Sand. We take it for granted. From deserts to beaches to children’s playgrounds, it seems ubiquitous. Yet the abundant resource is feeding a global land grab that’s even bred a sand-smuggling underworld.

I was shocked that people would fight for sand.

While researching beach erosion in Negril, Jamaica about six years ago, scientist Pascal Peduzzi’s conversation with residents in a fishing village left him astounded. Despite the high-tech geospatial modelling and remote sensing tools he was using to survey the damage, he’d never have surmised one reason for erosion on the country’s western coastline. Locals told him about the local mafias — armed men who came to the beach in the middle of night, hauled away bags of sand and sold them for the construction of beachfront developments.

“I was shocked that people would fight for sand,” said Peduzzi, director of science at the United Nations Environment Programme’s Division of Early Warning and Assessment. “I have been working for more than 20 years in the environment sector, but sand came to me as a surprise.”

As a building material, sand has withstood the test of time. In 3500BC, ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians were using sand, mostly formed when wind and water grind rocks into silica-rich grains, to make glass. Today, builders the world over use the natural resource, found in quarries, rivers, lakes and oceans, for many of their materials including paint and cement.

It’s used in everything from swimming-pool filters, metal castings and oil wells to smartphone screens and toothpaste.

With a global building boom and the arrival of hydraulic fracturing technology for oil and gas in the United States, the demand for sand has been skyrocketing. In 2014, 196 million tons of sand and its bigger counterpart gravel were mined around the world, according to the US Geological Survey. After water, it’s the most abundantly used natural resource, Peduzzi said. It’s used in everything from swimming-pool filters, metal castings and oil wells to smartphone screens and toothpaste.

The overall sand and gravel market was valued at $8.3bn in the US last year and £1.7bn ($2.5bn) in the UK in 2013, according to the USGS and the UK’s Mineral Products Association. Global demand for sand is expected to rise 5.5% a year through 2018, according to a December 2014 report from the Freedonia Group. Investors willing to weather the volatility, sift through the fragmented market and take on potential environmental risks could stand to profit from the growing appetite for this global commodity.

For years the sand market had been pretty “boring,” said Sonny Randhawa, a vice president in charge of research for the energy sector at D.A. Davidson, an Oregon based investment firm. But in the past few years the sand market has been more “feast or famine”, he said, particularly in the US.

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