Battle lines in the sand  
 
<DATE>November 2




 
Shifting sands … offshore mining could save Kurnell's dunes.
Photo: Nick Moir

The issue of mining the seabed to satisfy the building  industry's huge 
demand for sand is making waves, reports James  Woodford.< 
SYDNEY may be about to run out of building sand but not because there is a  
shortage. In fact, scientists, environmentalists and industry say an almost  
infinite amount of sand sits just offshore from the city but politicians are  
refusing to discuss whether it should be used. 
Stretching from the city's famous beaches almost out to the continental shelf 
 are mind-boggling sand deposits - old beachlines and shorelines that have 
been  submerged as climate change has caused the sea level to move up and down  
hundreds of metres. 
A senior lecturer at the University of Sydney's Institute of Marine Science,  
Dr Peter Cowell, says one of these deposits stretches from Sydney Heads to 
the  southern end of the Royal National Park. It is at least 60 metres thick, 
about  three kilometres wide and 35 kilometres long. In a perfect world there 
would be  no sandmining anywhere, he says, but the reality is that without it 
the building  industry would grind to a halt. 
This week one of the state's most influential environmental lobby groups, the 
 Colong Foundation for Wilderness, has demanded that the State Government 
drop  its blanket prohibition on marine sandmining. The foundation's Keith Muir 
wants,  at the very least, a comparison between the environmental impact of 
mining ocean  sands and the impact of land-based options. 
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He says the kind of destruction being caused in pursuit of sand at Kurnell,  
Newnes Plateau and the Penrith Lakes should not be allowed to happen to other  
environmentally sensitive areas. He says offshore sand deposits have been  
heavily trawled for more than a century and are already disturbed. 
In the 1990s, Muir campaigned against a proposed sandmining operation  
offshore from the Royal National Park. Now he says the issue needs to be  re-opened, 
even though he is aware of the intense feelings many in the  environment 
movement have against offshore sandmining. 
The state's peak environmental organisation, the Nature Conservation Council, 
 voted recently to call for all sand resources to be assessed as part of the  
metropolitan construction materials strategy. While the motion did not 
specify  offshore mining, it did not rule it out, either. 
Environmentalists are appalled that the Iemma Government is looking at  
opening or expanding half a dozen onshore mine sites in greater Sydney. The  
Government has told stakeholders it wants to see new mines and the expansion of  
quarrying at Maroota, Shellharbour, Somersby Plateau, Southern Highlands, Newnes  
Plateau and Port Stephens. Many of these require the destruction of surface  
vegetation and the creation of vast pits that are huge eyesores. 
Green groups are especially angry about the expansion of mining at Newnes,  
which is ecologically sensitive and adjacent to the Blue Mountains world  
heritage area. 
Many resident activists, such as Collaroy's Phil Colman, believe the  
commercial mining of ocean sand will allow a program of beach "nourishment" to  be 
undertaken. Under this proposal, sand mined offshore would be used to augment  
eroded shorelines. Long-time beach nourishment campaigners such as Colman say 
it  is not economical to resupply eroded beaches using expensive dredging 
equipment  unless offshore sandmining operations are created for the building 
industry. 
The State Government admits there is a problem with the supply of sand.  
Sydney uses 7 million tonnes of construction sand, 13 million tonnes of hard  rock 
aggregate and 2 million tonnes of clay a year. The population is soaring  but 
key sources are dwindling rapidly - Penrith Lakes, the Kurnell sand dunes  
and Prospect are all expected to be depleted within a 10 years. 
But there is a longstanding policy of prohibiting marine sandmining -  
primarily attributed to the former premier Bob Carr. 
Cowell says enough research has been done to determine that vast sand  
deposits sit off Sydney's coastline - ancient submerged dunes containing sand  
resources that dwarf the deposits at Kurnell. 
What needs to be evaluated now, he says, is how great the environmental  
impact of gaining access to the resource would be. 
"In all probability the impact will be less than it is now, with sandmining  
in the dunes, in the rivers and in the friable sandstone country around 
Sydney,  all three of which are devastating," he says, adding that as long as 
operations  take place in water depths greater than 20 metres, they should not have 
an  impact on wave dynamics. 
He also says that underwater sand is ecologically dynamic. The big storms  
that hit Sydney whip up waves that regularly disturb the sea floor. 
Muir says: "If we don't find the sand resource we will be up the creek. But  
we want to look at all the resources, including the offshore sand deposits,  
which is an enormous resource. We will probably find that marine sands will be  
one of the more [environmentally] superior options." 
Twice in the past few decades proposals for marine sandmining off Sydney have 
 been put forward - most recently by Metromix in the mid-1990s, to mine 
deposits  in the seas off the Royal National Park. Both have been knocked back. 
A spokesman for the peak industry group, Cement Concrete and Aggregates  
Australia, John Gardiner, says the predicted decline in supply is less a problem  
of shortage than one of obtaining the resource. "Sand deposits are getting  
further and further away, and getting more and more expensive to bring to  
Sydney." 
Gardiner is also the regional manager of Rocla Quarry Products, which mines  
in the Kurnell sand dunes. The further away the quarries, the greater the 
impact  from extra truck movements, both socially and economically. "The industry 
thinks  the Government shouldn't exclude any sand resource," he says. 
However, he warns that offshore mining is not a magic bullet - millions of  
tonnes of sand will still need to be brought ashore, which means that somewhere 
 there will be residents affected by truck movements. 
The Sydney division of Engineers Australia was so concerned about the lack of 
 discussion of the issue it held a seminar recently attended by  
environmentalists, scientists and industry representatives. One speaker at the  meeting, 
the managing director of The Ecology Lab, Dr Marcus Lincoln-Smith, said  there 
were about 9.6 million invertebrates per hectare on the sea floor in those  
areas. Most of these were worms and clams. 
"There's no question sandmining would have an impact on the ecosystem, but it 
 could be done in such a way to manage that impact and, in my view, it would 
be  readily sustainable if done properly," he said. 
Another paper presented at the seminar came from the dredging contractor Van  
Oord Australia. It talked of a fleet of mobile dredging ships, capable of  
sucking up loads of about 10,000 cubic metres, 24 hours a day, seven days a  
week. These ships can operate in depths of up to 50 metres. 
The company believes that, because of the expense of running these huge  
dredgers, it would be best to operate them continuously for a few months -  
dumping large artificial dunes on shore that could be harvested for the rest of  the 
year. 
A coastal campaigner for the Total Environment Centre, Fran Kelly, says she  
is loath to back offshore sandmining, though she can understand why the debate 
 might be needed. She says sandmining on land does cause "huge damage". 
"But there needs to be a real look at the demand for this material," she  
says. "There's concrete suburbs, concrete driveways, concrete everything.  
There's been an excessive growth in homes and driveways. Alternatives should be  
looked at. There needs to be more recycling and new building methods. 
"It's also really clear that there is not enough information about the  
impacts." 
She says the proposal sounds desperate - another grab for resources by a  
greedy Sydney. 
"The easy option is to go offshore — it's out of sight, out of mind." 
To build a multigrain city

The buildings in Sydney's central  business district are a monument to sand. 
In fact, says Dr Peter Cowell, a  senior lecturer at the University of 
Sydney's Institute of Marine Science,  Sydney is just about solid sand.

Sydney is endowed with a richness of the substance because the region sits on 
 top of a prehistoric river delta that dumped billions of tonnes of sediment 
into  what is now Sydney about 300 million years ago. Every time we drive 
through one  of the the city's underground sandstone tunnels, we are travelling 
through an  ancient river bed. 
Sand, however, is a remarkably variable material - every beach has sand with  
its own signature of coarseness and impurity. Every sand deposit has a 
slightly  different use in the building industry. Clay content and coarseness are 
the most  crucial variables. 
The most important use for sand is in concrete and cement. Slabs, driveways  
and skyscrapers all depend on concrete, as do many pipes and blocks. Each has  
its own strength tolerance and hence each requires a different type of sand. 
Skyscrapers are built from concrete made with the highest strength  
specifications and so require exact mixes of fine and coarse sands. 
According to John Gardiner, a spokesman for the peak industry body, Cement  
Concrete and Aggregates Australia, mortar for bricklaying is very silty and has 
 a high clay content. Rendering sand is also particularly fine so it will 
stick  when slapped onto walls - typically, the grain sizes for rendering are 
less than  a millimetre. 
Because offshore sand is relatively homogenous and free of clay, it cannot  
completely fill the gap left by dwindling supplies on land. 
"You are still going to have to have a range of different places supplying  
sand for different uses," Gardiner says. "You can't just say all sand is going  
to come from offshore - it's just simply not going to  work."



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