Built on Sand: Singapore and the New State of Risk

This article mentions illegal sand trade but doesn't go into much detail about sand theft.

In 2008 someone stole 500 truck loads of sand from a Jamaican beach. There's some details on that one and another in Hungary [1].

One question I wish this article addressed is what Singapore does with the land excavated from all its building developments.

In Toronto for example, our waterfront has been expanded for over 50 years with land excavated from digging down for building foundations. I believe it extends a kilometre more than the natural shoreline [2]. They even created a 5km long "spit" [3] to act as a breakwater.

And I'm sure this is common in a lot of bigger waterfront cities as well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_theft [2] http://www.blogto.com/city/2011/07/that_time_toronto_filled_... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Street_Spit

This is one of the craziest articles I have ever read.

It is like the premise of a sci-fi novel where future states slowly creep along by dredging and filling in land. But it's actually really happening at a scale beyond novelties like Dubai and non-contentious (at least internationally) expansions like Battery Park City.

The fact that sand-smuggling is a thing...

.6 miles is 1 kilometer. Why would you convert to imperial for one measure, but leave the second as metric?