The world is running out of sand, the strangest shortage on Earth, because only certain grains can build a city, and a violent black market now fights over what's left.

Sand and gravel are the second most used resources on Earth after water. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates global use at about 50 billion tonnes a year and says extraction is outpacing sustainable supply. Sand is central to concrete, asphalt and glass, while high-purity silica is a feedstock for silicon used in electronics and photovoltaic cells.

Demand for suitable sand and aggregates is high enough that poorly governed extraction has become a significant driver of environmental degradation, cross-border smuggling and organised violence. Reliable global data on illegal extraction are limited, so the size of that black market cannot be stated confidently.

The sand that can build a city

The counterintuitive core of the shortage is that not all sand is functionally equivalent. Windblown dune sand is often too fine and rounded to meet conventional concrete specifications without processing, blending or a specially engineered mix. Suitability depends on grading, grain shape, mineral composition and the intended use; desert sand is not categorically useless. Construction aggregate can come from river, lake, coastal and marine deposits, or from rock crushed to a suitable grading.

The practical consequence is that proximity to a desert does not guarantee a local supply meeting every construction specification. Singapore, which has expanded its territory through land reclamation since the 1960s, has imported large quantities of sand from neighbouring countries, several of which later restricted exports amid environmental concerns.

This video we made dives into exactly what’s happening with the world’s sand shortage – it’s worth a watch:

The scale of extraction

According to the United Nations Environment Programme’s summary of its 2022 report Sand and Sustainability: 10 Strategic Recommendations to Avert a Crisis, global sand consumption has grown roughly threefold over the two decades preceding the report’s publication, driven principally by urbanisation and infrastructure buildout in China, India, and Southeast Asia. The 50 billion tonnes extracted annually is described in the report as sufficient volume to construct a nine-storey wall the entire circumference of the planet. Documented environmental consequences of the extraction include river channel deepening, riverbank erosion, groundwater aquifer contamination, saltwater intrusion into coastal freshwater systems, sedimentation disruption in downstream floodplains, and localised loss of habitat for aquatic and semi-aquatic species. The UNEP report calls for the formal recognition of sand as “a strategic resource” and for the establishment of legal governance frameworks equivalent to those governing petroleum, timber, or metal ores. No such framework currently exists at the international level.

At national levels the regulatory response has been highly variable. Multiple countries, including India, Kenya, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia, have imposed restrictions or outright bans on unlicensed riverine sand extraction over the past two decades. Enforcement has been inconsistent. The regulatory gap between the legal restrictions on paper and the actual construction demand on the ground has created substantial economic incentives for illegal extraction, which is where the criminal element of the crisis has developed.

The rise of the sand mafia

According to Nautilus’s November 2023 reporting by science journalist Katharine Gammon, drawing on interviews with Arpita Bisht of the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague and with author Vince Beiser, organised criminal networks have taken control of a substantial portion of sand extraction operations across several countries. India is generally reported as the most affected. Estimates of the size of the illegal Indian sand mining workforce reach approximately 75,000 people, mostly working in informal or coerced arrangements. Working conditions are hazardous. In Vasai Creek near Mumbai, sub-creek divers involved in underwater sand extraction have been reported killed by collapsing sand dunes during operations. Similar patterns have been documented in Cambodia, Kenya, Nigeria, and Indonesia, where the extraction is often controlled by networks with established connections to local police, transport operators, and elected officials.

The violence associated with the trade has been extensively documented in the international press. Hundreds of people are reported to have died in conflicts related to sand extraction in India, Kenya, and Nigeria over the past decade. Journalists investigating the operations have been particular targets. Sandeep Sharma, a journalist in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh who had produced multiple undercover reports on sand mining in Bhind district and had previously requested police protection, was killed in March 2018 when a sand transport truck deliberately swerved into his motorbike. Jagendra Singh, a freelance journalist in Uttar Pradesh who had reported extensively on the local sand mafia, was burned to death in 2015 after an attack at his home. Sandhya Ravishankar, an investigative reporter for The Wire, was doxxed and subjected to sustained online harassment campaigns after publishing an extended investigation into the operations of one of India’s largest sand mining companies.

The regulatory gap

The wider structural problem, as identified by UNEP and by academic researchers working on the topic, is that sand has historically been treated by extraction regulators, tax authorities, and environmental agencies as a low-value bulk commodity of local significance, rather than as a globally traded strategic resource. The material’s value per unit weight is low, its extraction is technologically straightforward, and its transport is dominated by informal or unregulated networks in many of the highest-extraction regions. The cumulative effect is that sand has evolved into an unusually high-value commodity in aggregate terms, without evolving the regulatory, taxation, and enforcement infrastructure that governs comparable resources.

Projections of future sand demand vary substantially with assumptions about urbanisation, infrastructure investment and material substitution. UNEP’s 2026 report does not set a date when the world will run out of sand; it says demand is outpacing sustainable supply and that sand use for buildings could rise by up to 45 per cent by 2060. The central risk is loss of responsibly accessible material in particular regions and ecosystems, not the disappearance of every kind of sand worldwide.

The response can combine recycled concrete aggregate, manufactured sand, ore-sand from mineral-processing tailings and better-governed extraction. Which mixture works will depend on local geology, transport distances, engineering standards and the ecological cost of taking sand from rivers, deltas and coasts.

Correction, 15 September 2026: An earlier version gave an unsupported $200–350 billion value for the illegal sand market, described desert sand as categorically unusable, repeated an unverified claim about sand used in the Burj Khalifa, and said accessible construction sand could be exhausted around 2050. Those claims have been removed or qualified using UNEP’s 2026 assessment.