Outside InFrom the third runway to Lantau Tomorrow, Hong Kong’s ambition to build has one snag – the world is running out of sand

Our increasingly urban world is now using sand and gravel faster than they can be replenished naturally. The recent problems in building the Hong Kong airport’s third runway due to a delay in sand supply illustrates the challenge to come

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Workers dredged sand to reclaim land for Hong Kong Disneyland in the early 2000s. Photo: Handout

Published: 7:00am, 25 May 2019Updated: 7:34am, 25 May 2019

It seems we humans have an infinite capacity to make the infinite finite – to exploit to exhaustion every plausible resource in which we take interest. I’m not just talking about oil, or copper, or farmland, or tropical forests, or even fresh water. I’m talking sand.

It seems, worldwide, we are now gobbling up the stuff – which a just-published report from the UN calls “the unrecognised foundational material of our economies” – at such a rate that we are “exceeding natural sand replenishment rate”. And as we do it, we are inflicting unmeasured environmental harm to rivers, lakes, shorelines and even corals.

Our appetite for cement (25 per cent is sand), asphalt for road building, glass and different kinds of “aggregates” (a combination of crushed rock, sand and gravel) to underpin land reclamation has apparently tripled over the past couple of decades, says Joyce Msuya, acting executive director of the UN Environment Programme.

Let’s not even talk about military landing-strips in the middle of the South China Sea, or Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s “Lantau Tomorrow Vision”, or delays building Hong Kong airport’s third runway.

As always, when it comes to demand for natural resources of almost any kind, China plays a starring role. Of the total global aggregates consumption, estimated near to 50 billion tonnes a year, China – which uses half of the world’s supply of concrete – accounts for a large share.