast Asia,” National Geographic, March 16, 2018. https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/dramatic-photos-show-how-sand-mining-threatens-way-life-southeast-asia

5. Other parts of the English-speaking world, especially places that were glaciated in a similar fashion, like Michigan or Minnesota, would call these bodies of water “lakes” – however, in New England English, a pond can be anywhere from a tiny haunt of frogs, beloved of neighborhood kids, to a vast expanse of thousands of acres of open water (e.g., Assawompset Pond in Lakeville, the largest natural body of water in Massachusetts).

6. Attorney Margaret E. Sheehan, Esq. “Second Demand for Enforcement of Zoning Bylaw and Special Permit #3728; New Violations,” letter to Plymouth Director of Inspectional Services Nicholas Mayo, April 19, 2022. Attorney Jonathan M. Polloni, Esq., of Falmouth, clearly demonstrated in his presentation to the Plymouth Zoning Board of Appeals that significant legal problems existed with Makepeace’s Frogfoot Mine.

7. Jada Penn, Capital News Service (Lansing, Michigan). “Study Raises Health Concern for Sand and Gravel Workers,” April 29th, 2022. https://news.jrn.msu.edu/2022/04/study-raises-health-concerns-for-sand-and-gravel-workers/