Sand is a critical global resource, the foundation of every modern city - but it’s also fuelling organised crime. Is 2026 the year we find a way to protect the world’s second-most used resource?

In November 2025, Indonesian police uncovered a massive organised crime operation in Mount Merapi National Park, estimated to have generated over £100 million in revenue over two years. The target wasn’t gold or rare earth minerals. Instead, it was for something more mundane, a material of seemingly unlimited abundance which few people would think of as valuable - sand.

Sand is the second most-consumed resource on earth and is the defining material of the modern built environment. It is the primary ingredient in virtually all construction and infrastructure, from concrete and glass to high-tech applications like solar panels and silicon chips. Demand for sand makes sand mining the world’s largest mining endeavour, and organised crime networks around the globe are benefitting handsomely from illegally scooping it up.

With some estimating that we will run out of construction-grade sand by 2050, is the hourglass running low in our search for alternatives?

The illegal sand market is estimated at between $200 billion and $350 billion per year. Sand is a target for crime partly because it’s hard to regulate. It is not easy to track where sand has been sourced from, and mining operations are rarely challenged because they look legitimate.

The illegal sand trade kicks off a chain of illicit activities tied to the building sector. For example, in Brazil, gangs steal sand, which fuels construction in the irregular real estate market. Later, these gangs keep the cash flowing by exploiting people who move into the buildings. Local governments often lack the resources, capacity and authority to regulate the sand market, and the sand crime gangs corrupt local politics.

Part of the problem is that not all sand is equal. Riverbed sand is best for construction, particularly concrete, which is the biggest use for sand. However, dwindling supplies have led sand thieves to turn to more accessible coastal sources. Coastal sand is an inferior building material, contributing to shoddy construction. The damage from Turkey and Syria's 2023 earthquake has been partially attributed to the use of illegal coastal sand. Desert sand, while abundant, is largely useless.

With the world urbanising at a dizzying pace, demand for sand shows no signs of abating. The UN projects cities will grow to accommodate another 2.5 billion more people by 2050. We face serious risks by continuing to suck up sand from riverbeds and coastlines.

Both legal and illegal sand mining have high environmental and human impacts. For example, it has increased flood vulnerability in Uganda, destabilised and rerouted major rivers in India and led some of Asia’s largest deltas to sink. Meanwhile, in India, increased sand-linked violence has taken lives.

With sand being extracted three times faster than nature can replenish it, the time is right to fix the sand extraction market to prevent a global crisis.

Similar to other types of mining, improved national governance and international cooperation would strengthen permitting, licensing and better enforcement. In Kenya, improved governance over sand has reduced sand-linked crime and benefited the environment. Better monitoring can help, too, paired with market interventions.

This might be the year that innovations contribute a major shift. There is incremental growth in the use of traditional and sustainable materials in construction, like timber and stone. There are also intriguing recycling techniques to reduce the demand for sand-hungry new concrete. However, the sheer scale of global concrete consumption (estimated at 30 billion tonnes annually) means that we need solutions that are easily scalable to even make a dent.

We might see more use of manufactured sand, new ways of making concrete using recycled waste foundry sand, or advances in techniques to extract sand as a by-product of metal ore mining or recycle plastic waste as a partial substitute.

Addressing the global sand crisis requires treating sand not as a boundless commodity to be taken at any cost to line the pockets of criminals, but as a finite, strategic resource. As efforts to strengthen governance and monitoring align with the technological capacity to develop alternatives to sand, 2026 could be the year future cities begin to be built on solid ground.