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The HC Commodities Podcast
Sand: The most important commodity in the modern world with Vince Beiser (Summer Repeat)
00:46:56
Sand has transformed modern civilization. It is the ubiquitous commodity; in our infrastructure, in our industry and even in our personal care products. Yet due to its characteristics, the supply chain is fragmented, disastrous for our environment and often corrupt. And by a tragic quirk of geometry, desert sand is unusable meaning we wreck our riverbeds and oceans to acquire it. In this episode, author and journalist Vince Beiser joins us to discuss sand and its role in the modern world. Vince is the author of The World in a Grain - the story of sand and how it transformed civilization.
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Foreign.
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Welcome to the HC Insider Podcast, a podcast dedicated to the commodities sector and the people within it. I'm your host, Paul Chapman. Today we're talking about sand, arguably the most important commodity and in modern civilization. Our guest is Vince Beisser, award winning journalist and author of the World in a Grain the Story of Sand and how it Transformed civilization. Also on February 22nd in London, we have our latest HDInsider podcast live event. This time hosted by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. We'll be discussing the trading future of critical metals. Tickets are free but limited, so please rsvp. I'll put the links in the show notes if you wish to attend. As always, you can really support the show by leaving a positive review on the platform you're listening on or a thumbs up on YouTube if that's where you get the podcast. And as always, I hope you enjoy the episode. Vince, welcome to the show.
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Thanks, Paul. It's great to be here.
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So I'm looking forward to this discussion. We're talking about your book the World in a the Story of Sand and How It Transforms Civilization. And then we're going to come on to your, your next book, which is going to also be very relevant to this community. But I guess let's, let's start. Which is kind of almost the first and most shocking realization of the book, which is just how crucial sand is to modern civilization. And it really being kind of the unsung hero, the backbone of modern life. Can you just help us start there and just give us some sense of the scale and enormity of sand's role in modern civilization?
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Sure. I mean, it really is crazy, right? Because you think barely anybody ever thinks about sand, right. It just seems like the most trivial thing in the world, but it's actually, I call it the most important solid substance on earth. And that's because it's, it's what our cities are literally made out of. So if you think about every office tower, every apartment block, every airport that's being built anywhere in the world, it's made mostly out of concrete. And what's concrete? Concrete is basically just sand and gravel that have been glued together. So you've got just, you know, enormous, enormous amounts of sand in all the concrete that's all over the world. And it doesn't stop there. Also all the roads that connect all those buildings, asphalt, same thing. It's just sand and gravel that's been glued together to create asphalt. The windows in all of those buildings, also made of sand. Every single piece of glass on earth is just sand. That's been melted down. Even the silicon chips that power our phones, the computer that I'm talking to you over right now, also made from sand. So bottom line is no sand, no modern civilization. It is the most. It's the natural resource that we consume the most of, except for water.
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Fascinating. It's also, there is the obvious stuff that we think about. You know, obviously concrete, less so asphalt, and we can think about the impacts of that, but it's also in everyday products as well. I mean, it. It really is ubiquitous.
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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, sand is with us in ways that, that, you know, would absolutely blow your mind. It's in. Sand is used to make paint, it's used to make some kinds of wine. It's used in your toothpaste. It's even the elastic band in your underwear is probably made from sand. Sorry to tell you, Paul, you probably have sand in your underwear.
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It's also sort of thinking about this. It's kind of like how all the best foods are bad for you in the same way that sort of the, the most easily available sand to us is also not actually the useful sand that we all need. You know, that. That's sort of a crucial story that we're going to unravel. Can you just, I guess, before we get there, give us some definition of what sand is and then we can move into where it is and how it exists and which types of sand we use?
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Sure. So I mean sand, the word really just means small little pieces, grains of any hard thing. The, the most commonly used definition is something called the. There's something called the Uden Wentworth scale that folks listening to this podcast might be familiar with. But basically it with there, by that standard, it's any small hard grain that's between 2 millimeters and point 0625 millimeters in diameter. So that can be anything. Right. It can be crushed up rocks, it can be crushed up shells, it can be, you know, any sort of rock or stone that's crushed down to that, that size. But the most common kind of sand and the sand that we're really talking about, the sand that we use for, for concrete and all these other things is quartz. So quartz. Quartz sand. Grains of quartz are estimated to be about 70% of all the sand in the world. And that's the stuff that we're talking about that's really. That's useful for us.
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Yeah. And it really does matter the quality and the attributes that that silica dioxide has. Right. In terms of its usages. So can you, in the book you describe it really lovely in sort of four, there's sort of four different types really for us to think about. Can you just give us an overview of, of how we get from sort of sand using aggregates or aggregates all the way up to these just incredibly high quality purity quartz that's used in silicon wafers?
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Sure, yeah. So there's, there's your basic average, you know, construction sand or aggregate. You know, it usually comes mixed with, with gravel. I mean gravel is just bigger chunks of hard stuff. Right. So it's really, you know, it's sort of more useful to all. Think of it as one thing. So we have that quartz sand, that quartz sand is, you know, that sort of low purity, relatively low purity quartz sand that we use for concrete is found in pretty much every country on Earth. And we get it from the land, from terrestrial pits. Just dig it up. Some we get from the water. A lot of it comes from, from riverbeds, lake bottoms, beaches, even the bottom of the ocean. Problem with ocean sand is it comes up with salt all over it, which, so it has to be washed, which makes it a lot more expensive. The big problem with all the river sand that we used is it can cause huge environmental damage, which we can talk more about later. But anyway, so we've got our land sand, our marine sand, and then you sort of move up the scale of purity to more specialized kind of sand. So the sand that we use for glass making is called silica sand or industrial sand. And that's got to be upwards of 95% purity quartz. It's got to be a much more high concentration of silicon dioxide to have that purity that you need for glass. So that stuff is much harder to come by, but there's still a fair bit of it around. And then at the very, very top of the scale is what's called high purity quartz. And this is naturally occurring, super high purity quartz sand. That's the stuff that we use for making high tech components for solar panels, for silicon chips and chip making equipment. And that stuff is really hard to come by. It's very expensive. And it just so happens that the highest purity quartz sand that's ever been found anywhere on Earth is almost all in one little region of North Carolina. And in fact, pretty much every silicon chip on Earth today owes its creation to this one little region in North Carolina.
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Interesting. We didn't cover that when we, we discussed the, the silicon supply chain, the chips supply chain with Chris Miller. That's, you know, maybe that's a point of leverage down the line. There's. There's a couple of things I want to add there. One is obviously silica sand. This sort of the. The second tier, but still highly pure, is also crucial for the fracking industry.
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That's right, yeah. So fracking. You know, folks, listening to this podcast, I don't have to explain what fracking is, but basically, once you shatter that rock, once you. Once you fracture the rock, you need something to hold the cracks open so that the oil and gas can flow into your well. And so the way they do that is with sand, they inject sand into the cracks to. To literally hold them open. So for that, you need very particular characteristics. That sand's got to be hard, obviously, because geological forces want to close those cracks down again. And it's also got to be kind of rounded so that the oil and gas molecules can flow around them easily and get to the wellhead. So there's really excellent fracking sand in western Wisconsin, which for a few years there caused this enormous frack sand mining boom. So the fracking boom in North Dakota and in Texas also created a frac sand mining boom in Wisconsin. And for few years there, there was an incredible sand rush. They went from, you know, just a handful of frack sand mines in that part of Wisconsin to over a hundred. And it's often, you know, as is often the case with resources, there was this incredible boom. And it's been followed by a bust, basically. Yeah, you know, fracking kind of dried up for a few years. A lot of those frac sand mines went out of business. And then more recently, fracking's come back some, but they've also, in the meantime, they found a lot of frack sand in Texas, much closer to the fracking fields. So there was this amazing, just like boom and bust in frack sand mining in Wisconsin.
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Yeah, you can see that story in U.S. silica, that company, you know, the rise and fall. And then, then I guess this, and I alluded to this in my. My bad sort of analogy with. With sweet food and so forth. But obviously a lot of the challenges we're about to talk about would be solved relatively easily if desert sand could be used in this, you know, as in aggregates and all the things we're using in modern civilization. But it's. Unfortunately, desert sand doesn't really work for our purposes, does it?
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No, it's almost completely useless. People always ask me because, you know, the bottom line is we use so much sand that we're actually starting to run out. There's enormous environmental problems. That are causing. And there's even, you know, big black market that's developed in which hundreds of people are being killed over sand. So people always say, well, can't we just use all that desert sand? And the answer, sadly, is no. The reason for that is the grains are the wrong shape. So it turns out that desert sands have been shaped by wind over thousands and millions of years. They're tumbling and tumbling in the desert. And that. That's really broken off, sort of rounded off all the edges. So desert sand grains are kind of rounded like little marbles. Whereas the sand that we need for things like concrete especially is the sand that you find in terrestrial pits and river bottoms and so on, which is more angular. It's been. It's been eroded by water rather than wind, and. And as a result, it's a lot more angular, it's got a lot more corners and sharp edges. So it locks together to form that solid structure that you need for concrete. So it's like the difference between trying to build something out of millions of little marbles as opposed to millions of little bricks, with desert sand being the marbles. So all that desert sand, pretty much useless to us.
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Yeah. And I assume, I mean, it'd be interesting to see whether there have been any attempts to process that desert sand into more usable sand. But this comes back to this. Well, to the story of the supply chain, which is one of cost. Right. Because it's a very fragmented market, a very fragmented supply chain, in part because this is, you know, sand is heavy and it's very cheap at the moment.
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Yeah. So, in fact, there are a few. There's a couple of. There's at least a few researchers that I know of and one or two startups in the UK that claim they've made they can make concrete, perfectly good concrete with desert sand. I haven't checked it out myself, but they're out there. They, you know, every time I go on a podcast like this, they send me an email to remind me they're out there. So I believe that it's technically possible and it could be. Could be helpful. But the problem, as you say, even if you could do that, even if you can make concrete with desert sand, the problem is getting that desert sand to where you need it. And sand is enormously heavy. And so as soon as you have to transport it more than a few miles, the cost goes way, way up. So the secondary problem with desert sand is, okay, even if you can make desert sand into concrete, how are you going to get, you know, 50 million tons of sand from the Sahara to, you know, London or Houston or Rio de Janeiro or wherever it is you're, you're building your shopping mall or your dam or your airport or whatever, it's a big problem. I mean, I could see it, it could be useful, you know, in cities like, you know, Cairo or places like that that are literally right next to the desert. So if we can actually, if that technology can actually work at scale, it could help, it could help a bit, but it's not going to solve the global sand crisis.
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Yeah. And, and all this to say, you know, at the moment, places like the UAE are importing sand. Right. As a consequence of, of this, this factor. But let's, I guess, talking about the supply to get this right, sand, it's mined, and you've already mentioned that's either in pits or it's taken from riverbeds or even the sea floor. Can you give us some sense of, before we talk about the damage that causes, you know, how it's done? And indeed, just. I found it fascinating, reading the book, that a third of all the, all the sand used in the UK construction industry is basically hoovered off the sea floor.
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Yeah. So, well, we get it in just about every way you can think of. Right. So in terrestrial pits, it's, it's like any other kind of mining, really. You got to strip off the topsoil, the overburden, as it's called, do some blasting probably to break up the rock and then use heavy equipment to load up the sand and truck it away to wherever you're going to use it. If it's coming from a river, which is a very, very common way to get sand, probably the easiest, you just put a barge out in the middle of a big river, drop a pipe, a suction pipe down at the bottom of the river and just, just suck up all that sand that's on the bottom of the river already nicely washed and sorted, put it on your barge and take the barge to wherever. And similar with, with, with ocean sand, just bigger boats, take them out there to where you've, you've found some sand, suck it up like a straw onto your, onto your ship and then pipe it or, or ship it to wherever, to wherever you need it to go.
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Yeah, we'll come on to the, the damage that causes, I think people can imagine that has extreme impacts on, obviously, biodiversity and wildlife. That's getting hoovered up, but also actually on, on out the, the environmental integrity around things like flooding and so forth, which is particularly relevant to Houston as the, as the book highlights, where I'm based, it is a fragmented market. Before we talk about the illegal side, which is in part as a consequence of that, can you just, I mean, just some sense of, for example, Singapore and how it is essentially sort of become a magnet for sand from all over Indonesia, all the surrounding regions, to reclaim land and just this, I guess, some sense of the scale of that. And then actually this is still saying on the legal side, the impact that that's having just in the industry that that's created.
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Sure. So the problem is, of course, you know, with, with a lot of resources, some places have it, but some places don't. Singapore is a really special example because it's very, it's a very rich place, but a very small place. Right. Obviously it's, you know, it's just this tiny little city state. They don't have much in the way of their own sand. In fact, they've used up all their own sand resources long since. Not only building up the city itself, but also adding land. This is another thing that we use enormous amounts of sand for land reclamation, building artificial land. So Singapore has been a world leader in land reclamation for a long time. They've added huge, enormous amounts of. Just created enormous amounts of territory artificially just by dumping huge amounts of sand into the ocean and then building on top of it. Where do they get that sand? Well, they get it from all of their neighboring countries, from Indonesia, from Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines. But they've been doing that for so long and taking so much sand that it started to cause huge problems in a lot of those countries. In fact, there's 24 little islands in Indonesia that have disappeared that were literally mined out of existence. Their sand just hauled up and shipped off to Singapore. So as a result, a lot of those countries have since banned the export of sand to Singapore because of all the problems it was causing, suffers.
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And there's sort of the gray world of sand where, you know, there's missing permits and so forth. And then the very illegal side, which I'll talk to now of stolen beaches and sand mafias and as you say, people losing their lives in this. It sort of, it suffers from just the nature of the type of commodity it is. Right. It's. It's very localized in terms of mining, just given how heavy it is. It's a very fragmented market. There's no sort of dominating trading houses or, or organizations that are overseeing this. It's a very. It, it, it. By sheer dint of that, it opens itself up to, to this gray and then a black economy in it. And, you know, I guess can you give us some sense of, of that, of both the, the gray and the black and indeed how, how sort of black the black is in terms of, you know, the, the criminality that goes on?
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Sure. So, I mean, the black is as black as it gets. But let me start with. I'll start with the grayer end of the spectrum. So the other thing about, about sand, one thing that's, that's a bit unique about it as a commodity is it's actually, it's very easy to, to extract. You know, I mean, literally a lot of sand mining is done just by, you know, in the developing world. It's literally just like a few guys with shovels and a pickup truck or even donkeys just going down to the local beach, filling up a truck or, or, you know, a few donkey loads and then selling that sand to somebody who's, you know, building a hotel down the road. This is literally what's happening in, in places like Morocco where you have beaches being stripped bare in one area so that the sand can be sold to some guy who's building a hotel a mile or two down the road. Same thing in Jamaica where you've had, you know, people have stolen entire beaches and literally sold the sand to developers on some other part of the island. So that makes it really hard to, to control and regulate because a lot of the extraction isn't done by big multinational companies. You don't need the huge kind of equipment that you do for, for metal mining and other kind or, you know, oil extraction. A lot of it can be done, you know, with, with very simple methods by just about anybody and no processing.
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Right. I mean, it's not. You don't have to have a refinery attached to convert some of this stuff.
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Right? Exactly. Exactly. I mean, of course there are, you know, there are really big operations that do it. There are multinational corporations that have big sand mining operations, companies like Vulcan and Heidelberg that sort of have them as part of their, their whole concrete supply chain. And, you know, they do have big sorting facilities to, you know, to really sift out the sand by size and so on. So there's that piece of the industry as well. But a lot of it is at a much smaller scale. In fact, in most places, even in the United States, most of it is done by kind of small and local businesses. And that's sort of a function of. Again, it's partly because sand is so expensive to transport that you and, and it's so ubiquitous it's in so many places so that you usually, if you're using sand, you want to buy it from somewhere that's close by. And so that's sort of given rise to this situation where in the United States at least there are thousands of small and medium sized businesses that supply the bulk of it anyway. So having said all of that, so it makes it pretty easy on the gray market side. You know, if you've got a permit to, let's say mine sand from this square mile and you're allowed to go down to 60ft, it's very easy to just, you know, kind of on the sly mine for over two square miles and go down 100ft. And there is a lot of that kind of just permit exceeding sand mining that's going on. I mean the San Francisco Bay, the world famous San Francisco Bay, for instance, there's sand mining going on there right now. They're dredging sand from the bottom of the bay there. And the company that that's doing it was actually fined many millions of dollars a few years back for, for over mining for just overstepping the bounds of their permit. So there's a lot of that kind of thing going on and a lot of. And it's in general that's pretty easy to do because sand tends to be very poorly regulated. There just aren't that many in a lot of countries. There aren't very many rules. There aren't regulations. Where there are regulations, there aren't that many people kind of keeping an eye on it, government agencies and so on. I mean in Texas, Paul, where you're sitting, there were zero statewide regulations on sand mining until 2011 with dramatic impacts
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when it came to things like Hurricane Harvey and the flooding that the state saw and also aquifers and so forth. So we'll come on to that. But yeah, felt, felt, felt visually here we moved from that sort of the gray side and you know, a lack of regulation and you know, overextending on permits and so forth. Into. You talk very, you know, in the book about sand mafias and you, you pick stories in India that are just, you know, quite traumatic. Can you just give us some sense of, of how as you say, black this gets.
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Yeah, so at the, that's at the far end. But there's a hell of a lot of, there's an enormous black market in sand. This is mostly in, in the developing world, but not entirely. There's completely illegal sand mining in dozens and dozens of countries all over the world. And so the way is basically I'll tell you the story of how I found out about this issue in the first place, because it kind of illustrates the worst of the. Of the sand black market. So I came onto this because a few years ago, I read a story in an Indian newspaper about a farmer who'd been murdered over sand. And I just. I had never thought about sand before. I'd never. Like. I just. The idea that anybody would get killed over sand, I thought was just crazy, right? Like, who cares about sand, let alone enough, like, who would kill somebody over sand? Anyway, I started looking into it. Basically, what happened was this. The farmer was a guy named Paliram Chohan who lived in a. In a village, a farming village about an hour south of New Delhi in India. And one day, a bunch of crooks, sand mafias, as they call them in India, which sounds a bit funny, but bear with me, it's very, very serious stuff. Basically, these. This gang came to the village and just seized control of about 200 acres of the village's land. Just took it over, ripped up all their crops, dug up all the topsoil, and then started digging up the sand to sell to developers up in New Delhi, which, of course, is, you know, a booming city that needs lots and lots of sand to build, you know, to build all the buildings that they're building up there. So this guy, Pali Ram Chohan, obviously was very unhappy about this, like most of the rest of the village, and tried to get them to stop. He led protests, he went to the police, he went to the courts, he went to the local media. But he couldn't get any traction, largely because there's so much corruption in the system in India and in many other developing countries. These San Matthews have a lot of money. It's very easy to just spread around a few bribes to the local judge, to the local government inspector to get them to turn a blind eye. But at a certain point, he started to really get under their skin. He was just. He was bad for business. So this sort of head of this gang takes Pali Ram Chohan aside and says, listen, stop what you're doing. You're really starting to annoy us. Cut it out or we're going to kill you. But he didn't stop. He report, in fact, reported that threat to the police, which is how I know about it. Just a few days after that, two guys kicked in the door of his house and shot him dead in his own bed.
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And you get the feeling that this is a story that's been replicated throughout the developing world. Right Again, because the use of sand is so ubiquitous, you know, you're talking about.
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Yeah, I don't just have that feeling. I mean, I know it for a fact. I went to, to India and wound up doing a story for Wired magazine focusing on that particular case. But in the course of that, it, you know, I found out this is not news to folks who live in India, but it sure is to, to most of us. Hundreds of people have been murdered like that in recent years over sand. It's everything from locals trying to stop illegal sand mining like Pali Ram Chohan. It's environmentalists trying to raise the alarm, journalists in India and many other countries who've tried to write about it, even police officers, government officials in India, in Sri Lanka, in Mexico, in Ghana, in Nigeria, Indonesia, lots of places all around the world, there's an incredible amount of violence connected with the black market and sand.
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white papers on relevant trends and talent impact in the commodities world. And it's not just human violence, it's also environmental violence as well, in terms of the damage that's being done, you know, to aquifers, to coastlines, as I mentioned, but also wildlife. Can you give us some sense of that piece as well? And there's quite a powerful part of the book as well about, you know, China's obviously voracious demand for sand and the consequences of that in, you know, in the huge infrastructure boom it's undergone. But I mean, it's incredibly impactful and, and largely, as per these murders, also hidden from us. Right, the impact that mining is having around the world.
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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it causes. Sand mining causes huge environmental damage in lots of different ways in lots of different places. Let's just start with rivers, which is probably, probably the biggest and most damaging form of sand mining that we do. So. So, like I say, it's. It's a very easy, very cheap way to get. Lots of. You just roll a barge out into the middle of the Mekong river or the Ganges river or any river where there's a nice sandy bottom, suck up all the sand, drop a big pipe down, and just like a big straw, suck up all the sand onto your barge. Great. It's easy, it's cheap. And now you've got that sand on a barge where you can easily take it to wherever you want to sell it. But the problem is if you do that, if you're not very, very careful, first of all, obviously anything that was living on that river bottom, whatever kind of fish or bottom dwelling creatures you had down there, their habitat has been completely annihilated. Second thing is when you do that, you stir up all the other silt and mud and muck, whatever else is down on that sand bottom that all goes up into the water and it can cloud it up for a very long time and over a very wide area. So now you've got all this silt and mud floating around in the water, which can literally suffocate whatever's swimming in that water. Fish, porpoises, freshwater porpoises in places like China, as you mentioned, have really been harmed by all the silt that gets kicked up into the water. When the water is clouded up like that, it blocks the sunlight from getting down to plants that are growing underneath the water. So in that, so it can kill off those plants which in turn can do more damage to the fish and also, you know, everything else that lives off of those, that eats those plants and that fish. So all the other birds and other kind of creatures. So that kind of sand mining has done tremendous damage to rivers, to the life within rivers, to mangrove forests, eelgrass beds, coral reefs, all kinds of aquatic environments all over the world. China is one, is one great example. China, of course, has been the most voracious consumer of sand and concrete in the world by far, for the last many, many years. In fact, here's my very favorite mind blowing statistic. Just to give you a sense of how much concrete and sand China is consuming in just a few, in a, in a three year span in the 2000 and tens at the height of China's building boom, in just three years, China used more concrete, which means they used more sand than the United States used in the entire 20th century. Just stop and think about that for a sec. Right? Like think about, imagine every street, every building, every dam, every highway, every, every airport that was built in the United States of America between 1900 and 2000. All the concrete that that took. Well, China used more than that in just three years.
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B
Yeah. Which has a carbon story to it as well that we've covered. Right. And it's not just, it's not just environmental damage in the sense of biodiversity. Right. It's also you even talk about in the book, right. Like in the US Here you're having infrastructure collapse because of upstream river mining of sand. That's undermining then the foundations of the bridges and so forth. And then you, you, you cascade that out into coastline erosion, right into, okay, small things like beach erosion, but entire wetlands essentially no longer capable of doing their job, of resisting flooding and so forth, you know, from hurricanes. I mean, it has a. It's having a dramatic reshaping of our coastlines and river basins around the world.
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Yeah, absolutely. And the most, I mean, this has happened, that's, that's a problem many, many places in the world. Probably the, the biggest, the most significant one, the one we should be the most worried about is the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. So the Mekong Delta is, you know, where the Mekong river re. Hits the sea. And it's one of the most productive food areas in that entire part of Asia. It supplies something like half the rice that all of Vietnam eats, I think something on the order of a quarter of all the rice that all of Southeast Asia depends on and many, many other crops. It's an incredibly important food source, and it's also home to millions and millions of people. And what's happening now is the Mekong Delta is shifting, shrinking at the rate of about a football field, an American football field, or a British soccer pitch. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, just about, you know, by a big chunk of land every single day. The reason, one of the reasons for that is because, so the delta is always being, is always eroding. Like all coasts, it's naturally eroding. Wind and waves are always, you know, dragging off sand and silt. But in the normal course of things, that sand and silt gets replenished by the river. The Mekong river is constantly bringing fresh sand down from the mountains across the eight countries that it crosses and piling it up in the delta. But now, because of dams being built all the way along the Mekong and also because of sand mining, because so much sand is being pulled out of the Mekong all the way along in each of the eight countries that it flows through, basically the amount of sand coming into the Mekong now is just a trickle. It's just a tiny fraction of what it should be. So the natural erosion is continuing. Natural replenishment is not. So the Mekong is literally shrinking, which is a big, big problem also. P.S. in many of those many parts of the river along the way, as they're digging out all that sand and deepening and deepening the riverbed, the riverbanks collapse so you have thousands of people who have lost their homes, lost their farmland that. Because they lived right along the banks of the river. And it's just literally caved right in to the river along the way.
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And then you mentioned, as if it doesn't sort of, it's not stark enough at the start of the show that there is, there is this bizarre concept that we're also running out of sand as well. Can you talk to that and what that means for us?
- [34:31]
A
Yeah, right. It sounds completely crazy. I mean, sand is the most abundant thing on the earth's surface, and yet we are starting to run out. So by that I mean, we're not literally going to, you know, there's lots of sand still left in the earth, right. It's not like we're going to wind up, you know, with gangs of, you know, biker mutants fighting each other for the last of the sand, you know, Mad Max style. But it is, it's comparable in some ways to what's happening with oil and gas. Right? Like, yeah, there's lots of oil and gas still left on the Earth, but the stuff that's easy to get at is mostly gone. The stuff that was right near, close to the surface we could extract easily and cheaply. That stuff is mostly gone. And as a result, we're having to go further and further, dig deeper and deeper and cause more and more environmental damage to get at the stuff that's left. So in the same way that oil and gas has had to turn to fracking and deep offshore drilling and all these, you know, all these methods that are, you know, much more difficult and capital intensive and environmentally intensive than we used to, same thing's happening with sand. The stuff that's easy to get has mostly been tapped out and we're having to go further and further and dig deeper and deeper and cause more and more damage to get at the stuff that's left.
- [35:53]
B
And the last section of the book is it sort of focuses in. On solutions, right? Which actually was kind of depressingly short, sorry to say. You know, and obviously it's been a couple of years since you should put pen to paper. So, you know, wonder what sort of, if anything has changed since you wrote the book. But in reality, it's ultimately about awareness, right? And then regulations that that brings and so forth. But the challenges ultimately are that we're just using more concrete, we're using more asphalt, and no one has come up with or can afford the. A viable alternative that doesn't. That either lasts much longer. So we don't have to pull everything down every 20 years or, or you. Or use different materials.
- [36:38]
A
Yeah. So solutions are, I mean, there are a lot of potential solutions. There are none that are really happening at a big enough scale. Certainly not fast enough. But yeah, you sort of touched on a few of them. The good news is there are a lot of folks who are working on ways to address the whole sand crisis. So one of them, as you said, is figuring out ways to make concrete last longer. Right. Obviously, if we don't need to replace buildings and infrastructure so often, then, you know, we don't need to be extracting as much sand as we are right now. And there's some really interesting research going on around that. Things like self healing concrete, which I can talk more about if you want. But basically it's concrete that literally when it cracks, it just automatically fills in the cracks itself. There's also research. There's some, there's some folks looking into making concrete with things other than sand. So using things like shredded rubber or shredded plastic, which, if they could get that to work at scale, that would be fantastic. Right. That would be a double win. If we could both get rid of all this waste plastic that's causing all these other problems and use it to replace sand, that'd be fantastic. And there are, there is, there's a little stretch of roadway in the Netherlands that's made out of concrete that uses zero sand. It's all made out of concrete that uses shredded rubber from old tires. So again, it's, it's doable. They haven't, nobody's really been able to bring it to market at scale that's going to replace conventional sand anytime soon.
- [38:17]
B
Is it your sense? We've obviously. And it's in, it's cooled down for whatever reasons, you know, since. But there was that sort of moment just after the pandemic when, you know, ESG in its broadest possible sense really had its, had a moment. Was sand part of that discussion? Did it make, you know, international conferences as the, the real challenge it is, particularly on the environmental and the human impacts as well. Was there, you know, or did it largely, you know, the just stop sand movement didn't really get going
- [38:52]
A
well, I'll tell you, it's, you know, I've been, I've been banging on this drum for quite a few years by now, and it's still a thing that most people have never heard of, but it is, it is, awareness is definitely growing. I mean, I've definitely seen that over the last few years where it is starting to hit the radar of more of the big international environmental NGOs, like the World Wildlife Fund has actually taken it up in a pretty big way. They're doing a lot of work around the Mekong Delta, as I was talking about, and also in other places. The UN Environment Program is doing a lot of work around us, and they have actually gotten it onto the agenda of some of the big, you know, there's these big international confabs where they hammer out things like UN Sustainable Development Goals and so on, and they are, they are slowly, gradually getting it onto the agenda of those kind of forums. I mean, it's, it's amazing to sort of witness the process, just how slow and how bureaucratic it is and how the victories that they notch up are like, ah, we got it. You know, we got it on paragraph sub six, you know, section C24 of the agenda of the next COP meeting. You know, this kind of thing, it's kind of crazy, but that is part of how change happens. So I would say, you know, awareness is nowhere near where it should be, but it, but it is starting to grow.
- [40:19]
B
Yeah.
- [40:20]
A
And, you know, there is more, there's more media coverage around it and podcasts like this taking an interest of it. It all, it all helps.
- [40:28]
B
Yeah. I mean, fundamentally though, it still suffers from, unlike oil, you know, where there are fewer throats to choke. Right. And, and those organizations have true stakeholders that hold them to standards. You just don't, you just don't have that in the vast majority of, of sand. But. Well, that's been really interesting and I really encourage people to, to read the book and I'll put links in the show notes to it to where they can find it. We're also, I think, all equally interested in your upcoming book. You know, a somewhat of a similar story in these crucial supply chains that are sometimes quite missed, and a story that we've covered quite a few times with on this podcast. But can you. What's, what's the next book? And give us a teaser of what that's about?
- [41:10]
A
I'm so glad you asked. By all means, give me a, Give me an opportunity to plug it. So the book should be coming out this November, and it's going to be called Power the Race for the Resources that Are Shaping the Future. And this one's about the question of how are we going to get all of the material, materials, metals that we need for the energy transition and for digital technology. So this is probably not news to folks listening to this podcast, but you know, the world we are Switching from fossil fuels over to renewables. Not as fast as we should be in my opinion, but, but it is happening. You know, so wind, solar, electric cars, all of that, which is great, that's really good news for, for the climate, but it's also really hard on the planet because all of those technologies are require machines. They require enormous amounts of metals to build all of the wind turbines and the solar panels and the electric cars and the electric car batteries and the batteries that we need for all of our proliferating computers and cell phones and all the other gadgets that have, that are become to be so important. So you put it together. I sort of, sort of call it the, the electrodigital age. We're moving into a world where everything more and more things are running on electricity. Electric cars, electric transport, and also digital technology. So all that has a lot of upside. But it means that we need billions of tons of lithium, cobalt, copper, rare earths to build all the infrastructure of this new age. And where are we going to get all those things? How are we going to get all those things? Well, right now we're getting most of them in the traditional way. We're getting them from mining. And mining, as we all know, can be tremendously destructive. You know, causes enormous environmental damage. It can cause a lot of harm to, to people living in the areas that are affected by mines. So part of the book is looking at, once again at the problems, right? Mining's expand, mining for these critical minerals, as they're called, or critical metals is growing like crazy all around the world. And that's causing a lot of, a lot of the problems that always come with mining. So part of the book is I sort of travel around the world and look at the, you know, the issues that are being created by, you know, lithium mining in Chile and cobalt mining in the Congo and so on. But then the second half of the book, you know, Paul, you're not the only one who found it depressing that the solutions piece of my sand book got such short shrift. So the whole second half of the book is focused on solutions, is looking at the question of, you know, how can we do it better? Basically because, right, because we need this stuff. We need solar panels, we need wind turbines, we need electric cars. But we've got to find better ways of getting the metals that we need. So the second half of the book is really taking a hard look at the solutions that people usually propose, you know, which is recycling, reusing, and finally reducing our consumption. Just really trying to come up, take A look at, you know, how can we actually reduce our consumption of metals of all resources across the board.
- [44:44]
B
Yeah. Well, we obviously have discussed this and I look forward to having you back on when it's published in November to talk about the book. It's a, it's a topic that's played out on this podcast numerous times, you know, and from those like Bill Nussey who, you know, we have the solutions today in terms of green power all the way through to Mark Mills who argues that the amount of investment, but even just the material lift of achieving the energy transition in anything like a reasonable timeframe that will make a difference is out of reach. And we've obviously covered the story of exactly how the west has essentially offshored all of that digital pollution to China, which has in turn captured those supply chains. So it's going to be fascinating to, to get your take on it and also the potential solutions out there because, you know, recycling remains very nascent. It actually, as you and I discussed off air. Right. I mean we've, we had Guillaume Petron talking about the dark cloud and most of these devices aren't recyclable in any meaningful way and much of them have redundancy built into them or obsolescence built into them simply by software as opposed to hardware is issues. I mean, so it's going to be fascinating to have you on and, and your learnings from that, that long journey you've been on.
- [45:59]
A
Well, great. I look forward to it. Yeah, it's, it's a huge issue and yeah, lots of other folks are talking about different pieces of it and yeah, love to come and chat about it.
- [46:10]
B
Excellent. Well, thanks Vince, for your time.
- [46:11]
A
Sure thing, Paul. It's great having you. We'll talk to you again soon, I hope.
- [46:15]
B
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