It’s 2021 and we are facing a problem that threatens the very foundations of our planet. The funny thing is, you probably haven’t heard about it.
The problem? We are running out of sand.
Sand makes the glass in your cars and windows and computer screens. It makes paints and toothpastes, dinner plates and kitchen sinks, tiles, showers, toilets and computer chips. It filters water, casts metal, pulls oil and gas from the ground, and distills chemicals. It makes cleaning products, cooking oils and cold drinks. It processes food, mixes soaps and dyes, bolsters cosmetics and sunscreens, and lines athletic tracks and playing fields. And it makes up 65–75% of industrial concrete.
The sand that makes up so many corners of our world is pulled every day from shorelines and river beds around the globe. It is a market that is hard to regulate, hard to quantify, and even harder to replenish.
We live in a castle built of sand, and we are running out — fast.
Mirjam Mai is an industrial chemist whose company, Fibrilex, is working on a solution to the global sand problem.
The UNEP reports that somewhere between 47 and 59 billion tonnes of sand and gravel are pulled from the ground every year. In the last twenty years, we have tripled our sand consumption — but sand can take hundreds, thousands and millions of years to form. At the rate we’re currently extracting it, replenishing it is impossible.
Sand is in such high demand that it is stolen and sold on a black market of its own. Violent international sand mafia occasionally make headlines for murdering journalists and law enforcement officers, but most of the time, the sand problem flies under the radar.
The problem is not just that we are running out of sand: the problem is that extracting sand destroys coastlines and riverbanks, disrupts entire ecosystems, and forces people out of their homes. In Cambodia, homes and businesses along the Mekong Delta are being folded into the riverbed as illegal miners dredge up sand from the shores. Even in countries like the US, sand mining is contributing to increased flooding and environmental destruction, including the 2017 Hurricane Harvey floods in Houston. Up to 67% of Southern California beaches could be gone by 2100 thanks to sand mining.
The sand problem is not just an industry problem: it is an environmental catastrophe, a criminal hotbed, and a human rights disaster. The sand castle is crumbling.
Engineering solutions to complex problems is what Mirjam does. She is an industrial chemist, and has spent her career developing carbon fibres out of wood rather than petrol, packaging material out of biodegradable polymers, and car parts reinforced with plant fibres. She is fascinated by the possibility of building sustainable solutions, using resources that are renewable rather than finite.
It began with bullet holes. When she was young, Mirjam pored over crime novels and murder mysteries, determined to become a forensic pathologist, solving complicated murder mysteries from one-inch bullet holes — big problems from tiny clues. As it turned out, Germany’s crime rates would have made forensic pathology a rather dull pursuit.
As a child growing up in an industrial town, she watched scientists making artificial rubber and diaper absorbers on open days. “That’s so cool,” she thought to herself. They’re making magic in a factory.
After graduating from her bachelor’s and master’s degree in chemistry and her PhD in biomaterials, Mirjam moved to Canada in 2010 for her post-doctorate in biomaterials. After her postdoc, she worked for two local startups developing applications for biomaterials. It was in 2019 that she first heard about the sand problem. A patent published by FPInnovations in that year had offered a solution, but not a very user-friendly one.
“Someone should do something about this,” she mused aloud to her friend.
“You should do something about it,” her friend (and now mentor) replied, pointing her towards resources and accelerators for science-based startups.
This is how Mirjam ended up at her home in 2021, making Engineered Sand that can be mixed into a new kind of concrete, checking to make sure her prototype would hold out before sending it to the lab for more intensive engineering. With her bullet hole problem, she set out to save the world.
Fibrilex is developing a sand upgrading process using renewable binders that will allow concrete makers to mix concrete out of sand collected from dunes and deserts.
There is an abundance of desert sand in the world. Deserts cover a third of the Earth’s surface, and 20% of deserts are blanketed by sand, which, in context, is a lot of sand. But until now, it hasn’t been used for much.
Sand pulled from seabeds, riverbeds, coastlines and quarries is angular because of the way it is crafted by water. It’s this angularity that helps the grains lock together and help make strong concrete. Dune and desert sand, on the other hand, is smooth and rounded from all the weathering it gets from desert winds. Smooth grains don’t bind well with cement, so desert sand has never been an option for the construction industry.
That’s how you end up with trucks full of river sand and crushed rocks zooming into areas like Texas, which are already overflowing with sand — the wrong kind of sand.
On the other hand, frac sand producers (sand used for fracking) who mine dune sand have huge surpluses now that the fracking market has taken a turn for the worse. These sand producers are desperately looking for ways to put their products to work in other areas.
Mirjam’s solution is a sand upgrading process that links round grains of sand, making them into a workable shape for concrete-making.
Making desert sand fit for construction purposes solves multiple problems. It cuts demand for ocean and river sand, allowing us to draw instead from our enormous reserves of previously unusable desert sand from all over the world. Construction projects in desert regions can start to mix concrete from locally sourced sand, rather than importing it from all over the world.
Most of Mirjam’s work takes place outside the kitchen lab. Her small remote team is busy applying for grants, building strategic partnerships, sending test samples to labs, onboarding trial users and building pitch decks. Save for a couple of quick evening sample handovers, the three Fibrilex team members have never met in person: they work and communicate entirely online.
As an industrial chemist serving the sand and construction industry, Mirjam is an entrepreneur at the intersection of three famously male-dominated worlds.
“In my last position, I was the only woman in the company aside from constantly alternating co-op students,” she says.
You get used to it. You learn to expect that your customer profile is male, that your business advisors are men, that you’ll be the only woman in the meeting. You learn to speak first, so you’ll have a chance at getting a word in. To say something so people know you’re there. And you learn to seek out your own kind.
“Male mentors think in a different way,” Mirjam says. “They don’t always realise how having a family affects you differently as a woman. They can always go to meetings or work long hours. But I don’t have a ‘wife’ who takes care of the household and children. Switching assumed gender roles in 2021 is still a challenge and you notice it in the small things. It’s much better to also have a female mentor who lets you know that, hey, it’s okay if you go at your speed, and it’s okay if you do it your way.”
The three Fibrilex team members are all women. “It’s just a coincidence,” she says. It’s the kind of coincidence that tends to happen when women take the reins.
When she takes Fibrilex full-time, Mirjam hopes to expand her team and get the attention of investment partners and, maybe one day, be acquired by a bigger player in the industry. With the right funding and resources behind her, Mirjam’s sand-modifying technology could be the next big innovation in construction, solving multiple problems with a single solution.
If you think about the sand problem too long, you will begin to panic. You will wonder how long our fragile coastlines can support increasing extraction, how long our riverbeds will hold storming tides at bay, how long the surface of the Earth will look the way you know it to.
Of course, if you think like Mirjam, you will wonder if the solution is a whole lot smaller than the problem. You will wonder if the solution might not lie in coastlines, but in single grains. You will wonder if maybe the answer has been there all along — in the bullet hole, not the crime scene. And then, just maybe, you will get to work.
