Inside the crime rings trafficking sand

From the article:

Very few people are looking closely at the illegal sand system or calling for changes, however, because sand is a mundane resource. Yet sand mining is the world's largest extraction industry because sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. The only natural resource more widely consumed is water. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded that we are dredging river sand at rates that far outstrip nature's ability to replace it, so much so that the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. The U.N. report confirms that sand mining at current rates is unsustainable.

The greatest demand comes from China, which used more cement in three years (6.6 gigatons from 2011 through 2013) than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century (4.5 gigatons), notes Vince Beiser, author of The World in a Grain. Most sand gets used in the country where it is mined, but with some national supplies dwindling, imports reached $1.9 billion in 2018, according to Harvard's Atlas of Economic Complexity.

...

Luis Fernando Ramadon, a federal police specialist in Brazil who studies extractive industries, estimates that the global illegal sand trade ranges from $200 billion to $350 billion a year—more than illegal logging, gold mining and fishing combined. Buyers rarely check the provenance of sand; legal and black market sand look identical. Illegal mining rarely draws heat from law enforcement because it looks like legitimate mining—trucks, backhoes and shovels—there's no property owner lodging complaints, and officials may be profiting. For crime syndicates, it's easy money.

...

Questionable mining happens worldwide. In the early 1990s in San Diego County, California, officials stopped mining from the San Luis Rey River, only to see operators move across the border into Baja California to plunder riverbeds there. Until a few years ago, a mine north of Monterey, Calif., operated by Cemex, a global construction company, was pulling more than 270,000 cubic meters of sand every year from the beach, operating in a legal gray zone. That was the last beach mine in the U.S., shut down in 2020 by grassroots pressure. Mining in rivers and deltas, however, is still going strong throughout the U.S., not all of it legal.

This article from 2017 talks about the legalities for the Cemex plant:

It has operated for years without permits from the state, claiming that its operations pre-date state laws such as the 1976 Coastal Act.

Last month, however, the State Lands Commission — an agency that regulates offshore oil drilling in state waters and submerged tidal lands — sent a letter to officials of the Mexican-based company demanding that the company obtain a lease from the commission and begin paying royalties or shut down. The company already was under investigation from the California Coastal Commission and was facing years of protracted litigation and potential fines.

(The rest of the Scientific American article is mostly about Africa.)