Sand. It's everywhere. Or it feels that way. You see it at the beach, at the playground, along the road, at the river, in the parking lot. It is also hidden in the concrete of your office, in your smartphone screen, in the pavement of your driveway. We use a lot of sand every year — and it has to come from somewhere.
Yet, even though Carl Sagan used to compare the grains of sand on a beach to the stars in the universe, sand is not an infinite resource. Right now, we are extracting sand from rivers, beaches, deserts and oceans — twice the amount of sand than is naturally replenished by geologic processes. That is almost 40 billion tons per year and some estimates think we could double that by 2060. Sand itself accounts for almost 85 percent of all mining on Earth today.
Where is all this ...
