Every year humanity extracts some 50 billion tonnes of sand and gravel, enough to build a wall 27 metres high and 27 metres wide around the Earth. It is the second most used resource in the world, after water.
In the United States the tonne traded at 14.50 dollars in 2025. The first seven issues of L'Écart dealt with objects whose price exceeded their value. This is the opposite case.
per tonne of construction sand and gravel in the United States in 2025, for 870 million tonnes sold and 12.6 billion dollars (USGS, February 2026)
The United Nations Environment Programme, citing the United States Geological Survey, notes that this price stayed remarkably stable, between 4.50 and 6.70 dollars a tonne from 1910 to 2013. Transport accounts for most of the delivered cost. The price of sand does not measure the sand: it measures the distance.
Sand is everywhere, and that is the whole difficulty. The shortage is not one of mineral but of a precise quality: an angular grain, washed of its salt, taken from a few dozen kilometres of the building site, within a perimeter where extraction is allowed.
The word scarcity means nothing until you have said scarcity of what, and for whom.
Dune sand almost never goes into concrete. The usual explanation, grains too rounded to grip cement, is disputed by concrete engineers; the real obstacle is a grading too fine and too uniform, and the cost of haulage. Dubai swallowed 186.5 million cubic metres of sand in Palm Jumeirah alone and, its marine reserves exhausted, is reported by UNEP to have imported sand from Australia.
Those two facts, the most quoted in the world about sand, trace back to the same second-hand source. There is no such thing as an abundant material: there are only usable materials, and we cannot say how much is left.
According to UNEP, over the last twenty years on record Singapore reported 517 million tonnes of sand imported, while its four neighbours reported 637 million tonnes exported. The gap, 120 million tonnes, belongs to no one.
A Yap stone carried the name of the man who brought it back. A 2009 bitcoin carries its block height. A tonne of sand carries nothing: no name, no date, no deed. It enters a concrete in which it ceases to exist as an object.
Lake Poyang, in China, yielded some 236 million cubic metres a year in 2005 and 2006, while the three largest American sites together produced 16 million. None of those tonnes will ever know where it came from.
1995-2001: the tonne imported by Singapore is declared at 3 dollars.
Nobody tells the story of sand. The subject has existed publicly only since a documentary broadcast in 2013, which the United Nations Environment Programme explicitly credits with having given it the idea for its own 2014 report.
The seven previous issues showed stories that carried prices. Here the story arrived after the material, and it lifted nothing at all.
In its February 2026 summary the United States Geological Survey writes that no reliable production information is available for most countries; the world total is listed as not available. It took, in 2023, crossing vessel position signals with machine learning to estimate the annual volume of sand and sediment dredged at sea at 6 billion tonnes, against a natural replenishment rate of 10 to 16 billion tonnes brought down each year by rivers.
The planet's second resource has no cadastre, no register, no date of entry. Proven origin is nil here, not because it would be false: because nobody has ever written it down.
Real rarity very high, transmission nil, story non-existent, proven origin untraceable. Three axes out of four are empty, and the price stays at fourteen dollars while the real cost is written elsewhere: Indonesian islands reduced to almost nothing, maritime borders disputed, water tables lowered, mafias installed.
Since 2022 the United Nations Environment Programme has been asking that sand be priced in a way that recognises its true social and environmental value. That is the Méridiens sentence, written by a United Nations agency.