Sand shortage dilemma Our reporter/Peng Danni Published in the 922nd issue of "China News Weekly" on November 4, 2019 "If you don't do it, don't do it! In the past, we all had to give gifts, and these people would give us the list. If you don’t have any materials now, please give them to us and don’t accept them!” In Hefei City, Anhui Province, the production manager of a large concrete mixing station told his subordinates not to accept orders for construction projects. The "material" he is talking about is sand. A similar situation also occurred in Qingdao City, Shandong Province on the eastern coast. Here, a dealer who has been providing sand and gravel materials to large local construction units used to be able to buy the quantities needed by customers within a 100-kilometer radius. Recently, his search range has been expanded to 200 kilometers, and a lot of sand is available. Comes from informal channels. In order to solve the recent shortage of sand and gravel supply in many places across the country, Hu Youyi, president of the China Sand and Gravel Association, has just met with officials from government decision-making departments in Beijing. He told "China News Weekly", " China now proposes to make up for its shortcomings in infrastructure, but when we look back, we see that there is not enough sand and gravel, and many projects have been suspended, so the authorities are paying more attention to it. " Rocks in nature have been weathered, Due to various surface processes such as erosion and wind and sun for thousands of years, it was broken and separated into particles of different sizes, which were washed away by rivers. Depending on the size, the very fine ones are called sand, such as silt and desert, while the coarser ones are called sand. The latter is more of a concept in civil engineering. The reinforced concrete structures and asphalt roads used in modern buildings require sand. Along with stones, sand and gravel aggregates are the most commonly used materials in concrete, and their quality directly affects the quality of concrete. " A square meter of house requires 800 kilograms of sand and gravel aggregate. Without these 800 kilograms, the house cannot be built. " Hu Youyi said. When stone houses and wooden houses become history, human beings live in spaces surrounded by sand, walk on roads paved with sand, and travel through airports, stations and shopping malls built with sand... For a long time, natural rivers Sand is a building material that is easily available, cheap and easy to use. Sand mining ships, digging trucks, and cheap labor are all needed for sand mining operations; for those who need it, a truck containing more than ten tons of sand costs only more than one hundred yuan. Its important role in the stability of concrete structures is still difficult to surpass artificial sand. Although it is everywhere, it is never obvious, so that people ignore its existence and true value. The sand in deserts, which accounts for 20% of the earth's land surface, is too smooth to be useful in industrial society. All that is really usable comes from rivers - which occupy less than 1% of the earth's area. In the past two or three years, marked by the skyrocketing price of sand, the struggle between limited natural resources and huge social needs has begun to unfold. (In late September, truck drivers queue up to load river sand at the Huangwei sand mining site in Jin'an District, Lu'an City. This is one of the few sand mining sites in the district that has not sold out its quota. Photography/Staff reporter Peng Dan Ni) Hefei Shagui Like many Chinese, Cai Peng has experienced drastic changes in the appearance of his hometown in the past ten years. His family lives in Yaohai District, which is under the jurisdiction of Hefei City, Anhui Province. In the past, this area was the urban-rural fringe and the development depression of Hefei City. It was full of farmland and bungalows. But now, towering hanging towers and fenced construction areas can be seen everywhere. With cement mixer trucks coming and going on the road. At around 8 o'clock in the evening, at the intersection of Baogao Road and Dazhong Road near Cai Peng's home, private cars gradually became rarer, and the road began to give way to transportation vehicles. The reporter squatted on the roadside and counted and found that out of 100 vehicles, 38 were large trucks.Most of these trucks loaded with various bulk building materials have a load capacity of more than 40 tons. Just like the rhythm of China's urbanization, they are eager and determined. In order to grab time, sometimes they even rush across the intersection when the yellow light has flashed; At a construction waste disposal site next to the intersection, truck drivers lined up to enter, weigh and dump in turn, raising dust all over the sky... If you ask them where the sand on the Hefei construction site comes from, whether it is a large concrete mixing station or private sand and gravel Hawkers will all answer: Lu'an. Lu'an is a prefecture-level city next to Hefei. The Pihe River, which flows through five districts and counties under the jurisdiction of Lu'an including Jin'an, Yu'an and Huoshan, is a tributary of the Huaihe River and the main source of river sand in Hefei. Ma Jianxiong is the production manager of one of the top three large-scale concrete mixing stations in Hefei. He said that the drivers who transport sand have many sand pulling groups. When the buyers prepare sand for production, they will shout in the group the day before. A certain mixing station, 42 yuan/ton, 3,000 tons, cash settlement. "The truck owners usually have a dozen drivers. If they think the price is feasible, a dozen trucks will transport the sand from the riverside sand factory the next day. Out and traveled more than 200 kilometers eastward to Hefei. However, a truck driver said that now "the sand in Lu'an is difficult to deal with." Since the implementation of limited mining at the Lu'an sand mining site, the quota will be gone after a certain amount is collected every month. Under such circumstances, prices in the sand procurement and distribution chain generally skyrocketed. Ma Jianxiong said that before the spring of 2018, the price of river sand had been stable at around 40 yuan/ton, and now this number has risen to 130 yuan. 
People in the concrete industry were once "too anxious to do anything." Ma Jianxiong said that the price increase can be passed on to the next level of users, but the problem is that even if you have money, you cannot buy sand. "The price increase only accounts for 20% of the total reason. We have so many contract units and produce millions of cubic meters of concrete a year. What should we do if we don't have raw materials?"
Under the attack of high prices and shortages, downstream companies began to explore ways to cope. Concrete batching stations began to inquire with each other, asking those "well-connected" companies what kind of sand they used and where it was shipped from, and then gave them contact information to connect with them. At the same time, the mixing station laboratory staff began to study how to use river sand and machine-made sand, and how much cement to use to achieve the previous strength and standards.
"In the past, the sand used in the mixing station was basically river sand. Since last year, the categories have been diverse." Ma Jianxiong said that now 50% to 60% of Lu'an sand in Hefei is replaced by river sand: dug from the Yangtze River Jiangsha is transported by large ships of 10,000 tons, and then transferred to small boats of 2,000 tons at Yuxikou, Wuhu via inland shipping to various docks in Hefei, and then transported by transport fleets to various concrete mixing stations.
The manager of another smaller concrete station said that the company now uses only river sand; because the price of river sand is too high, Wu Fang now also uses river sand mixed with river sand from Anqing to sell. She said that in the past, Hefei people thought that Anqing's sand was not good and would not pay for it, but now customers no longer care about this.
Ma Jianxiong said that considering the price, small concrete companies do not undertake municipal projects such as subways, viaducts and special construction parts that require high-grade concrete, so they do not need river sand. However, natural river sand is still irreplaceable in high-standard and high-grade concrete due to its uniform particle size distribution.
River sand has even become a tool for inspection and decoration of concrete mixing stations. Ma Jianxiong said that when the government came to inspect the materials, they asked, "How do you meet the on-site materials for the several projects you won the bid for, including Track Line 2 and Line 3?" , "river sand specially used for viaducts," but he said, "That pile of sand is not used at all. I can say that the pile of special (sand) in 90% of the mixing stations is basically useless. "
But now. , the price of Jiangsha is also rising, from 100 yuan/ton last year to about 140 yuan/ton recently. "Sand and gravel tensions have become normal." Ma Jianxiong said.
(No. 1 sand factory in Huoshan County, Lu'an City. Only a few workers guarding the sand factory are patrolling here. The sand factory stopped mining in February 2019 and was still closed for cleaning in September. Photography/This Journal Reporter Peng Danni)
Rivers in emergency
China's river sand mining management has always been supported by sand mining planning. Taking the Yangtze River Basin, China's main sand-producing area, as an example, in 2002, 2011 and 2016, the Ministry of Water Resources prepared three rounds of sand mining plans for the main river channels of the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River. These documents stipulate the total amount of mining, the scope of mining and the mining period. However, if you rely on the mining volume given in these sand mining plans as a reference, you will get a data that is far lower than the actual value.
Head west from Hefei to Jin'an District, Lu'an City on the right bank of the middle section of the Pihe River. Zhang Yuanfeng, a manager at the District's River Sand Mining Management Bureau, explained that the previously planned annual volume was only a guideline volume, and the actual mining volume was several times the planned volume. "When we were doing statistics on ecological resources last year, we found that we planned to produce more than 3 million tons a year, but the actual sales volume was close to 10 million tons, and it may have been an underestimate."
In the late 1990s, the Pihe River had not yet been regulated, and every household Can dig sand. "That's not called sand mining, it's like a small workshop." Zhang Yuanfeng said. After 2009, the Jin'an District River Management Bureau was established, and a licensing system was implemented for river sand mining. Only those with complete sand mining vessels, forklifts, transportation channels, etc. are qualified to become sand miners.
A bidding, auction and listing system has been implemented here since 2012. According to the sand mining plan, the mining scope is delineated, and the sand resources and management rights are sold at one time. The mining period is generally 3 to 5 years. The disadvantage of this management method is that once obtains the management rights, the winning bidder often does not mine according to the transfer scope of the transferor, but mines beyond the scope and depth. Zhang Yuanfeng said that for example, the Pihe River is the boundary river between Jin'an District and Yu'an District, and sand mining companies may go to Yu'an District to mine sand, and some mining beyond the scope may endanger the safety of river water conservancy projects.
Indiscriminate mining almost goes hand in hand with sand mining planning. Zhang Yuanfeng said, "To be honest, the plan at that time was basically just a formality after it was compiled. In addition to the real no-mining areas, which we will strictly observe and guard, other over-mining behaviors, such as only allowing 3 meters of mining but digging With a height of 6 meters, you can dig whatever you want.”
html Over the past decade, extensive sand mining management has kept sand prices low for a long time, allowing the construction industry to operate at a low cost, but its impact on the environment has gradually become apparent. The situation of the Yangtze River, the longest river in China, is a typical case.In the 1990s, China's economy began to enter an upward trajectory, and the booming construction industry drove the sand rush in the Yangtze River Basin. Data from the Ministry of Water Resources' "China's River Sediment Bulletin" shows that indiscriminate excavation and mining are beginning to endanger river safety. At the beginning of the new century, the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River began a two-year mining ban policy; in 2002, the State Council promulgated the "Yangtze River Sand Mining Management Regulations" to manage sand and gravel mining in the mainstream rivers below Yibin of the Yangtze River.
Sand mining activities have not disappeared. On the contrary, it has avoided the wind and instead targeted tributaries and Dongting Lake and Poyang Lake. Judging from the average annual and total sand mining volume recorded, WWF pointed out that Poyang Lake is the largest sand mining site in the world. . In the first decade of the 20th century, the amount of sand mined in Poyang Lake was equivalent to the mud deposited in the previous 55 years. Amount of sand. Zhou Jianjun, a professor at the Department of Water Conservancy at Tsinghua University and an expert on sediment issues, pointed out that Poyang Lake is the area most severely affected by sand mining in China.
When Chen Yushun, a researcher at the Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, investigated the impact of sand mining on lakes in Dongting Lake and Poyang Lake in the Yangtze River Basin from 2015 to 2016, he found that it was difficult to obtain first-hand data on sand mining conditions. "It can only be superficial observation, such as seeing how many ships are operating over there, comparing it with satellite remote sensing photos, or asking some local people whether the number of ships is more or less." Chen Yushun told China News Weekly, " Because the relevant water conservancy departments have very limited complete and accurate data. For example, the mining volume assigned to a contractor is 500,000 tons per year, but no one knows how much was dug. "
Chen Yushun remembers. , four or five years ago, sand mining activities in Poyang Lake were crazy.
Sand shortage dilemma Our reporter/Peng Danni Published in the 922nd issue of "China News Weekly" on November 4, 2019 "If you don't do it, don't do it! In the past, we all had to give gifts, and these people would give us the list. If you don’t have any materials now, please give them to us and don’t accept them!” In Hefei City, Anhui Province, the production manager of a large concrete mixing station told his subordinates not to accept orders for construction projects. The "material" he is talking about is sand. A similar situation also occurred in Qingdao City, Shandong Province on the eastern coast. Here, a dealer who has been providing sand and gravel materials to large local construction units used to be able to buy the quantities needed by customers within a 100-kilometer radius. Recently, his search range has been expanded to 200 kilometers, and a lot of sand is available. Comes from informal channels. In order to solve the recent shortage of sand and gravel supply in many places across the country, Hu Youyi, president of the China Sand and Gravel Association, has just met with officials from government decision-making departments in Beijing. He told "China News Weekly", " China now proposes to make up for its shortcomings in infrastructure, but when we look back, we see that there is not enough sand and gravel, and many projects have been suspended, so the authorities are paying more attention to it. " Rocks in nature have been weathered, Due to various surface processes such as erosion and wind and sun for thousands of years, it was broken and separated into particles of different sizes, which were washed away by rivers. Depending on the size, the very fine ones are called sand, such as silt and desert, while the coarser ones are called sand. The latter is more of a concept in civil engineering. The reinforced concrete structures and asphalt roads used in modern buildings require sand. Along with stones, sand and gravel aggregates are the most commonly used materials in concrete, and their quality directly affects the quality of concrete. " A square meter of house requires 800 kilograms of sand and gravel aggregate. Without these 800 kilograms, the house cannot be built. " Hu Youyi said. When stone houses and wooden houses become history, human beings live in spaces surrounded by sand, walk on roads paved with sand, and travel through airports, stations and shopping malls built with sand... For a long time, natural rivers Sand is a building material that is easily available, cheap and easy to use. Sand mining ships, digging trucks, and cheap labor are all needed for sand mining operations; for those who need it, a truck containing more than ten tons of sand costs only more than one hundred yuan. Its important role in the stability of concrete structures is still difficult to surpass artificial sand. Although it is everywhere, it is never obvious, so that people ignore its existence and true value. The sand in deserts, which accounts for 20% of the earth's land surface, is too smooth to be useful in industrial society. All that is really usable comes from rivers - which occupy less than 1% of the earth's area. In the past two or three years, marked by the skyrocketing price of sand, the struggle between limited natural resources and huge social needs has begun to unfold. (In late September, truck drivers queue up to load river sand at the Huangwei sand mining site in Jin'an District, Lu'an City. This is one of the few sand mining sites in the district that has not sold out its quota. Photography/Staff reporter Peng Dan Ni) Hefei Shagui Like many Chinese, Cai Peng has experienced drastic changes in the appearance of his hometown in the past ten years. His family lives in Yaohai District, which is under the jurisdiction of Hefei City, Anhui Province. In the past, this area was the urban-rural fringe and the development depression of Hefei City. It was full of farmland and bungalows. But now, towering hanging towers and fenced construction areas can be seen everywhere. With cement mixer trucks coming and going on the road. At around 8 o'clock in the evening, at the intersection of Baogao Road and Dazhong Road near Cai Peng's home, private cars gradually became rarer, and the road began to give way to transportation vehicles. The reporter squatted on the roadside and counted and found that out of 100 vehicles, 38 were large trucks.Most of these trucks loaded with various bulk building materials have a load capacity of more than 40 tons. Just like the rhythm of China's urbanization, they are eager and determined. In order to grab time, sometimes they even rush across the intersection when the yellow light has flashed; At a construction waste disposal site next to the intersection, truck drivers lined up to enter, weigh and dump in turn, raising dust all over the sky... If you ask them where the sand on the Hefei construction site comes from, whether it is a large concrete mixing station or private sand and gravel Hawkers will all answer: Lu'an. Lu'an is a prefecture-level city next to Hefei. The Pihe River, which flows through five districts and counties under the jurisdiction of Lu'an including Jin'an, Yu'an and Huoshan, is a tributary of the Huaihe River and the main source of river sand in Hefei. Ma Jianxiong is the production manager of one of the top three large-scale concrete mixing stations in Hefei. He said that the drivers who transport sand have many sand pulling groups. When the buyers prepare sand for production, they will shout in the group the day before. A certain mixing station, 42 yuan/ton, 3,000 tons, cash settlement. "The truck owners usually have a dozen drivers. If they think the price is feasible, a dozen trucks will transport the sand from the riverside sand factory the next day. Out and traveled more than 200 kilometers eastward to Hefei. However, a truck driver said that now "the sand in Lu'an is difficult to deal with." Since the implementation of limited mining at the Lu'an sand mining site, the quota will be gone after a certain amount is collected every month. Under such circumstances, prices in the sand procurement and distribution chain generally skyrocketed. Ma Jianxiong said that before the spring of 2018, the price of river sand had been stable at around 40 yuan/ton, and now this number has risen to 130 yuan.
People in the concrete industry were once "too anxious to do anything." Ma Jianxiong said that the price increase can be passed on to the next level of users, but the problem is that even if you have money, you cannot buy sand. "The price increase only accounts for 20% of the total reason. We have so many contract units and produce millions of cubic meters of concrete a year. What should we do if we don't have raw materials?"
Under the attack of high prices and shortages, downstream companies began to explore ways to cope. Concrete batching stations began to inquire with each other, asking those "well-connected" companies what kind of sand they used and where it was shipped from, and then gave them contact information to connect with them. At the same time, the mixing station laboratory staff began to study how to use river sand and machine-made sand, and how much cement to use to achieve the previous strength and standards.
"In the past, the sand used in the mixing station was basically river sand. Since last year, the categories have been diverse." Ma Jianxiong said that now 50% to 60% of Lu'an sand in Hefei is replaced by river sand: dug from the Yangtze River Jiangsha is transported by large ships of 10,000 tons, and then transferred to small boats of 2,000 tons at Yuxikou, Wuhu via inland shipping to various docks in Hefei, and then transported by transport fleets to various concrete mixing stations.
The manager of another smaller concrete station said that the company now uses only river sand; because the price of river sand is too high, Wu Fang now also uses river sand mixed with river sand from Anqing to sell. She said that in the past, Hefei people thought that Anqing's sand was not good and would not pay for it, but now customers no longer care about this.
Ma Jianxiong said that considering the price, small concrete companies do not undertake municipal projects such as subways, viaducts and special construction parts that require high-grade concrete, so they do not need river sand. However, natural river sand is still irreplaceable in high-standard and high-grade concrete due to its uniform particle size distribution.
River sand has even become a tool for inspection and decoration of concrete mixing stations. Ma Jianxiong said that when the government came to inspect the materials, they asked, "How do you meet the on-site materials for the several projects you won the bid for, including Track Line 2 and Line 3?" , "river sand specially used for viaducts," but he said, "That pile of sand is not used at all. I can say that the pile of special (sand) in 90% of the mixing stations is basically useless. "
But now. , the price of Jiangsha is also rising, from 100 yuan/ton last year to about 140 yuan/ton recently. "Sand and gravel tensions have become normal." Ma Jianxiong said.
(No. 1 sand factory in Huoshan County, Lu'an City. Only a few workers guarding the sand factory are patrolling here. The sand factory stopped mining in February 2019 and was still closed for cleaning in September. Photography/This Journal Reporter Peng Danni)
Rivers in emergency
China's river sand mining management has always been supported by sand mining planning. Taking the Yangtze River Basin, China's main sand-producing area, as an example, in 2002, 2011 and 2016, the Ministry of Water Resources prepared three rounds of sand mining plans for the main river channels of the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River. These documents stipulate the total amount of mining, the scope of mining and the mining period. However, if you rely on the mining volume given in these sand mining plans as a reference, you will get a data that is far lower than the actual value.
Head west from Hefei to Jin'an District, Lu'an City on the right bank of the middle section of the Pihe River. Zhang Yuanfeng, a manager at the District's River Sand Mining Management Bureau, explained that the previously planned annual volume was only a guideline volume, and the actual mining volume was several times the planned volume. "When we were doing statistics on ecological resources last year, we found that we planned to produce more than 3 million tons a year, but the actual sales volume was close to 10 million tons, and it may have been an underestimate."
In the late 1990s, the Pihe River had not yet been regulated, and every household Can dig sand. "That's not called sand mining, it's like a small workshop." Zhang Yuanfeng said. After 2009, the Jin'an District River Management Bureau was established, and a licensing system was implemented for river sand mining. Only those with complete sand mining vessels, forklifts, transportation channels, etc. are qualified to become sand miners.
A bidding, auction and listing system has been implemented here since 2012. According to the sand mining plan, the mining scope is delineated, and the sand resources and management rights are sold at one time. The mining period is generally 3 to 5 years. The disadvantage of this management method is that once obtains the management rights, the winning bidder often does not mine according to the transfer scope of the transferor, but mines beyond the scope and depth. Zhang Yuanfeng said that for example, the Pihe River is the boundary river between Jin'an District and Yu'an District, and sand mining companies may go to Yu'an District to mine sand, and some mining beyond the scope may endanger the safety of river water conservancy projects.
Indiscriminate mining almost goes hand in hand with sand mining planning. Zhang Yuanfeng said, "To be honest, the plan at that time was basically just a formality after it was compiled. In addition to the real no-mining areas, which we will strictly observe and guard, other over-mining behaviors, such as only allowing 3 meters of mining but digging With a height of 6 meters, you can dig whatever you want.”
html Over the past decade, extensive sand mining management has kept sand prices low for a long time, allowing the construction industry to operate at a low cost, but its impact on the environment has gradually become apparent. The situation of the Yangtze River, the longest river in China, is a typical case.In the 1990s, China's economy began to enter an upward trajectory, and the booming construction industry drove the sand rush in the Yangtze River Basin. Data from the Ministry of Water Resources' "China's River Sediment Bulletin" shows that indiscriminate excavation and mining are beginning to endanger river safety. At the beginning of the new century, the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River began a two-year mining ban policy; in 2002, the State Council promulgated the "Yangtze River Sand Mining Management Regulations" to manage sand and gravel mining in the mainstream rivers below Yibin of the Yangtze River.
Sand mining activities have not disappeared. On the contrary, it has avoided the wind and instead targeted tributaries and Dongting Lake and Poyang Lake. Judging from the average annual and total sand mining volume recorded, WWF pointed out that Poyang Lake is the largest sand mining site in the world. . In the first decade of the 20th century, the amount of sand mined in Poyang Lake was equivalent to the mud deposited in the previous 55 years. Amount of sand. Zhou Jianjun, a professor at the Department of Water Conservancy at Tsinghua University and an expert on sediment issues, pointed out that Poyang Lake is the area most severely affected by sand mining in China.
When Chen Yushun, a researcher at the Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, investigated the impact of sand mining on lakes in Dongting Lake and Poyang Lake in the Yangtze River Basin from 2015 to 2016, he found that it was difficult to obtain first-hand data on sand mining conditions. "It can only be superficial observation, such as seeing how many ships are operating over there, comparing it with satellite remote sensing photos, or asking some local people whether the number of ships is more or less." Chen Yushun told China News Weekly, " Because the relevant water conservancy departments have very limited complete and accurate data. For example, the mining volume assigned to a contractor is 500,000 tons per year, but no one knows how much was dug. "
Chen Yushun remembers. , four or five years ago, sand mining activities in Poyang Lake were crazy.Most of the sand mining here is concentrated in the Hukou channel where the lake water flows into the river. Poyang Lake, which slopes from southeast to northwest, is like a bottle pouring water out, and this long and narrow water channel is like the mouth of the bottle. The coarser river sand is deposited here and is a high-quality building material that can be sold at a high price in the market. The huge profits that come from digging attract both legal and illegal sand miners to dig for gold here.
Those with or without sand mining licenses are desperately trying to salvage "soft gold". When was at its most rampant, there were 450 and 368 illegal sand mining boats operating in the two lakes respectively. Their sand suction capacity could empty out 20 years of sedimentation in the two lakes in one year. Indiscriminate digging and mining are equally crazy. According to media reports, in 2014, a sand mining company won a sand mining site in Poyang Lake. According to the water conservancy department's plan, the sand mining company's planned sand mining volume in 2014 was 2 million tons. However, surrounding fishermen believed that their sand mining volume was far more than that. This number. They calculated this: "A large 'Sand Suction King' can dig a hole 10 meters deep, suck 200 tons to 1,000 tons of sand and gravel, and can drill at least seven or eight holes a day. There are as many as nine such sand mining ships, and as few as Four, working non-stop for 24 hours, the specified mining volume was reached in thirty or forty days."
According to the article "Causes of Poyang Lake Problems in the Yangtze River and the Impact of the Construction of the Hukou Gate" published by Zhou Jianjun and others in March this year, only from 2000 to 2011. In 2008, the registered sand mining volume of Poyang Lake exceeded 500 million tons, nearly half of which came from the 50 to 60 kilometers of the waterway entering the river. After the riverbed of this section is dug deep, " this is equivalent to expanding the mouth of the bottle in depth, and it will be particularly easy to pour water into the Yangtze River from Poyang Lake. " Zhou Jianjun said that when the water level of the Yangtze River is cut due to water conservancy projects such as the Three Gorges, Poyang During the dry season of the lake, especially in February and March, the water level in the center of the lake is two to three meters lower than in the same period in the past.
Poyang Lake, the largest freshwater lake in China, is an important flood storage and discharge place for the Yangtze River. It is also a water source for the living and agricultural irrigation of the surrounding 44 million people. Internationally recognized for its rich biodiversity, it is home to many rare animals and where many fishermen make a living. However, the rapid shrinkage of its lake area in recent years makes it difficult for it to carry so much ecological significance. The drought in Poyang Lake aggravated by sand mining and a series of subsequent problems have attracted the attention of ecologists.
Poyang Lake is known as the "last refuge" for the Yangtze finless porpoise, a national first-level protected animal. A 2012 scientific survey by the Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences found that the national population of Yangtze finless porpoises was 1,045, of which 450 were in Poyang Lake. At the end of 2013, a researcher observed 47 finless porpoises in some waters here. A year later, this number was "0". "First of all, the habitats of fish and other aquatic organisms such as beaches and river bottoms are destroyed; at the same time, after the low-level organisms attached to the mud are dug away, aquatic organisms will have no food." Chen Yushun said, "If If mining continues on the scale of 2015, the problem will definitely be huge. "
Putting the problem of sand mining in Poyang Lake into the larger ecosystem, you will see that it makes the already unbalanced Yangtze River sediment system more fragile. In the upper reaches of the Yangtze River Basin, large water conservancy projects such as the Three Gorges Dam trap large amounts of sediment in reservoirs. According to the 2018 "China River Sediment Bulletin" by the Ministry of Water Resources, the sediment transport monitored by the three largest hydrological control stations in the Yangtze River decreased by 91%, 76%, and 77% from top to bottom compared with the average over the past 50 years. %.
Zhou Jianjun explained that the Yangtze River is a system with a balanced erosion and siltation in history. The current situation is: the sand coming from the upper reaches has been greatly reduced, the middle and lower reaches of the river have less coming and more travel, and the sediment is in a state of erosion - in the years after the construction of the Three Gorges Dam , 27.8 billion cubic meters of sediment have been washed away downstream. The river bed composed of these materials is the framework of the river. In the Jingjiang section of the Yangtze River, the water level dropped by two to three meters along with the river bed. This has had a great impact on the navigation of the Yangtze River, agricultural irrigation, domestic water, and the transportation of water pollutants or nutrients along the way.
Take nutrient transport in water as an example. Nutrients or pollutants such as phosphorus are mainly adsorbed on sediment. In the past, a large amount of phosphorus in the Yangtze River was released after interacting with seawater at the estuary. It was a nutrient source for a large number of microorganisms, algae and even fish in the estuary. This is also an important reason why the Zhoushan fishery once became one of the four largest fisheries in the world.But now, the Yangtze River has become an ecosystem with little phosphorus.
A series of problems after sand mining in Poyang Lake are a mirror of the ecological impact of excessive sand mining. "The Yangtze River is currently facing a huge problem, and further digging will make it worse. But even if there is no dam, we do not advocate sand dredging in relatively gentle areas downstream of the river," Zhou Jianjun said. But the reality is that, according to an article published last year by Li Gang, a senior engineer at the River Sand Mining Administration Bureau of the Yangtze River Water Conservancy Commission, at present, the production capacity of hundreds of sand mining vessels cruising on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River is ten times the recoverable amount. But at the same time, urbanization along the Yangtze River continues to push up the demand for river sand, and the contradiction between supply and demand for sediment resources in this section has become increasingly prominent.
"Due to the lack of reliable estimates of the natural replenishment rate of sand, we don't know how mining matches the amount of sand incoming, which is why sand mining often has serious consequences in places with shortages." Jim, professor of sedimentary geology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Leonard said in an interview with China News Weekly.
(On April 13, 2017, law enforcement officers from the local maritime affairs office of Hongze District, Huaian, Jiangsu Province cracked down on illegal sand mining in the parking area of illegal sand mining ships in the Hanqiao waters of Hongze Lake. Picture/Visual China)
governance caused sand Huang
"I said that the 'Yangtze River is sick', and the illness is not serious." This is the second time that Xi Jinping has taken the pulse of the Yangtze River.
In January 2016, when Xi Jinping chaired the first symposium on the development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt in Chongqing, he pointed out that “repairing the ecological environment of the Yangtze River must be given an overwhelming priority, and we must work together to protect the Yangtze River and not engage in large-scale development.” Subsequently, six special ecological and environmental actions focusing on the Yangtze River Economic Belt were launched one by one, and the special rectification of illegal sand mining was one of them.
This year, the Central Environmental Protection Inspection Team, led by the former Ministry of Environmental Protection and participated by relevant leaders of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the Organization Department of the Central Committee of the CPC, was formally established. Illegal sand mining is one of the key areas of environmental inspection; on June 19, 2018, the Ministry of Water Resources released Notice, a six-month river sand mining remediation operation has been launched. Changes are starting to come.
In June 2017, the operating rights of six sand plants in Matou Town, Jin'an District, Lu'an City expired. When the district river management bureau was preparing for a new round of bidding, auction and listing, the superiors said: "You can no longer use the traditional bidding method. It’s an old road, and it must be consistent with the country’s guiding ideology of ecological environment protection.”
In response, the Jin’an District River Management Bureau of Lu’an City, on the advice of experts from the Anhui Provincial Department of Water Resources, went to Jiangxi to inspect sand mining here. The practice of management has explored the "Jiujiang model" that is being imitated across the country: abandoning the bidding, auction and listing system that has been in place for many years, replacing it with government leadership, and establishing a state-owned enterprise to lease private sand mining ships for mining. Throughout the Yangtze River Basin, the bidding, auction, and listing model that had lasted for many years was gradually stopped. For example, in 2017, many cities and counties with the right to mine Dongting Lake sand and gravel stopped sand mining and gradually adopted nationalized management.
In October of the same year, Jin'an District of Lu'an City began to launch a new set of nationalized sand mining management. There are 13 sand mining sites under its jurisdiction, each with a monthly quota of 60,000 tons of river sand production and sales. Sand miners can receive 15 yuan in labor fees for every ton of sand produced and sold, and the rest of the income belongs to the district government.
In order to strictly control the mining volume, Jin'an District has implemented "technological desertification control" measures. At the Huangwei sand mining site, a truck weighs the tare weight when it enters the sand plant. After it is loaded with sand, it weighs the truck again and weighs the gross weight. The net weight is determined by subtracting the two data. These data are recorded on the computer at the export management station. The staff issued a sand and gravel ticket and a loading order based on the net weight. The driver paid by swiping his card and received an electronic receipt. He took the three tickets with him for transportation, and the transportation department verified the weight again at the highway checkpoint before entering the market. . On the computer at the management station, once all the sand shipped out exceeds 60,000 tons that month, the release system will automatically shut down.
The situation in Jin'an District, Lu'an City is generally a microcosm of the history of sand mining management in China. Zhang Yuanfeng said that if the original bidding, auction and listing system were followed, it is estimated that there will be no sand to be mined in the Pihe River by 2022, but now that quantitative mining is strictly in accordance with the plan, it can be mined for another 5 to 8 years.
After leaving Lu'an City, we went up the Pihe River to Shengren Village, Xiafuqiao Town, Huoshan County, which is located in the hinterland of the Dabie Mountains. The eastern branch of the upper reaches of the Pihe River mainly flows through here, and there is a sand factory beside the river.It is completely different from the imagined busy scene of sand mining operations and trucks queuing up to load sand. There are no trucks in a place with the name "Sand Factory No. 1". There are piles of yellow sand and gravel piled up there. There are no sand mining boats on the river. Several workers who were in charge of the sand factory were playing cards and chatting in the small tent at the entrance.
A sand mining manager in Huoshan County explained that the three connected sand factories in this area are the three sand mining sites sold by Huoshan County after the bidding and auction in 2017. Since the environmental protection approval was not passed last year, the sand mining site will be closed once a year. The replacement sand mining permit was not issued. Earlier this year, the Lu'an Municipal Water Conservancy Bureau's river chief's office sent a direct letter requesting a halt to mining.
In 2017, environmental protection inspections began to affect Huoshan. In March of that year, almost more than 90 stone quarries in Huoshan County were shut down. The Foziling Reservoir located in Huoshan is the drinking water source for Hefei and Lu'an. In mid-2018, a special inspection team of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment inspected the drinking water sources of Lu'an City and believed that sand mining activities had affected the quality of drinking water. Two months later, all sand fields in Dongpi River were closed, including The last three sand mining plants in Huoshan County. From random digging to no sand to be mined, the price of sand in Huoshan has been rising all the way.
For a long time, sand was so cheap that it could hardly be called a commodity. Although the quality of the sand in the Huoshan section is the best among the sand in the Pihe River, Han Ming, leader of the water supervision team of the Huoshan County Water Affairs Bureau, remembers that when the sand mining license was started in 2004, Huoshan sand only cost 10 yuan per ton; A few years passed, and it only more than tripled in 2017. However, starting in 2018, the price nearly quadrupled in one year, reaching 110 or 120 yuan/ton. In the first half of this year, the price rose again to 150 yuan/ton. Ton.
In October 2018, Henan Province held a province-wide river sand mining management work conference in Xinyang City to promote the nationalization of sand mining. Currently, there are 20 sand mining companies in the province, all of which are solely state-owned or state-controlled; in December of the same year, Hubei Province issued The "Notice on Strengthening the Management of the Ban on Sand Mining in Rivers" has rectified more than 1,700 sand-related ships of various types, and some of the "three noes" sand mining ships were blasted and dismantled on site. Against the backdrop of nationwide efforts to control sand mining, provinces such as Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Shaanxi, and Hainan have begun to experience sand shortages one after another, creating a dilemma for large sand-consuming countries.
In Hainan Province, which is located in a corner, in February this year, the provincial state-owned enterprise Hainan Development Holdings Co., Ltd. imported river sand from the Philippines for the first time. Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangsu, Heilongjiang and other provinces are also interested in importing. In Jiangxi, a major sand-producing province, the government is trying to ensure sand supply by accelerating sand mining permits and comprehensively utilizing sand and gravel obtained from dredging...
While there is no sand available, inferior sand and even illegal sand flow into the market. The aforementioned Qingdao sand and gravel dealer found that in Qingdao, where river sand is in short supply and machine-made sand is immature, construction tailings sand, sand with a high mud content from river dredging, and even processed sea sand are beginning to enter some Construction sites with low quality requirements make it difficult to guarantee project quality.
Sea sand is a well-known taboo in reinforced concrete construction. Sea sand contains salt. When the chloride ion content in the concrete exceeds the critical value, the steel bars will be corroded and then expand in volume, causing the surrounding concrete to be stretched and cracked. In 2013, the "Haisha Dangerous Building" incident in Shenzhen, which caused shock, is an example. But now the crisis is on the rise again. For example, in August 2018, a notice issued by the Sand and Gravel Branch of the Shanghai Stone Industry Association showed that the regulation of the Yangtze River and inland rivers has caused a decrease in river sand, and sea sand has flowed into the Shanghai construction market.
"When the right path is not smooth, the crooked path comes." Hu Youyi said, "Messy and unqualified sand enters the construction site. What should we do if the house collapses? This involves the quality of a century-old plan. Because this time the sand and gravel Huang, many people may go to jail in the future. ”
(Sand mining ship stranded in Poyang Lake during dry season. Photo/Visual China)
“A game of speed”
Starting from the second half of 2018, Lu’an City The supply of sand has begun to decrease significantly. At that time, Ma Jianxiong's commercial concrete industry had not yet established river sand supply channels and still purchased river sand from Lu'an. In the morning the sand was brought in and they saw there was grass in it. "There was grass growing on the river beach, and there was sand underneath the grass. We thought something was wrong when we saw the grass. When we asked, we were told that it was secretly dug on the river beach at night.”
If there is a way to make a living without working hard and not costing too much, then stealing sand must be a good option. By using forklifts, excavators and transport trucks on the shallow Pihe River, you can gain a lot . In places with deep water such as the Yangtze River and Huaihe River, the sand thieves designed sand mining boats that can be controlled by remote control. They can sink underwater during the day and come up again at night to illegally mine sand. The motorboat is powerful and fast. The insider asked me which part of the boat was not to be checked tonight. When I pressed the (remote control), the boat rushed over. " Ma Jianxiong said.
Ma Jianxiong remembered that in the middle of this year, Jiangsu sand mining was also banned. As a company that uses a large amount of sand and gravel, the boss has asked the person in charge of procurement to go abroad to see if it can be purchased from Malaysia and North Korea. These places import, but later found that it is not necessary, " (Hubei) Jiangsha can also get it, some people are not afraid of death. ”
Zhai Changyou is the deputy director of the Huoshan County Water Affairs Bureau, in charge of water administration supervision and river management. In order to strengthen the unified management of sand and gravel mining, in December last year, the county government established the Huoshan County Sand and Gravel Management Law Enforcement Brigade, which he is now responsible for. (hereinafter referred to as the "Law Enforcement Brigade"), affiliated to the Water Affairs Bureau.
As a regulator, he joked that his job is in a high-risk industry, so that he needs to look around and be careful when walking - "Our law enforcement department is to some extent. Cutting off people and money. "Being threatened, reported, and investigated by the disciplinary inspection department are things that Han Ming, who has been engaged in water law enforcement for many years, often encounters. In 2004, the Huoshan County Water Conservancy Bureau had just begun to regulate sand mining in rivers. In an area where excessive digging and mining were indiscriminate, they went to To enforce the law, the vehicle was pushed over and he was beaten.
Unlike Jin'an District, which has only one main river that can be set up with checkpoints, there are many mountainous rivers and dry sandy areas everywhere, making it difficult to steal sand and gravel. Like a cat versus a mouse, this is a protracted war between regulators and sand thieves. The aforementioned villagers along the Huoshan River said that no one had ever taken care of the river before, but only after the price of sand increased in the past two years did patrols begin. Personnel. " There are patrols along the river day and night. But river sand is valuable, and as long as people (sand thieves) can make money, they will even dig the road for you. ”
When the law enforcement inspections first started at the end of 2017, Han Ming said, “People (sand thieves) have a thorough understanding of your entire trip, and law enforcement vehicles are often stopped. "At first, every time Han Ming went to the scene after receiving a report, the sand thief had already run away. Later, when he went to repair the car, he discovered that a locator was installed under the car. After that, they began to go to the repair shop for inspection regularly.
In this regard, The "opponents" used another trick: They placed a person near each vehicle to follow them on a motorcycle or in a car, and then used walkie-talkies or mobile phones to notify teammates.
Interviewees often compared the huge profits from stealing sand with drug trafficking. Compared with , if measured in tons, the profit of sand stealing is even higher than that of drug trafficking. A water law enforcement officer in Hubei Province wrote in 2016 that sand mining ships can mine 1,000 tons of river sand per hour, and the direct price on the water is 15 yuan. The profit is about 10 yuan per ton, which means that the net profit can be tens of thousands of yuan per hour. Now, the sand price is already several times that of 15 yuan.
According to "Anhui Province River Road, there was not much risk." According to the "Sand Mining Management Measures", those who illegally steal sand will have their illegal gains confiscated and be fined from 5,000 yuan to 20,000 yuan; in serious cases, they will only be fined less than 50,000 yuan when mining in flood season and prohibited mining areas, the value of which reaches 50,000 yuan. Ten thousand yuan can be punished with criminal detention, but Zhai Changyou said, “You can’t even hold him in jail for a few days. "At the end of 2016, the country's top two officials issued a judicial interpretation that illegal sand mining in rivers would be punished as illegal mining, which became a powerful weapon for law enforcers.
Before the law enforcement brigade was established, Han Ming was an administrative law enforcement officer in the water affairs department. , the sand thieves are not too afraid, “If we just go to negotiate with the sand thieves and there is no police to come forward, sometimes the situation will be difficult to control. "
In view of the serious situation of illegal mining, the Huoshan County Public Security Bureau established the first water police office in Anhui Province in February last year, with auxiliary police officers on hand every time it enforces the law. The special campaign against gangs and evil that started last year also has Conducive to Zhai Changyou's work.Because people who steal sand usually overlap with those involved in gangs, evil, and drugs. In fact, if the crackdown on gangs and evil cannot be normalized, he is worried that illegal sand mining may rebound again.
After the nationalization of river sand mining, the indiscriminate digging and mining by sand bosses has become a pressed gourd, while illegal digging and illegal mining may be a floating scoop. The difficulty of supervision has largely been transferred to the water law enforcement personnel. superior. However, as Fan Xiaowei and others from the Anhui Provincial Hydrology Bureau pointed out, the sand mining management agency has few personnel and insufficient equipment, making it difficult to achieve effective management of sand mining alone.
As a staff member of the water conservancy department, Han Ming said frankly that the protection of dams and water sources is the focus of river management. River sand, as a resource flowing into the market, has little to do with water conservancy itself. But in the past two years when sand prices have skyrocketed, if there is any direct impact on his water law enforcement unit, it is that the difficulty of managing sand thieves has increased sharply. "(Places for stealing sand) are many and wide. If you have few managers, you are playing a speed game with them."
(A large river sand distribution center in the Fuyang section of the Huaihe River in Anhui Province. Photo/Xinhua)
Looking for new sand Source
The story of Lu'an Sand has been repeated in many places across the country. In the second half of 2018, Henan Province implemented controls on river sand three times in a row. All sand mining and sand-making enterprises in the country were stopped and converted to nationalized operations. After the supply was reduced, the rise in sand prices was accompanied by inexhaustible illegal mining.
“When we discuss available sand, we must think about its sustainable use and how to minimize the impact on the environment; at the same time, we must also realize that sand is a key raw material for contemporary society and a livelihood for many people. ." said Jim Leonard, professor of sedimentary geology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Anhui Provincial Hydrology Bureau Fan Xiaowei and others published an article in "River and Lake Management" in 2018, arguing that river sand and gravel management has long been treated as a water activity, ignoring its side as an economic activity and failing to face up to its market demand. . He pointed out that if we want to cut off the profit chain of illegal sand mining in rivers, we must start from the supply side and free the rivers from river sand supply channels.
"Relying on digging sand from rivers is no longer possible. Because it is obvious that the high-quality river sand in various places is rapidly decreasing. If we continue to mine sand at the current rate, many rivers have been destroyed. Do we have to keep digging like this? These rivers that have flowed on the land of China for thousands of years were destroyed in the hands of our generation or two? Now that the country has restricted mining and excavation, it is necessary to protect the ecology of the rivers," said Song Shaomin, head of the Department of Building Materials at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture.
Regarding the current sand shortage problem, Hu Youyi concluded, "In the past, it was 'relying on the mountains to dig stones, and relying on the water to scoop up the sand'. Now the ecological environment construction managed by the state is not allowed to be dug in many places, but the new industrialization has not kept up. , so there is not enough sand, it’s that simple. ” The industrialization mentioned here is machine-made sand. By crushing rocks with machines and controlling the particle size of the powder, "manufactured sand" that meets the standards for construction sand is produced. It has been used in China for eight or nine years.
In Guizhou, an inland mountainous province where "the land is not even three feet flat", machine-made sand is the main way to solve the local sand demand, and Guizhou has become the most developed region in the country for this industry. Amid the rising prices, Guizhou, which does not rely on river sand, has become a sand price depression. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People's Republic of China went to the area for investigation in September and hopes that various departments of the local government will cooperate to transport local machine-made sand and gravel out of the province.
As a country with the largest demand and strict environmental protection requirements, China's machine-made sand and gravel technology is relatively advanced, and the depth of research and process progress of machine-made sand leads the world. According to information provided by the China Sand and Gravel Association, machine-made sand now accounts for more than 80% of China's sand consumption. Song Shaomin said, "Relatively speaking, machine-made sand is the safest and largest substitute that can meet our infrastructure construction needs in the next ten years."
If machine-made sand is done well, it can be comparable to or even exceed river sand. It, because human manufacturing means that quality control can be carried out as per the requirements. Song Shaomin said that at present, however, the large amount of manufactured sand is still unable to compare with natural river sand."There is a big difference (in the impact on construction) between whether machine-made sand is done well or not. There are now a number of advanced companies that have done a good job, but the overall proportion is still very low. "
The technical difficulties of machine-made sand, The reason is not to simply break the stone into small particles, but to imitate the natural and mixed distribution of coarse and fine particles of river sand. The standardization of industrial machine production has now become both its spear and its shield - concrete requires a reasonable mix of sand of various particle sizes, and machine-made sand is either coarse or fine. Good and smooth particle size distribution challenges equipment and Craftsmanship.
As a protection for large-scale, high-quality machine-made sand enterprises, the China Sand and Gravel Association believes that if illegal mining and excavation cannot be suppressed strongly, there will be a large number of illegal sand mining activities that can make money by digging river beds, which will harm the machine-made sand industry. develop. However, manufactured sand is not affected by natural river resource endowments and will be more stable and controllable in terms of supply. Experts point out that this requires each region to arrange production according to its own demand in the future to avoid environmental pressure.
But what worries Hu Youyi is that government departments are now unwilling to control sand and gravel. "Everyone is pushing it. Can there be no environmental impact when mining sand and gravel? Everyone is afraid of taking responsibility. Stone is under the jurisdiction of the natural resources department. If you want to build a company, it is in the industry and information department. If you want to be able to produce and meet environmental protection standards, it is in the Ministry of Environmental Protection. It also involves the Ministry of Water Resources. , Forestry Department. No one cares about it, which means no one cares about it. "There is a lot of sand used in urban construction now, and there is no other way out, so the simplest and most direct way is to dig it out of the river. This is a very big problem. It’s a big problem. The country should come up with a solution and not place the sand extraction target in the river,” Zhou Jianjun said.
opens up new sources in many aspects. Such as dry sand. Han Ming said that there were many ancient rivers in Huoshan before. After the embankment was built, the rivers were separated and part of them became dry land. The two or three meters of cultivated layer above were peeled off, and in some places there was sand dozens of meters deep. " The amount of sand in our ancient rivers is very large, but it needs to be mined in a standardized and reasonable manner. In fact, you don't have to think about going to the river to . If the country also has policies, some of the river sand mining can be replaced." He said.
Zhou Jianjun said that from the perspective of river dredging, for example, dredging sand in the tributaries of the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, such as the Dadu River in Sichuan or the Jinsha River, if properly managed, will also be beneficial to reducing reservoir siltation.
Zhou Jianjun spent several years in Aachen, Germany. He went back again two years ago and found that more than ten years later, the city's appearance had hardly changed from before. In contrast, almost every town in China has undergone earth-shaking changes within a decade. He lamented the rapid development of urbanization in China, but it would be short-sighted to complete such large-scale construction at the expense of the environment.
After years of rapid construction and slowing population growth, will China still need to build so many houses in the future? Zhou Jianjun said that some cities now have high vacancy rates. Looking to the future, making better use of existing buildings and moderately slowing down the pace of development may be the best way to reconcile humans and nature.
But now, the Yangtze River has become an ecosystem with little phosphorus.A series of problems after sand mining in Poyang Lake are a mirror of the ecological impact of excessive sand mining. "The Yangtze River is currently facing a huge problem, and further digging will make it worse. But even if there is no dam, we do not advocate sand dredging in relatively gentle areas downstream of the river," Zhou Jianjun said. But the reality is that, according to an article published last year by Li Gang, a senior engineer at the River Sand Mining Administration Bureau of the Yangtze River Water Conservancy Commission, at present, the production capacity of hundreds of sand mining vessels cruising on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River is ten times the recoverable amount. But at the same time, urbanization along the Yangtze River continues to push up the demand for river sand, and the contradiction between supply and demand for sediment resources in this section has become increasingly prominent.
"Due to the lack of reliable estimates of the natural replenishment rate of sand, we don't know how mining matches the amount of sand incoming, which is why sand mining often has serious consequences in places with shortages." Jim, professor of sedimentary geology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Leonard said in an interview with China News Weekly.
(On April 13, 2017, law enforcement officers from the local maritime affairs office of Hongze District, Huaian, Jiangsu Province cracked down on illegal sand mining in the parking area of illegal sand mining ships in the Hanqiao waters of Hongze Lake. Picture/Visual China)
governance caused sand Huang
"I said that the 'Yangtze River is sick', and the illness is not serious." This is the second time that Xi Jinping has taken the pulse of the Yangtze River.
In January 2016, when Xi Jinping chaired the first symposium on the development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt in Chongqing, he pointed out that “repairing the ecological environment of the Yangtze River must be given an overwhelming priority, and we must work together to protect the Yangtze River and not engage in large-scale development.” Subsequently, six special ecological and environmental actions focusing on the Yangtze River Economic Belt were launched one by one, and the special rectification of illegal sand mining was one of them.
This year, the Central Environmental Protection Inspection Team, led by the former Ministry of Environmental Protection and participated by relevant leaders of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the Organization Department of the Central Committee of the CPC, was formally established. Illegal sand mining is one of the key areas of environmental inspection; on June 19, 2018, the Ministry of Water Resources released Notice, a six-month river sand mining remediation operation has been launched. Changes are starting to come.
In June 2017, the operating rights of six sand plants in Matou Town, Jin'an District, Lu'an City expired. When the district river management bureau was preparing for a new round of bidding, auction and listing, the superiors said: "You can no longer use the traditional bidding method. It’s an old road, and it must be consistent with the country’s guiding ideology of ecological environment protection.”
In response, the Jin’an District River Management Bureau of Lu’an City, on the advice of experts from the Anhui Provincial Department of Water Resources, went to Jiangxi to inspect sand mining here. The practice of management has explored the "Jiujiang model" that is being imitated across the country: abandoning the bidding, auction and listing system that has been in place for many years, replacing it with government leadership, and establishing a state-owned enterprise to lease private sand mining ships for mining. Throughout the Yangtze River Basin, the bidding, auction, and listing model that had lasted for many years was gradually stopped. For example, in 2017, many cities and counties with the right to mine Dongting Lake sand and gravel stopped sand mining and gradually adopted nationalized management.
In October of the same year, Jin'an District of Lu'an City began to launch a new set of nationalized sand mining management. There are 13 sand mining sites under its jurisdiction, each with a monthly quota of 60,000 tons of river sand production and sales. Sand miners can receive 15 yuan in labor fees for every ton of sand produced and sold, and the rest of the income belongs to the district government.
In order to strictly control the mining volume, Jin'an District has implemented "technological desertification control" measures. At the Huangwei sand mining site, a truck weighs the tare weight when it enters the sand plant. After it is loaded with sand, it weighs the truck again and weighs the gross weight. The net weight is determined by subtracting the two data. These data are recorded on the computer at the export management station. The staff issued a sand and gravel ticket and a loading order based on the net weight. The driver paid by swiping his card and received an electronic receipt. He took the three tickets with him for transportation, and the transportation department verified the weight again at the highway checkpoint before entering the market. . On the computer at the management station, once all the sand shipped out exceeds 60,000 tons that month, the release system will automatically shut down.
The situation in Jin'an District, Lu'an City is generally a microcosm of the history of sand mining management in China. Zhang Yuanfeng said that if the original bidding, auction and listing system were followed, it is estimated that there will be no sand to be mined in the Pihe River by 2022, but now that quantitative mining is strictly in accordance with the plan, it can be mined for another 5 to 8 years.
After leaving Lu'an City, we went up the Pihe River to Shengren Village, Xiafuqiao Town, Huoshan County, which is located in the hinterland of the Dabie Mountains. The eastern branch of the upper reaches of the Pihe River mainly flows through here, and there is a sand factory beside the river.It is completely different from the imagined busy scene of sand mining operations and trucks queuing up to load sand. There are no trucks in a place with the name "Sand Factory No. 1". There are piles of yellow sand and gravel piled up there. There are no sand mining boats on the river. Several workers who were in charge of the sand factory were playing cards and chatting in the small tent at the entrance.
A sand mining manager in Huoshan County explained that the three connected sand factories in this area are the three sand mining sites sold by Huoshan County after the bidding and auction in 2017. Since the environmental protection approval was not passed last year, the sand mining site will be closed once a year. The replacement sand mining permit was not issued. Earlier this year, the Lu'an Municipal Water Conservancy Bureau's river chief's office sent a direct letter requesting a halt to mining.
In 2017, environmental protection inspections began to affect Huoshan. In March of that year, almost more than 90 stone quarries in Huoshan County were shut down. The Foziling Reservoir located in Huoshan is the drinking water source for Hefei and Lu'an. In mid-2018, a special inspection team of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment inspected the drinking water sources of Lu'an City and believed that sand mining activities had affected the quality of drinking water. Two months later, all sand fields in Dongpi River were closed, including The last three sand mining plants in Huoshan County. From random digging to no sand to be mined, the price of sand in Huoshan has been rising all the way.
For a long time, sand was so cheap that it could hardly be called a commodity. Although the quality of the sand in the Huoshan section is the best among the sand in the Pihe River, Han Ming, leader of the water supervision team of the Huoshan County Water Affairs Bureau, remembers that when the sand mining license was started in 2004, Huoshan sand only cost 10 yuan per ton; A few years passed, and it only more than tripled in 2017. However, starting in 2018, the price nearly quadrupled in one year, reaching 110 or 120 yuan/ton. In the first half of this year, the price rose again to 150 yuan/ton. Ton.
In October 2018, Henan Province held a province-wide river sand mining management work conference in Xinyang City to promote the nationalization of sand mining. Currently, there are 20 sand mining companies in the province, all of which are solely state-owned or state-controlled; in December of the same year, Hubei Province issued The "Notice on Strengthening the Management of the Ban on Sand Mining in Rivers" has rectified more than 1,700 sand-related ships of various types, and some of the "three noes" sand mining ships were blasted and dismantled on site. Against the backdrop of nationwide efforts to control sand mining, provinces such as Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Shaanxi, and Hainan have begun to experience sand shortages one after another, creating a dilemma for large sand-consuming countries.
In Hainan Province, which is located in a corner, in February this year, the provincial state-owned enterprise Hainan Development Holdings Co., Ltd. imported river sand from the Philippines for the first time. Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangsu, Heilongjiang and other provinces are also interested in importing. In Jiangxi, a major sand-producing province, the government is trying to ensure sand supply by accelerating sand mining permits and comprehensively utilizing sand and gravel obtained from dredging...
While there is no sand available, inferior sand and even illegal sand flow into the market. The aforementioned Qingdao sand and gravel dealer found that in Qingdao, where river sand is in short supply and machine-made sand is immature, construction tailings sand, sand with a high mud content from river dredging, and even processed sea sand are beginning to enter some Construction sites with low quality requirements make it difficult to guarantee project quality.
Sea sand is a well-known taboo in reinforced concrete construction. Sea sand contains salt. When the chloride ion content in the concrete exceeds the critical value, the steel bars will be corroded and then expand in volume, causing the surrounding concrete to be stretched and cracked. In 2013, the "Haisha Dangerous Building" incident in Shenzhen, which caused shock, is an example. But now the crisis is on the rise again. For example, in August 2018, a notice issued by the Sand and Gravel Branch of the Shanghai Stone Industry Association showed that the regulation of the Yangtze River and inland rivers has caused a decrease in river sand, and sea sand has flowed into the Shanghai construction market.
"When the right path is not smooth, the crooked path comes." Hu Youyi said, "Messy and unqualified sand enters the construction site. What should we do if the house collapses? This involves the quality of a century-old plan. Because this time the sand and gravel Huang, many people may go to jail in the future. ”
(Sand mining ship stranded in Poyang Lake during dry season. Photo/Visual China)
“A game of speed”
Starting from the second half of 2018, Lu’an City The supply of sand has begun to decrease significantly. At that time, Ma Jianxiong's commercial concrete industry had not yet established river sand supply channels and still purchased river sand from Lu'an. In the morning the sand was brought in and they saw there was grass in it. "There was grass growing on the river beach, and there was sand underneath the grass. We thought something was wrong when we saw the grass. When we asked, we were told that it was secretly dug on the river beach at night.”
If there is a way to make a living without working hard and not costing too much, then stealing sand must be a good option. By using forklifts, excavators and transport trucks on the shallow Pihe River, you can gain a lot . In places with deep water such as the Yangtze River and Huaihe River, the sand thieves designed sand mining boats that can be controlled by remote control. They can sink underwater during the day and come up again at night to illegally mine sand. The motorboat is powerful and fast. The insider asked me which part of the boat was not to be checked tonight. When I pressed the (remote control), the boat rushed over. " Ma Jianxiong said.
Ma Jianxiong remembered that in the middle of this year, Jiangsu sand mining was also banned. As a company that uses a large amount of sand and gravel, the boss has asked the person in charge of procurement to go abroad to see if it can be purchased from Malaysia and North Korea. These places import, but later found that it is not necessary, " (Hubei) Jiangsha can also get it, some people are not afraid of death. ”
Zhai Changyou is the deputy director of the Huoshan County Water Affairs Bureau, in charge of water administration supervision and river management. In order to strengthen the unified management of sand and gravel mining, in December last year, the county government established the Huoshan County Sand and Gravel Management Law Enforcement Brigade, which he is now responsible for. (hereinafter referred to as the "Law Enforcement Brigade"), affiliated to the Water Affairs Bureau.
As a regulator, he joked that his job is in a high-risk industry, so that he needs to look around and be careful when walking - "Our law enforcement department is to some extent. Cutting off people and money. "Being threatened, reported, and investigated by the disciplinary inspection department are things that Han Ming, who has been engaged in water law enforcement for many years, often encounters. In 2004, the Huoshan County Water Conservancy Bureau had just begun to regulate sand mining in rivers. In an area where excessive digging and mining were indiscriminate, they went to To enforce the law, the vehicle was pushed over and he was beaten.
Unlike Jin'an District, which has only one main river that can be set up with checkpoints, there are many mountainous rivers and dry sandy areas everywhere, making it difficult to steal sand and gravel. Like a cat versus a mouse, this is a protracted war between regulators and sand thieves. The aforementioned villagers along the Huoshan River said that no one had ever taken care of the river before, but only after the price of sand increased in the past two years did patrols begin. Personnel. " There are patrols along the river day and night. But river sand is valuable, and as long as people (sand thieves) can make money, they will even dig the road for you. ”
When the law enforcement inspections first started at the end of 2017, Han Ming said, “People (sand thieves) have a thorough understanding of your entire trip, and law enforcement vehicles are often stopped. "At first, every time Han Ming went to the scene after receiving a report, the sand thief had already run away. Later, when he went to repair the car, he discovered that a locator was installed under the car. After that, they began to go to the repair shop for inspection regularly.
In this regard, The "opponents" used another trick: They placed a person near each vehicle to follow them on a motorcycle or in a car, and then used walkie-talkies or mobile phones to notify teammates.
Interviewees often compared the huge profits from stealing sand with drug trafficking. Compared with , if measured in tons, the profit of sand stealing is even higher than that of drug trafficking. A water law enforcement officer in Hubei Province wrote in 2016 that sand mining ships can mine 1,000 tons of river sand per hour, and the direct price on the water is 15 yuan. The profit is about 10 yuan per ton, which means that the net profit can be tens of thousands of yuan per hour. Now, the sand price is already several times that of 15 yuan.
According to "Anhui Province River Road, there was not much risk." According to the "Sand Mining Management Measures", those who illegally steal sand will have their illegal gains confiscated and be fined from 5,000 yuan to 20,000 yuan; in serious cases, they will only be fined less than 50,000 yuan when mining in flood season and prohibited mining areas, the value of which reaches 50,000 yuan. Ten thousand yuan can be punished with criminal detention, but Zhai Changyou said, “You can’t even hold him in jail for a few days. "At the end of 2016, the country's top two officials issued a judicial interpretation that illegal sand mining in rivers would be punished as illegal mining, which became a powerful weapon for law enforcers.
Before the law enforcement brigade was established, Han Ming was an administrative law enforcement officer in the water affairs department. , the sand thieves are not too afraid, “If we just go to negotiate with the sand thieves and there is no police to come forward, sometimes the situation will be difficult to control. "
In view of the serious situation of illegal mining, the Huoshan County Public Security Bureau established the first water police office in Anhui Province in February last year, with auxiliary police officers on hand every time it enforces the law. The special campaign against gangs and evil that started last year also has Conducive to Zhai Changyou's work.Because people who steal sand usually overlap with those involved in gangs, evil, and drugs. In fact, if the crackdown on gangs and evil cannot be normalized, he is worried that illegal sand mining may rebound again.
After the nationalization of river sand mining, the indiscriminate digging and mining by sand bosses has become a pressed gourd, while illegal digging and illegal mining may be a floating scoop. The difficulty of supervision has largely been transferred to the water law enforcement personnel. superior. However, as Fan Xiaowei and others from the Anhui Provincial Hydrology Bureau pointed out, the sand mining management agency has few personnel and insufficient equipment, making it difficult to achieve effective management of sand mining alone.
As a staff member of the water conservancy department, Han Ming said frankly that the protection of dams and water sources is the focus of river management. River sand, as a resource flowing into the market, has little to do with water conservancy itself. But in the past two years when sand prices have skyrocketed, if there is any direct impact on his water law enforcement unit, it is that the difficulty of managing sand thieves has increased sharply. "(Places for stealing sand) are many and wide. If you have few managers, you are playing a speed game with them."
(A large river sand distribution center in the Fuyang section of the Huaihe River in Anhui Province. Photo/Xinhua)
Looking for new sand Source
The story of Lu'an Sand has been repeated in many places across the country. In the second half of 2018, Henan Province implemented controls on river sand three times in a row. All sand mining and sand-making enterprises in the country were stopped and converted to nationalized operations. After the supply was reduced, the rise in sand prices was accompanied by inexhaustible illegal mining.
“When we discuss available sand, we must think about its sustainable use and how to minimize the impact on the environment; at the same time, we must also realize that sand is a key raw material for contemporary society and a livelihood for many people. ." said Jim Leonard, professor of sedimentary geology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Anhui Provincial Hydrology Bureau Fan Xiaowei and others published an article in "River and Lake Management" in 2018, arguing that river sand and gravel management has long been treated as a water activity, ignoring its side as an economic activity and failing to face up to its market demand. . He pointed out that if we want to cut off the profit chain of illegal sand mining in rivers, we must start from the supply side and free the rivers from river sand supply channels.
"Relying on digging sand from rivers is no longer possible. Because it is obvious that the high-quality river sand in various places is rapidly decreasing. If we continue to mine sand at the current rate, many rivers have been destroyed. Do we have to keep digging like this? These rivers that have flowed on the land of China for thousands of years were destroyed in the hands of our generation or two? Now that the country has restricted mining and excavation, it is necessary to protect the ecology of the rivers," said Song Shaomin, head of the Department of Building Materials at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture.
Regarding the current sand shortage problem, Hu Youyi concluded, "In the past, it was 'relying on the mountains to dig stones, and relying on the water to scoop up the sand'. Now the ecological environment construction managed by the state is not allowed to be dug in many places, but the new industrialization has not kept up. , so there is not enough sand, it’s that simple. ” The industrialization mentioned here is machine-made sand. By crushing rocks with machines and controlling the particle size of the powder, "manufactured sand" that meets the standards for construction sand is produced. It has been used in China for eight or nine years.
In Guizhou, an inland mountainous province where "the land is not even three feet flat", machine-made sand is the main way to solve the local sand demand, and Guizhou has become the most developed region in the country for this industry. Amid the rising prices, Guizhou, which does not rely on river sand, has become a sand price depression. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People's Republic of China went to the area for investigation in September and hopes that various departments of the local government will cooperate to transport local machine-made sand and gravel out of the province.
As a country with the largest demand and strict environmental protection requirements, China's machine-made sand and gravel technology is relatively advanced, and the depth of research and process progress of machine-made sand leads the world. According to information provided by the China Sand and Gravel Association, machine-made sand now accounts for more than 80% of China's sand consumption. Song Shaomin said, "Relatively speaking, machine-made sand is the safest and largest substitute that can meet our infrastructure construction needs in the next ten years."
If machine-made sand is done well, it can be comparable to or even exceed river sand. It, because human manufacturing means that quality control can be carried out as per the requirements. Song Shaomin said that at present, however, the large amount of manufactured sand is still unable to compare with natural river sand."There is a big difference (in the impact on construction) between whether machine-made sand is done well or not. There are now a number of advanced companies that have done a good job, but the overall proportion is still very low. "
The technical difficulties of machine-made sand, The reason is not to simply break the stone into small particles, but to imitate the natural and mixed distribution of coarse and fine particles of river sand. The standardization of industrial machine production has now become both its spear and its shield - concrete requires a reasonable mix of sand of various particle sizes, and machine-made sand is either coarse or fine. Good and smooth particle size distribution challenges equipment and Craftsmanship.
As a protection for large-scale, high-quality machine-made sand enterprises, the China Sand and Gravel Association believes that if illegal mining and excavation cannot be suppressed strongly, there will be a large number of illegal sand mining activities that can make money by digging river beds, which will harm the machine-made sand industry. develop. However, manufactured sand is not affected by natural river resource endowments and will be more stable and controllable in terms of supply. Experts point out that this requires each region to arrange production according to its own demand in the future to avoid environmental pressure.
But what worries Hu Youyi is that government departments are now unwilling to control sand and gravel. "Everyone is pushing it. Can there be no environmental impact when mining sand and gravel? Everyone is afraid of taking responsibility. Stone is under the jurisdiction of the natural resources department. If you want to build a company, it is in the industry and information department. If you want to be able to produce and meet environmental protection standards, it is in the Ministry of Environmental Protection. It also involves the Ministry of Water Resources. , Forestry Department. No one cares about it, which means no one cares about it. "There is a lot of sand used in urban construction now, and there is no other way out, so the simplest and most direct way is to dig it out of the river. This is a very big problem. It’s a big problem. The country should come up with a solution and not place the sand extraction target in the river,” Zhou Jianjun said.
opens up new sources in many aspects. Such as dry sand. Han Ming said that there were many ancient rivers in Huoshan before. After the embankment was built, the rivers were separated and part of them became dry land. The two or three meters of cultivated layer above were peeled off, and in some places there was sand dozens of meters deep. " The amount of sand in our ancient rivers is very large, but it needs to be mined in a standardized and reasonable manner. In fact, you don't have to think about going to the river to . If the country also has policies, some of the river sand mining can be replaced." He said.
Zhou Jianjun said that from the perspective of river dredging, for example, dredging sand in the tributaries of the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, such as the Dadu River in Sichuan or the Jinsha River, if properly managed, will also be beneficial to reducing reservoir siltation.
Zhou Jianjun spent several years in Aachen, Germany. He went back again two years ago and found that more than ten years later, the city's appearance had hardly changed from before. In contrast, almost every town in China has undergone earth-shaking changes within a decade. He lamented the rapid development of urbanization in China, but it would be short-sighted to complete such large-scale construction at the expense of the environment.
After years of rapid construction and slowing population growth, will China still need to build so many houses in the future? Zhou Jianjun said that some cities now have high vacancy rates. Looking to the future, making better use of existing buildings and moderately slowing down the pace of development may be the best way to reconcile humans and nature.
