The Global Sand Supply Issue

There is a global sand supply issue and most people are not aware of it, except for those closely affected by the problem.  Currently, sand for construction can only be sourced from environmentally and socio-economically sensitive riverbeds, beaches and marine beds.  With sand being the 3rd most consumed raw material in the world after air and water, these sensitive areas are being devastated by illicit and even licensed mining.  What's more, sustainable mining options for riverine and marine sand are running out of capacity so that in many parts of the world, criminal syndicates are now mining and supplying sand illegally from riverbeds and beaches with devastating consequences.

So whilst the sustainable options for sourcing river-sand dwindle and the marine impact of sourcing sand is shown to be very ecologically invasive, the demand for constructions sand is set to increase to 80 billion tons a year in 2060, according to some researchers. This means that new solutions need to be found to stop using sand from rivers, beaches and marine beds.

Vince Beiser - Investigative Journalist and Author of "The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How it Transformed Civilisation"

"We use about 50 billion tons of sand every year............there is a global sand crisis that no-one is talking about"

In 2019, the United Nations Environment Program commission a report to highlight the problem and distribute it to member countries as one of the big sustainability issues that civilisation is facing globally. The report "2019: Sand and Sustainability: Finding new solutions for environmental governance of global sand resources" paints a grim picture of the problem with potential solutions often not having the scale to address the supply problem for tens of billions of tons needed globally. China has started to move on the problem in light of their massive sand usage and is looking to solve it through manufactured sand from quarries, which is likely to have a massive carbon footprint with the machinery needed to mechanically crush the rock

Desert Sand Solution

At VIS we looked at this global issue and working with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Melbourne University, we sourced sand from the UAE literally from the side of the road a few kilometres outside of Sharjah.  We processed this with the VIS machine and we achieved breakthrough results in particle effect and in the compressive strength of the concrete bonding tests that were done in comparison to standard high quality river sand as detailed in the images below.

The reasons for the breakthrough results achieved were:

• The VIS process radically alters the particle shape and the ridges the particle surface to drastically increase surface area and mechanically sit better in the concrete.
• The VIS process had increased the chemical reactivity of the sand. With the UAE sand particularly, the process had managed to chemically activate the calcium carbonate particles in the sand, where this was chemically inert prior to being processed

We are right at the beginning in the road to how the VIS machine can unlock the use of desert sand as a viable and even superior option to river or marine sand.  The desert sand global volumes, and far less ecologically sensitive nature, mean that using desert sand will be a massive solution to the global sand crisis and we make it workable with the VIS machine.

Plant design needed for processing desert sand is not complex and requires material to be run through the VIS machine and then bagged or needs to go straight into a materials mixing plant to mix the dry concrete ingredients.

VIS is keen to engage with any company looking to test local sand and evaluate setting up a local sand processing plant, especially in the Middle East with all the new projects taking place and we are actively searching out partners currently.