/GEAS_Mar2014_Sand_Mining.pdf

Why Sand Is Disappearing - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/05/opinion/why-sand-is-disappearing.html

Today, however, 75 to 90 percent of the world’s natural sand beaches are disappearing, due partly to rising sea levels and increased storm action, but also to massive erosion caused by the human development of shores. Many low-lying barrier islands are already submerged.
(…)
The sand and gravel business is now growing faster than the economy as a whole. In the United States, the market for mined sand has become a billion-dollar annual business, growing at 10 percent a year since 2008. Interior mining operations use huge machines working in open pits to dig down under the earth’s surface to get sand left behind by ancient glaciers. But as demand has risen — and the damming of rivers has held back the flow of sand from mountainous interiors — natural sources of sand have been shrinking.

One might think that desert sand would be a ready substitute, but its grains are finer and smoother; they don’t adhere to rougher sand grains, and tend to blow away. As a result, the desert state of Dubai brings sand for its beaches all the way from Australia.
(…)
But the greatest industrial consumer of all is the concrete industry. (…) Concrete still takes 80 percent of all that mining can deliver. Apart from water and air, sand is the natural element most in demand around the world, a situation that puts the preservation of beaches and their flora and fauna in great danger. (…)

The huge sand mining operations emerging worldwide, many of them illegal, are happening out of sight and out of mind, as far as the developed world is concerned. But in India, where the government has stepped in to limit sand mining along its shores, illegal mining operations by what is now referred to as the “#sand_mafia” defy these regulations. In Sierra Leone, poor villagers are encouraged to sell off their sand to illegal operations, ruining their own shores for fishing. Some Indonesian sand islands have been devastated by sand mining.

Cf. en France, les luttes des #Peuples_des_Dunes (Gâvres-Quiberon-Groix, Trégor,…)

Gâvres. Les différents Peuples des dunes se réunissent
▻http://www.ouest-france.fr/gavres-les-differents-peuples-des-dunes-se-reunissent-2755334

Réunion au sommet ce mardi [12/08/14], à Gâvres, entre les Peuples des dunes de Gâvres et de l’île de Sein (Finistère), et l’association Force 5 de Plougasnou (Finistère). Des militants des trois associations se sont rassemblés pour échanger leurs expériences dans la lutte contre l’extraction de granulats marins, et réfléchir à une mutualisation de leurs ressources. Les Peuples des dunes de Trébeurden et de Haute-Normandie, invités, étaient absents.

sur la mafia du #sable voir aussi ►http://seenthis.net/messages/143775 et ▻http://seenthis.net/messages/270356

▻http://seenthis.net/messages/306869

Pense-bête : rechercher le lien sur les voleurs de sable au maroc (étude sortie par le PNUE il y a une petite dizaine d’année).

Je sais, ce n’est pas le rapport, mais c’est le Maroc, les plages, le trafic et ça cite le PNUE. C’est tout récent et c’est dans le Spiegel.

Global Sand Stocks Disappear As It Becomes Highly Sought Resource - SPIEGEL ONLINE
▻http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/global-sand-stocks-disappear-as-it-becomes-highly-sought-resource-a-994851.h

Sands are “now being extracted at a rate far greater than their renewal,” a March 2014 UNEP report found. “Sand is rarer than one thinks,” it reads.

http://cdn2.spiegel.de/images/image-758239-galleryV9-juvm.jpg

Cité par Le Mag au Maroc
Der Spiegel : Des plages en disparition du fait du trafic de sable
▻http://www.lemag.ma/Der-Spiegel-Des-plages-en-disparition-du-fait-du-trafic-de-sable_a86280.html

Berlin : Le Maroc appartient à un groupe de pays dans le monde où un phénomène de disparition des plages est imminent à cause du trafic de sable.

En effet, le Maroc, le Cap-Vert, le Kenya, la Nouvelle-Zélande et la Jamaïque ont été placés sur une liste de pays qui risquent le plus, de voir disparaître leurs plages, laissant place à des étendues en masses de terre et de pierres noires avec des retombées environnementales et éco-touristiques graves.

Selon le site du quotidien allemand Der Spiegel, cette catastrophe naturelle que risquent le Maroc et ce groupe de pays, serait causée par l’aggravation ces dernières années, des trafics de sables.

Du coup, avec le titre, ça va tout seul,…

Sand, rarer than one thinks
▻http://na.unep.net/geas/getUNEPPageWithArticleIDScript.php?article_id=110
ou (pdf) ▻http://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/GEAS_Mar2014_Sand_Mining.pdf

@simplicissimus est une #merveille

#matières_premières

Inside India’s Deadly Sand Mafia - Bloomberg
▻http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-17/indian-college-kids-a-sand-mafia-path-a-river-of-death.html

The sand mafia, a ubiquitous presence up and down the Beas, ran a brazenly open and illegal operation here, across the highway from the engineering and staff offices of the Larji Hydroelectric Project. (...)

How the sand mafia did so with impunity remains an unanswered question in the Beas River drownings. So does the issue, raised in the Indian press and in filings before the Himachal Pradesh High Court, of whether anyone with the Larji project had been cooperating with the sand mafia to artificially boost water releases — flushing out more sand for the mafia to steal.