"The World Is Running Out of Sand"

"It’s one of our most widely used natural resources, but it’s scarcer than you think."

"The final event of last year’s beach-volleyball world tour was held in Toronto, in September, in a parking lot at the edge of Lake Ontario. There’s a broad public beach nearby, but few actual beaches meet the Fédération Internationale de Volleyball’s strict standards for sand, so the tournament’s sponsor had erected a temporary stadium and imported thirteen hundred and sixty tons from a quarry two and a half hours to the north. The shipment arrived in thirty-five tractor-trailer loads.

I visited the site shortly before the tournament, and spoke with Todd Knapton, who was supervising the installation. He’s the vice-president of the company that supplied the sand, Hutcheson Sand & Mixes, in Huntsville, Ontario. He’s in his fifties, and he was wearing a white hard hat, a neon-yellow-green T-shirt, dark-gray shorts, and slip-on steel-toed boots. We walked through a gate and across an expanse of asphalt to a pair of warmup courts, which from a distance looked like enormous baking pans filled with butterscotch-brownie batter. 'You want to see the players buried up to their ankles,' he said, and stuck in a foot, to demonstrate. 'Rain or shine, hot or cold, it should be like a kid trying to ride a bicycle through marbles.'

Ordinary beach sand tends to be too firm for volleyball: when players dive into it, they break fingers, tear hamstrings, and suffer other impact injuries. Knapton helped devise the sport’s sand specifications, after Canadian players complained about the courts at the 1996 Olympic Games, in Atlanta. 'It was trial and error at first,' he said. 'But we came up with an improved recipe, and we now have a material that’s uniform from country to country to country, on five continents.' The specifications govern the shape, size, and hardness of the sand grains, and they disallow silt, clay, dirt, and other fine particles, which not only stick to perspiring players but also fill voids between larger grains, making the playing surface firmer. The result is sand that drains so well that building castles with it would be impossible. 'We had two rainstorms last night, but these courts are ready to play on,' he said. 'You could take a fire hose to this sand and you’d never flood it.'  "

David Owen reports for the New Yorker May 29, 2017.