Illegal sand mining in India Yet another thing we are running out of. For years on TreeHugger, we have talked about Peak Everything, having started with Peak Oil. so it seems really odd to talk about Peak Sand. But in fact, we appear to be running out of the stuff. The problem is that concrete is 26 percent sand, and we are still making huge amounts of concrete; according to Neil Tweedie in the Guardian , about 2 cubic meters every year for every man, woman and child on the planet. China leads the charge in today’s sand-fuelled construction boom, consuming half the world’s supply of concrete. Between 2011 and 2014 it used more concrete than the United States did in the entire 20th century. Aggregate is the main ingredient for roads, and China laid down 146,000km of new highway in a single year. You would think […]