No one can talk about sand mining better than Fei Wei Dong, a brilliant businessman from Shanghai who earns £180,000 a year trading in the most humble commodity: sand. Fei often works in the fishing village of Poyang Lake, China's largest freshwater lake and home to millions of migratory birds, some of which are endangered. The village is little more than a tiny collection of ramshackle houses and battered wooden docks - it is hidden by huge ships anchored just offshore, excavators, long barges, clunky metal flatboats with cranes working the mining operation. Fei regularly comes here to buy raw sand extracted from the lower part of Poyang. He ships the sand 300 miles down the Yangtze River and resells the sand to construction workers in booming Shanghai who need the sand to make concrete.
Demand for sand is stable. The global boom in urbanization is gobbling up colossal quantities of sand, a key ingredient in concrete and asphalt. Shanghai, the financial center of China. Since 2000, Shanghai has grown and its population increased by 7 million people to 23 million. In the last decade, Shanghai has seen the construction of taller buildings than all of New York City, as well as numerous roads and other infrastructure. “My sand helped build Shanghai Pudong Airport,” boasts Fei.
Used more cement in the last few years than the US did during the entire 20th century. Hundreds of units and ships extract sand from the lake, and the largest of them can extract up to 10,000 tons of sand per hour. According to a recent study, 236,000,000 cubic meters of sand are removed from the lake every year. This makes Poyang the largest sand mine on the planet, much larger than the largest sand mines in the US. "I couldn't believe it when I did the calculations," says David Shankman, a geologist at the University of Alabama.
All this dredging, according to the researchers, is a key reason why the water level in the lake has dropped dramatically in recent years. So much sand was scooped up and hauled away, Shenkman says, that the lake's outflow channel suddenly deepened and widened, nearly doubling the amount of water flowing into the Yangtze. Lower water levels lead to shallowing of the lake and swamping of the surrounding area. This can be detrimental to the inhabitants of the area, both for animals and people.
Construction problem
Poyang Lake, which is located in the green rural areas, is a haven for thousands and millions of migratory birds. During the colder months it houses millions of geese and storks, as well as several endangered and rare species. It is also one of the few remaining habitats where the endangered freshwater dolphin (freshwater porpoise) lives. Research has shown that sediment rising from the seabed and noise generated by machinery and boats are preventing dolphins from catching fish and shrimp for food, and is also causing declines in freshwater fish populations.
“Boats are destroying our fishing grounds,” fishermen say. Dredging destroys fish spawning grounds, pollutes water and breaks nets. "I've been fishing here for 30 years, but today there are fewer and fewer fish," says Tan Chun Hwa, a local fisherman. Today he also has to work in sand mining, otherwise he will have nothing to live on.
Poyang Lake may be a unique place, but sand miners don't pay attention to it. Around the world, riverbeds and beaches are being stripped bare and farmland and forests are disappearing as sand mining takes over the region... It's a global crisis no one has heard of. The main driving force behind this crisis is the unprecedented growth of cities. Cities are expanding rapidly and on a scale far beyond anything known to mankind. Since 1950, the number of people living in urban areas has more than quadrupled; today some 4 billion people live in cities! And in the next decade, this figure will only grow.
New cities require staggering amounts of sand. Almost every skyscraper, office tower and shopping mall, which are being built anywhere from Beijing to Lagos, are built from concrete, which is essentially just sand and gravel glued together with cement. Every meter of paved road connecting these buildings is also made of sand, and every window in each of these buildings.
In India, the amount of construction sand used annually has more than tripled since 2000, and this figure is growing rapidly. There is so much demand for certain types of construction sand that Dubai, which sits on the edge of a vast desert, imports sand from Australia. China today is at the center of urban development - more than half a billion Chinese now live in urban areas, triple the number 60 years ago. In addition, China is also home to the world's largest urban agglomeration: the Pearl River Delta, opposite Hong Kong, home to between 42 and 60 million people. Even Nanchang, the secretive provincial town that is the closest major urban area to Poyang Lake, is bordered by rapidly growing forests of high-rise apartment buildings.
In recent years, China has used more cement than the United States did during the entire 20th century. Just last year, the nation used enough construction sand to cover the entire state of New York with an inch-deep layer. This sand needs to be taken from somewhere - until recently it was taken from the bed of the Yangtze River, but by the end of the 1990s this resource was exhausted - the river was dug up so much that bridges collapsed, shipping stopped and the banks crumbled. Chinese authorities banned sand mining on the Yangtze in 2000. This led to the turn of Lake Poyang.
Catastrophic damage
Sand mining is harmful environment. In some places, local residents dig up the banks of the river with shovels and pull out layers of earth with cars, while in others, sand mining is carried out on an industrial scale. This process affects the environment everywhere... Not only in China, but also in the USA, Europe, Russia...This year, a strange protest took place in California - activists threw 200 pounds of store-bought sand ashore. They returned it to where the sand was obtained from. To a beach that, according to researchers, is gradually disappearing.
“This is the fastest-growing coastline in California,” says Professor Ed Thornton, a retired coastal engineer with the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, who has studied the environmental impacts of sand mining for years. “We're losing eight acres of coastline a year and we're losing some of the most beautiful coastline in the world. It's because of sand mining."
The California beach is the only one in the United States where sand is still mined for construction. The Mexican company Cemex extracts 270,000 cubic meters of sand here annually. There were many such sand mines along the California coast in the early 20th century, but the government closed them in the late 1980s due to erosion that was plaguing the famous beaches. The Cemex plant is still operating thanks to a legal loophole - the ships are below the mean high tide line, thus falling outside federal jurisdiction. But the protesters want government bodies intervened.
Environmentalists are also calling on their governments to reduce sand mining. In Northern Ireland, activists are trying to stop dredging in Low Neagh, where birds also nest. In southern England, developers want to extract sand to expand the Port of Dover from a site of offshore sandbanks and shoals, but it has sparked an outcry from conservationists who fear it will endanger the seals, birds and other marine life that the sandbanks provide habitat and nutrition.
Various types of sand mining cause a variety of damage. Dredging destroys the habitat of fish and microorganisms. Mud rising from the bottom muddies the water, suffocates fish and blocks sunlight that supports underwater vegetation. Kenyan authorities closed all river sand mines in one part of the country several years ago due to the environmental damage they caused. Supreme Court India recently warned that "alarming rates of unrestricted sand mining" are destroying coastal ecosystems across the country and could have fatal consequences for fish, animals and birds.
Sand mining from rivers has also caused millions of dollars in damage to infrastructure, leading to the destruction of bridges. In Ghana, sand mining workers got so carried away that they dug up the foundations of buildings on a hillside, putting them at risk of collapse and endangering the lives of residents. Sand mining caused the destruction of a bridge in Taiwan in 2000, in Portugal a bridge collapsed while a bus was passing over it, and in India a similar precedent occurred in 2016. These are all human lives.
Sand mining in riverbeds is destructive - deep mining creates holes that have proven fatal to salmon in Washington state. In Australia, floodplain plains that are home to the world's largest collection of rare carnivorous plants are being destroyed by sand mining. In Wisconsin and Minnesota, farmers worry that a recent boom in sand mining has polluted the water and air. In Vietnam, miners blasted hundreds of hectares of forests and farm fields to reach underground sand deposits. When the earthen quarries and river beds are depleted, sand miners will turn to the seas. The UK, for example, gets about one-fifth of its sand from the ocean floor. Around the world, thousands of ships suck up millions of tons of sand from the seabed each year, disrupting marine fish habitats and sending up plumes of sand that harm ecosystems. In coastal areas of Cambodia, in places like coastal Cambodia, dredging threatens important mangrove forests, seagrass beds and endangered species such as irwaddy, dolphins, king turtles.
The most dramatic impact of ocean sand mining is undoubtedly in Indonesia, where two dozen islands have been completely wiped out since 2005. The material from these islands has largely ended up in Singapore, which requires titanic amounts of sand to continue its artificial expansion program. Over the past 40 years, the city-state has created an additional 20 square miles of land and continues to expand, making it the world's largest importer of sand. The demand has denuded beaches and riverbeds in neighboring countries to such an extent that Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam have now restricted or banned sand exports to Singapore.
“This story is similar to overfishing,” says Pascal Peluzi, a researcher with the United Nations Environment Program who authored the sand mining study. According to him, the problem is that there is, of course, a supply of sand that can be extracted sustainably, but it does not cover the demand for this fossil, which is dictated by the urban boom!
Therefore, it is now worth thinking about the harm that urbanization causes to the planet’s biodiversity.
The quarry is the main place for sand extraction. A quarry refers to a place from which minerals are extracted, such as crushed stone, sand, gravel, shale, stone and other minerals. In addition, quarries produce large quantities of coal, limestone, gypsum, clay, china clay or kaolin, quartz sand and more. Thus, the quarries are directly connected to fossil processing plants. These include: concrete plants, plants for the production of asphalt and bitumen road materials, pipeline production, concrete block production, brick factories and others.
Two types of sand mining
As a rule, sand is extracted from a quarry open method and underwater.
The open-pit mining method involves mining by removing the top layer of soil. The water method involves the extraction of sand from under water from rivers and reservoirs.
Underwater sand mining
From the bottom of rivers and reservoirs, extraction occurs using special equipment, such as: a dragline (a single-bucket excavator with a cable connection), dredges, a dredger, a scraper (a machine with pneumatic wheels or caterpillar tracks). In addition, it is necessary to provide a floating installation, such as a pontoon (a floating device for supporting weights on the water), which can be moved and fixed using an anchor and a pile and a cable that carries a pump and equipment.
Mining principle
Principle of operation and production:
- the nozzle on the pump neck sinks to the bottom of a river or reservoir, and sand begins to be sucked into the pipe;
- using a mechanical crusher, sand is crushed if necessary;
- through a floating slurry pipeline (a mixture of water and sand that moves through a pipeline), the mass reaches the storage location;
- The next step is drying the sand on the river bank, and the water from it flows back into the river.
Sand collection devices
Sand can also be collected from water using a hydraulic elevator. A hydraulic elevator is a device that allows you to draw water from a depth of up to 20 meters. Sand can also be extracted using a hydraulic monitor located above the water level. Pressurized water enters the pipe using a pump and is directed to the shore.
Open pit sand mining
Sand, which is mined in an open pit, was formed due to the destruction of rocks. Sand lies both on the surface, under a layer of soil or clayey rocks, and under groundwater. Sand is usually extracted using an excavator. Before sand is extracted, the top layer of soil or clay is removed from the quarry. If there is water in the quarry, it is drained using drainage systems. When extracting sand in a quarry, you need powerful equipment such as an excavator, dump truck, bulldozer and others. If sand deposits are located on a hill or in the mountains, then slope sand mining is carried out. Quarry sand, due to the presence of impurities in it, is usually washed, thus purifying and enriching it. The sand is also sifted, dried and fractionated, which allows it to be used for water filtration and more.
You can profitably purchase fractionated quartz sand from the manufacturer directly without intermediaries from us. The Euromineral Ukraine company is engaged in the direct sale of quartz sand of various fractions at flexible prices. It is possible to purchase both wholesale and retail.
Let me say right away that this business will do entrepreneurs in those cities where there are more or less large rivers with a sandy bottom. There are two options for starting a business: rent a dredging machine (to try how things go) - this is approximately 20-25 thousand rubles of rent per month. Or buy it - approximately 800 thousand - 1 million rubles at once.
Well, registering as an individual entrepreneur, paying taxes, hiring dredging machine operators, etc. Its productivity is approximately 15-20 machines of sand per day. Pure river sand sells very well, because it is needed both in construction and in household farming. Having “recaptured” the initial expenses, you can gradually reach a level of net income of up to 100,000 rubles per month. What do you think?
Opinions on this matter from our users
This is the first time I’ve heard of this, that sand from the bottom of the river is sold, and why is such sand worse than usual? The business is certainly interesting, but I definitely wouldn’t do something like this, even as a last resort, something tells me that nothing profitable will come of it.
roman-maurinio, I have this idea was no less surprising than yours. If we take into account that the sand is not golden, then it will need to be transported by KAMAZ trucks, that is, huge financial investments will be required for equipment. In addition, all kinds of ecologists, representatives of local authorities and others are unlikely to approve of such excavations - sand is taken out, the banks are washed away, mud goes downstream (purely assumptions, I don’t understand this technology). You'll still have to pay kickbacks.
The idea is definitely not for one person. We need to involve partners and investors.
And I was also surprised, because compared to ordinary sand from quarries, it won’t be possible to load it right away, you still need time and equipment to dry it, and then look for transport, in general, it would be stupid to start with that.
So, here they have already started calling the working (that is, implemented!) idea stupid, which, in general, is forgivable for people who do not live in the city on the Volga. To me, as a person who lived in Astrakhan for 20 years, the idea does not seem stupid. Firstly, river sand (mined from the bottom) is clean and fine. Secondly, a plot of land with an area of 6 acres (the size of a typical dacha) is sufficient for drying it, and for transportation you need two two-axle trucks (which are also rented in the region). The authorities of a city or region are themselves interested in carrying out dredging work, therefore, as practice shows, they not only do not create obstacles and do not demand bribes, but are also ready to pay for such work!
Of course, the business idea is interesting for me personally, since this is the first time I’ve heard about such an idea. It seems that there is nothing complicated here, but a very large investment in equipment is needed, since I know that in order to extract sand in this way, you need expensive modern equipment.
Ostrovitjanin
What is the positive side the fact that sand has been mined since the day of the river? The very first thing that just popped up for me was that environmentalists would really have their brains soaring, but otherwise I think there won’t be any problems. I toured the facilities under construction, collected orders and started doing business. I think if you rent all the equipment, the costs won’t be that big.
The main advantage of river sand is that it is clean and has a more or less uniform consistency. There is a lot of it there, and so much is still applied every year that dredging can be carried out annually, “fishing” for up to 1000 cars of sand for sale! Can you imagine how good this money is? Plus, since the state has farmed out dredging to private owners, municipalities are willing to pay for this type of work. It turns out there are two sources of income at once. Of course, people will have to hire 8-10 people, but the cost of their salaries will amount to 30 percent of the net profit of the owner or tenant of the dredger!
But the main disadvantage is that river sand is of low quality, fine, and demand is gradually shifting towards a higher quality product - alluvial quarry sand, which is more effective in the production of concrete, and its use in the production of asphalt allows saving on expensive chemical additives. So this business, in my opinion, has little prospects.
We don’t have large sand quarries in our region, and importing from neighboring regions is very expensive, so people prefer to buy river sand for household needs. It may indeed be smaller, but the price is not bad for the end consumer!
For what economic needs does the population buy river sand? Personally, I have never bought sand before, and I don’t even understand why the population might need it. if you are building something, you need to order special sand, obviously river sand is not suitable for construction, you need special sand. Well, I’m not a pro in these matters, that’s why I’m asking.
Construction work - masonry, screed, plastering. The downside of fine sand is that it shrinks quickly when making concrete mortar. However, builders usually find a way out - they add a little soap solution or shampoo to the solution. Still, coarse sand is best for such work.
Apparently you are a builder? But I also worked at a construction site, and I have never seen anything like this. Well, okay, maybe the sand wasn’t just from the river, but high-quality quarry sand. But still, it is not easier to order normal sand than river sand, which is not very suitable for construction work. Is it really that much more expensive than the career one?
I think that you can, of course, sell sand from the river, but is this allowed by nature conservation in Russia? I think no. I think there will be demand, not all builders use high-quality materials in construction, my husband works in construction, and he says such things that you are surprised that half the country has not collapsed.
Well, how is it not allowed? And then how are houses built in Russia? After all, this sand is needed for cement, and embankments are also made for the foundation if the ground is soft and the house may sag in the future. Everything is allowed in Russia.
It is allowed and even encouraged as long as you are doing dredging that is beneficial to the river. What about Low quality: I know firsthand that river sand is widely used in construction, and its quality suits the majority of clients. I repeat, in a number of regions of Russia, quarry sand will cost almost twice as much as river sand, and few people will purchase it for construction!
In our country, on the contrary, they carry sand and pour it on the seashore, because over time, the sand is washed with water and leaves. So they prepare the beaches for the season in this way, bringing sand and pouring it onto the shore. Maybe they should be advised to carry fine sand from Astrakhan, otherwise it is not known where they are being taken to the Odessa beach, maybe from a neighboring beach.
Wow, I don’t know, I don’t understand anything in this, this is definitely not my topic, probably, this is something new and not identified for me. Well, I wonder where you came up with the amount of 100,000 per month net earnings? How much does one machine of sand cost you?
Ostrovitjanin,
No, well, the fact is that a certain amount can be exported from certain zones. Here in our region in the Belorechensky district, they showed on TV that they were so carried away by this business that people have nowhere to go, they dug everything so much that they formed huge pits and flooding, entire villages suffer. So my point is, how controlled is it all? That is, this business is very often conducted without following the rules.
tatyana, I think that even a word is often an understatement, in most cases it is not conducted according to the rules, everyone would like to snatch more jackpot, but the fact that people have nowhere to swim, or they violate something else there, it hardly bothers anyone .
IN modern world the construction of buildings, from small private houses to colossal skyscrapers, has long been put on stream. Technologies make it possible to build houses quickly and efficiently, providing all of humanity with personal housing, a workplace, or simply a building for entertainment. But, no matter how far the current progress has gone, one of the main components for construction still remains the most common sand.
Yes, it cannot be said that this is a rare material. You can meet him just walking down the street. Can be seen on children's playgrounds. Naturally, there is enough of it on the beaches. But where does sand come from in the first place? How and where is it mined? Let's look at the answers to these questions in our article.
What is sand
Sand is a loose sedimentary rock that is the most popular non-ore building material. The size of one grain of sand varies from 0.16 to 5 mm. This material formed during the destruction of rocks. Most often, sand consists almost entirely of a substance called silicon dioxide (chemical formula - SiO 2). It is also called silica. There are white, yellow and even black sands. The latter, by the way, may be radioactive, so their use for industrial and domestic needs is dangerous.
Differences by location
In terms of locations for sand mining on a large scale, there are two main types - river and quarry. Quarry sand is mined in quarries, and even though the extraction is carried out in really large volumes, such raw materials cannot boast of any special original quality.
Another thing is river sand. Based on the name, it is mined in rivers, taking it from the bottom. The quality of this sand is noticeably different - there are no large inclusions of unnecessary elements or clay admixtures.
Sand mining methods
In the vast majority of cases, sand extraction occurs in one of two ways. In the case of quarry sand, an open method is used. By the way, it is cheaper than the second one and does not require as much equipment.
Before the start of open-pit sand mining, stripping operations are carried out at the mining site. Simply put, the top layer of earth is simply removed in order to minimize unnecessary impurities in the composition of the extracted raw materials. The work is carried out thanks to a scraper and a bulldozer. Then, having completed the trenches and laid paths for the equipment, the mining process begins. One way or another, the resulting raw materials cannot be called high-quality, therefore the resulting sand must also be cleaned from various impurities in different ways.
The second method is hydromechanical. It is used during the extraction of sand from river beds. To implement this method a pontoon or a specially equipped vessel is required. They are necessary so that anchors and cables with mining equipment are securely fixed to the surface of the river. The algorithm is as follows: a powerful pump is lowered down into the water along with a loosening device. The device “beats” the surface to be treated, and the pump, in turn, sucks the pulp (a combination of sand and water) into the hydraulic dumps. There, the sand is already filtered from excess impurities, and the water flows back into the river.
Thus, the second method not only does not harm the environment (the water is returned to the river, no drainage), but also allows you to obtain sand more High Quality. The only disadvantages of this method are its slower speed compared to the first one, as well as its higher cost.
If you are planning to buy sand for your own purposes, carefully study the documents for your purchase. Special attention pay attention to GOST standards for sand. Not every one of them is suitable for construction, or vice versa - for decorative work.
Sand mining in Russia
In the world, unlike minerals, a titanic volume of sand along with gravel is used per year - 40 billion tons per year. In Russia itself, the Voronezh, Leningrad, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara and Smolensk regions can boast of the most voluminous sand deposits. Specifically, sea and river types of sand are found in the Azov Sea, near the Gulf of Finland, Neva, and also in the Leningrad region.
The Eganovskoye deposit, located near the Ramenskoye station, is interesting because quartz sands are being fished there.
Hundreds of vehicles, as well as trains railway transport Every day thousands of tons of sand are moved across the country from sand pits and river beds to factories, industrial sites and other “thirsty” people.
Application of sand
Sand is a very important building material. Therefore, the extraction of construction sand is necessary to create things such as cement, bricks, plaster, and concrete. It is also used as an abrasive material for surface treatment. Sand is a fundamental element for the glassblowing industry, because it is thanks to silica that we have glass in windows and mirrors on walls. Sand is also used in its pure form to create various embankments, in road construction and as a decorative element for decorating the facades of private houses, cottages, children's playgrounds and as a “covering” for artificial beaches.
Carrying out construction work, regardless of its complexity, requires the availability of high-quality sand. The construction material has a natural origin and is mined in special quarries. Due to its enormous popularity, every specialist involved in the construction industry should know how sand is extracted. Having such knowledge, you can assess the relevance of its use for a particular type of construction!
Basic characteristics
In its natural form, it is a sedimentary rock and in most cases consists of the natural mineral quartz. By composition and origin, it can be divided into several types:
- Natural, mined through the destruction and subsequent grinding of natural rocks to the state of a homogeneous substance of small grains;
- Arising from natural phenomena: raw materials related to this species, can be divided into alluvial, deluvial, marine, lacustrine and ash;
- Heavy artificial, obtained as a result of the deliberate loosening and crushing of various hard mineral rocks. In this case, a substance with different grain sizes and fineness is obtained.
When used for construction purposes, it is important to know where sand is mined, have information about its processing methods, and also know about other characteristics.
Basic mining and processing methods
To understand how it is obtained, you should study the main sources of its production.
- River. The most common building material that is mined near riverbeds or from the bottom of rivers and reservoirs. It is characterized by extreme purity and the absence of impurities, clay deposits and small stones;
- Career. There are two varieties: washed and seeded. In the first case, it is extracted by digging quarries and subsequent crushing of the resulting raw materials by washing and cleaning them from various impurities and deposits. The second option involves drying and further sifting, which allows you to rid the raw materials of harmful impurities.
- Naturally educated. Current legislation determines that such raw materials can be classified as bulk materials of inorganic origin. According to GOST, it has special requirements for grain size and fineness.
Material extracted from special deposits differs from raw materials from places where river sand is mined. Considering that various repair and construction work may require one type or another, special attention should be paid to the choice.
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