For a grain of sand. The raw material of everything, from concrete to silicon

On 11 July, Silvia Ferrari returned to Is Arutas, on the Sinis coast, with forty kilos of quartz sand in her boot. It had been transferred into glass jars – the sort used for sun-dried tomatoes or artichokes in oil: eleven jars filled to the brim with white grains instead of preserves. Her parents had taken it without permission back in the 1970s, at a time when taking it from Sardinia’s most photographed beach was just another souvenir, not yet a criminal offence. For decades, those rounded grains – the very same ones that now appear on every Instagram profile on the island – adorned a Zen garden in a Milanese flat, occasionally raked into concentric circles as is done in Japanese temples. Then Silvia’s mother fell ill, and in the final stages of her illness she asked for that sand to be returned. But sand is not merely a prop: it is the very substance upon which industrial civilisation literally rests. And it is the second most consumed natural resource in the world after water.

“To see a world in a grain of sand,” wrote William Blake in 1803: a poetic image that today can almost be read as a matter of fact. To build the skyscrapers of Shanghai, the tarmacked roads of Europe and the glass facades of America’s vertical cities, between forty and fifty billion tonnes are extracted every year. That is double the amount that nature manages to regenerate through the slow erosion of mountains. The paradox is that the desert, though stretching as far as the eye can see, is of no use: wind-blown sand is too polished by the wind; the grains are too round and smooth to bind in concrete, which needs sharp edges to take hold. We need the kind of sand that has been roughened by water. A single medium-to-large block of flats uses up hundreds of tonnes, an airport millions. The United Nations estimates that, at this rate, global demand will permanently exceed accessible reserves within a few decades: a silent countdown for a material that was taken for granted as the only truly infinite one. A countdown that has, for millennia, had its own ready-made symbol: the hourglass. Before clocks became mechanical, the most reliable way to measure a span of time was to let those tiny grains fall from one vessel to another. In the collective imagination, time continues to flow in this way: an idea preserved in the loading icons of early computers and now found in digital timers, which still mimic the shape of an object that has been all but forgotten, except perhaps when playing Scrabble.

After all, for several millennia now, humanity has known that sand is not merely an ingredient in cement and a guardian of time: it is also, when subjected to a sufficiently intense heat, the material from which glass is born. A legend handed down by Pliny the Elder tells of Phoenician merchants camped on a beach in Syria, who placed their pots on blocks of natron rather than on stones. The heat fused the sand beneath with the natron, and a transparent liquid, never seen before, flowed from it. For a long time, the glassworks of Aleppo and Damascus dominated the Mediterranean with glazing and gilding techniques that Venetian merchants studied closely during their stopovers in the Levant, later bringing them back to the lagoon along with their spices. Venice has steadfastly preserved that transformation. In 1291, the Doge ordered the transfer of all the furnaces from the city to the nearby island of Murano: officially to avert the risk of fire in a Serenissima built almost entirely of wood, but in reality also to confine the secrets of this precious craft within a perimeter that could be monitored and was surrounded by water. Master glassmakers were forbidden to leave the island without special permission: anyone who left without authorisation and failed to return risked, according to the guild’s rules, the confiscation of their property and, in the most serious cases, a death sentence that could even be carried out abroad. In exchange for this ‘golden confinement’, the glassmakers enjoyed privileges otherwise reserved solely for the nobility: they were permitted to carry swords, and their daughters could marry Venetian patricians without their husbands losing their status. It was within this regime of strict secrecy that, around 1450, Angelo Barovier perfected the formula for crystal – the perfectly transparent glass that revolutionised the European market and which Venice managed to protect for generations, before some master craftsman on the run, or simply the passage of time, caused the recipe to spread across the rest of the continent.

Many centuries later, far removed from the secrets of the guilds, Italian sand would find a far lighter way of entering the collective imagination: that of catchy pop songs, which even in recent years seem to have disappeared. During the carefree summer of 1961, Nico Fidenco sang “Legata a un granello di sabbia”: the first Italian record to sell over a million copies, which launched the genre of ‘beach songs’ and accompanied the economic boom and the first mass holidays. From then on, Italian sand has ‘sung’ often: ‘Pinne fucile ed occhiali’ by Edoardo Vianello, ‘Sapore di sale’ by Gino Paoli, arranged by a young Ennio Morricone, ‘Stessa spiaggia, stesso mare’, written by Mogol and Soffici and recorded by Mina a month before Piero Focaccia, the Riviera lifeguard who would be associated with that song for sixty years. Soundtracks of a country which, for the first time in its history, found itself free to lie in the sun for two weeks a year, without imagining that, a few decades later, the sand would become the subject of disputes, seizures and conflicts.

On those very same beaches, the only structure is built that is created knowing full well it will soon cease to exist: the sandcastle. The tallest ever erected without an internal scaffold reached seventeen metres in Germany in 2025, with eleven thousand tonnes of wet sand held up solely by the patience of those who piled it up. Sandcastles last as long as a photograph; then the water and wind come along and return them to the nothingness from which they came. But there are also those who build them expecting them to remain standing. Dubai has created its palm-shaped islands by pumping sand from the seabed of the Persian Gulf, an operation that has reshaped the coastline and altered the sea currents to such an extent that permanent breakwaters are required. Singapore’s land area has grown by twenty-five per cent since 1965, almost entirely thanks to sand imported from across South-East Asia: Indonesia, Malaysia and Cambodia, which have since banned its export after seeing entire islets vanish, dredged away until they disappeared from nautical charts.

Where demand outstrips legal supply, the black market emerges. In India, the so-called ‘sand mafias’ control illegal extraction from riverbeds – a trade which some estimates put at several hundred million dollars a year and which has already claimed the lives of civil servants, journalists and environmentalists guilty of exposing illegal quarries: over the last ten years, human rights organisations have documented dozens of such cases, almost none of which have resulted in a conviction. Villages crumbling into rivers because the sand that held the banks in place has been carried off under cover of night; number-plate-less lorries unloading their haul before dawn; local police often complicit or intimidated: the very material that elsewhere is simply brushed off one’s sandals is a commodity of armed smuggling, just as much as timber or ivory. Fifty years before Indian news reports made it a reality, Frank Herbert had already imagined a science-fiction version of the same mechanism in Dune: on the sandy planet Arrakis, it is not the sand itself that sparks wars and conspiracies, but the ‘spice’ that the desert produces and conceals – a scarce commodity for which every power is prepared to do anything. In the Indian ‘sand mafias’, the fiction has been turned on its head: there, it is the raw material itself – including the killings – that is the contraband, with no need for any alien substance to justify its value.

Then there is a second, less visible but far richer market for sand: that of quartz sand, the raw material for microchips. To manufacture a semiconductor, silica purified to eleven nines – that is, 99.999999999 per cent – is required. Unreadable? Let’s put it this way: out of one hundred billion atoms, only one may be an impurity. Quartz melted in a crucible, the silicon crystal that emerges as it is slowly drawn upwards in the Czochralski process, the wafer cut as thin as a wafer and polished to a mirror finish: all the artificial intelligence that is written about (and used to write) in newspapers originates, ultimately, from a handful of sand selected with obsessive care. The United States currently controls ninety per cent of the world’s ultra-high-purity quartz. A near-monopoly that perhaps lacks the mining appeal of rare earths: it always looks like nothing more than sand, even when it is worth more than gold. China, which also needs it for photovoltaic glass, imports silica sand at a rate growing by twenty-eight per cent a year: a shortfall of four million tonnes is already expected by 2026. The oldest material in human construction – the one the Romans mixed with lime to make the pozzolana with which they built the dome of the Pantheon – is the youngest material in the contemporary economy. And perhaps in the energy future.

In Finland, in the town of Pornainen, the company Polar Night Energy has commissioned the world’s largest sand-based thermal storage facility: an insulated silo thirteen metres high and fifteen metres wide, filled with sand or crushed soapstone, capable of storing one hundred megawatt-hours of heat. The principle is almost rudimentary in its simplicity: surplus electricity generated by wind and solar power – which would otherwise be wasted during periods of low demand – heats the air circulating through the sand to between five and six hundred degrees. The heat remains there, stored with minimal loss, ready to be released into the district heating network even months later. This “beach in a bottle” keeps the town warm in winter and has already enabled it to almost completely eliminate its consumption of fuel oil. The technology, which originated from a degree project by two young engineers from Tampere during the gas crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is now coming to Latvia and has its sights set on Germany and Switzerland.

In Italy, the battle for beach concessions is raging. For twenty years, Rome and Brussels have been passing the Bolkestein Directive back and forth, which mandates public tenders for the allocation of these concessions. Italy has responded for years with automatic extensions, each of which has been rejected in turn by the Council of State: first the deadline was set for 31 December 2023, then, after a series of postponements, it was pushed back to 30 September 2027. At stake are over seven thousand businesses, with an average of 2.3 concessions each, along almost eight thousand kilometres of coastline – making Italy the third-largest European country in terms of coastline length. This is a source of income often passed down from father to son, and no government, of any political persuasion, has ever been in any hurry to hand it over to the open market. Speaking of battles over Italy’s beaches, there is also the battle against the sea, which is eating away at much of the coastline, from Venice to Versilia. The most common remedy is beach nourishment – that is, dredging sand from the seabed offshore or transporting it by lorry from other quarries to ‘plump up’ the thinning sandy shores. Beaches kept alive on a drip of sand. An extremely costly stopgap measure that must be repeated frequently: a ‘transfusion’ every few summers, and the same ‘haemorrhage’ every winter. The paradox is clear: a country debating whether to open its coastline to the market must first find a way to keep it intact.

And finally, there is the petty daily theft, the one that brings the story begun by Silvia Ferrari full circle. Every summer, between the port and the airport in Olbia, dozens of tourists are stopped with bottles and bags full of goods: nearly four tonnes seized over the last two years, two hundred fines, and one hundred and ten thousand euros in penalties imposed by the Customs Agency and the Guardia di Finanza. A regional law passed in 2017 punishes anyone who takes even a few grams with fines of up to three thousand euros, yet the practice has never stopped.

From an artificial island in Dubai to a jar confiscated at the airport, the same question arises, on different scales: who does the sand belong to, and who has the right to take it away? Some use it to expand a country, others to build a chip, others to safeguard a source of income, and others simply to keep it on a shelf. We are all weighing up the pros and cons of this issue – which seemed endless but isn’t – one grain at a time.

The oldest building material used by humankind – which the Romans already employed in the dome of the Pantheon – is the youngest in the contemporary economy

The sand we shake off our slippers is, elsewhere, contraband, just like timber or ivory. The trafficking activities of the ‘sand mafias’

The battle over beach resorts and the battle for the sea. Beaches kept alive on a drip-feed of sand: a transfusion every summer, and the same haemorrhage every winter

A sandcastle is the only structure that is built knowing full well it will crumble. Yet there are also those who build them whilst expecting them to remain standing