A transição energética está acabando com a areia de sílica de alta pureza: o elefante na sala

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Did you know that the global daily demand for sand is around 18 kg per person on average? That‘s about 6,570 kg per year – more than an elephant’s weight in sand. This makes sand the world‘s most mined material, with some 50 billion tonnes extracted every year. As you know, sand comes in many colors. Impurities like iron give it a yellowish tint. When the quartz grains are almost pure and not much mixed with other particles, we get white-colored sand. And that‘s the type of rare sand the world needs to make the energy transition a success. It‘s called high-purity (quartz) silica sand and is used for the production of solar panels, wind turbine blades and many other high-tech products like smartphones, TV screens and fibre optics. Alarmingly, we are running out of high-purity silica sand.