Jakob Villioth

Sand Stories is an extraordinary book! While Vince Beiser’s – The World in a Grain – offers a rather historical account of the all-encompassing importance of sand in our modern society, SandStories puts its focus on the manifold environmental impacts of sand mining and potential solutions to the global sand crisis. Carefully researched, each chapter provides impressive statistics on amounts of sand consumption and sands wide field of applications, while staying vivid and easy to follow throughout. Most importantly, it reveals that there is a huge potential for change: using diverse examples and narratives SandStories shows that many people, organizations and companies are already working towards solutions to this under-reported environmental crisis. Like presenting many pieces of a complex puzzle, ranging from plant based concrete to obtaining silicon from rice husks, SandStories illustrates how an entirely different sand economy could look like. I highly recommend this book to anyone working towards a more sustainable world and everybody who wants to know more about one of the major sustainability challenges of the 21st century.