THE SUPPLY OF SAND THAT CAN BE MINED SUSTAINABLY IS FINITE.

But it’s a small victory in a large-scale war — where environmentalists are often pitted against criminals not corporations.

Thieves in Jamaica made off with 1,300 feet of white sand from one of the island’s finest beaches in 2008. Smaller-scale beach-sand looting is ongoing in Morocco, Algeria, Russia, and many other places around the world. Sand miners have also completely obliterated at least two dozen Indonesian islands since 2005. Hauled off boatload by boatload, the sediment forming those islands ended up mostly in Singapore, which needs titanic amounts of sand to continue its program of artificially adding territory by reclaiming land from the sea.

The city-state has created an extra 50 square miles in the past 40 years and is still adding more, making it by far the world’s largest sand importer. The demand has denuded beaches and riverbeds in neighbouring countries to such an extent that Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia have all restricted or completely banned exports of sand to Singapore.

The sand underneath the water isn’t safe, either. Sand miners are increasingly turning to the seafloor, vacuuming up millions of tons with dredges the size of aircraft carriers. One-third of all aggregate used in construction in London and southern England comes from beneath the United Kingdom’s offshore waters. Japan relies on sea sand even more heavily, pulling up around 40 million cubic meters from the ocean floor each year. That’s enough to fill up the Houston Astrodome 33 times.

Hauling all those grains from the seafloor tears up the habitat of bottom-dwelling creatures and organisms. The churned-up sediment clouds the water, suffocating fish and blocking the sunlight that sustains underwater vegetation. The dredging ships dump grains too small to be useful, creating further waterborne dust plumes that can affect aquatic life far from the original site.

Sand mining is also damaging lands and livelihoods far from any coast. Fracking depends on a particular type of especially hard, rounded sand grains to help extract oil and gas from shale rock formations. There are huge deposits of just that kind of “frac sand” in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Result: Thousands of acres of fields and forests have been stripped away so that miners can get their hands on those rare grains.

Colossal amounts of more ordinary construction sand is dredged up from riverbeds or dug from nearby floodplains. In central California, floodplain sand mining has diverted river waters into dead-end detours and deep pits that have proven fatal traps for salmon. In northern Australia, floodplains that are home to the world’s biggest collection of rare carnivorous plants are being wiped out by sand mining. In Sri Lanka, sand extraction has left some riverbeds so deeply lowered that seawater intrudes into them, damaging drinking water supplies.

In Vietnam, researchers with the World Wildlife Fund believe sand mining on the Mekong River is a key reason the 15,000-square-mile Mekong Delta — home to 20 million people and source of half of all the country’s food and much of the rice that feeds the rest of Southeast Asia — is gradually disappearing.

For centuries, the delta has been replenished by sediment carried down from the mountains of Central Asia by the Mekong River. But in recent years, in each of the several countries along its course, miners have begun pulling huge quantities of sand from the riverbed to use for the construction of Southeast Asia’s surging cities. “The sediment flow has been halved,” says Marc Goichot, a researcher with the WWF. At this rate, nearly half the delta will be wiped out by the end of this century.

Sand extraction from rivers has also caused untold millions of dollars worth of damage to infrastructure around the world. The stirred-up sediment clogs up water supply equipment, and all the earth removed from riverbanks leaves the foundations of bridges exposed and unsupported. A 1998 study found that each ton of aggregate mined from the San Benito River on California’s central coast caused $11 million in infrastructure damage. In many countries, sand miners have dug up so much ground that they have dangerously exposed the foundations of bridges and hillside buildings. A bridge undermined by sand extraction in Portugal gave way in 2001 just as a bus was passing over it; 70 people were killed.

River-bottom sand also plays an important role in local water supplies. It acts like a sponge, catching the water as it flows past and percolating it down into underground aquifers. But when that sand has been stripped away, instead of being drawn underground, the water just keeps on moving to the sea, leaving aquifers to shrink. As a result, there are parts of Italy and southern India where river sand mining has drastically depleted local drinking water supplies.

Even after the sand miners are done, the battered landscape they leave behind can be startlingly dangerous. In the United States and elsewhere, mining companies are generally required to restore the land to a certain extent after they are finished. But in less well organized countries, miners leave behind deep open pits that fill with rainwater and trash, degenerating into swampy breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes.

In response to all this destruction, governments around the world have tried, with varying levels of commitment, to regulate and restrict sand mining. But that, in turn, has spawned a booming worldwide black market in sand.

At one end, this includes legitimate businesses overstepping the boundaries of their permits. In 2003, for instance, California filed a lawsuit against Hanson Aggregates, a global mining outfit, for unauthorized dredging of and from the San Francisco Bay. “These sand pirates have enriched themselves by stealing from the state and ripping off taxpayers,” the state’s attorney general declared at the time. Hanson eventually settled, paying the state $42 million.

At the other extreme are outright criminals, from petty thieves to well-organized gangs willing to kill to protect their sand business. In 2015, New York state authorities slapped a $700,000 fine on a Long Island contractor who had illegally gouged thousands of tons of sand from a 4.5-acre patch of land near the town of Holtsville and then refilled the pit with toxic waste. These “scoop and fill” operations have become common as the area’s legitimate sources of sand have been increasingly depleted, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

In other countries, the black market takes more dramatic forms. One of Israel’s most notorious gangsters, a man allegedly involved in a spate of recent car bombings, got his start stealing sand from public beaches. In Kenya illegal sand miners reportedly coax children into dropping out of school to come work for them. Dozens of Malaysian officials were charged in 2010 with accepting bribes and sexual favours in exchange for allowing illegally mined sand to be smuggled into Singapore.

Like any big-money black market, sand also generates violence. People have been shot, stabbed, beaten, tortured, and imprisoned over sand mining in countries around the world — some for trying to stop the environmental damage, some in battles over control of the land, and some caught in the cross fire.

In Gambia, security forces recently shot dead two people protesting against local sand miners. In Indonesia in 2016, an activist was beaten into a coma, and another tortured and stabbed to death, by the sand miners they were trying to stop. In Kenya, at least nine people have been killed — including a policeman hacked to death with machetes — in battles between farmers and sand miners in recent years.

In India, where the illicit sand trade is estimated at $2.3 billion a year, battles among and against “sand mafias” have reportedly killed hundreds of people — including police officers, government officials, and ordinary people who get in their way.

At root, all of this is an issue of supply and demand. The supply of sand that can be mined sustainably is finite. But the demand for it is not. Every day the world’s population is growing. More and more of us want decent housing to live in, offices and factories to work in, malls to shop in, and roads to connect them. Economic development as it has historically been understood requires concrete and glass. It requires sand.