InSabbia — the app for anonymously reporting illegal sand mining locations
The following article covers the work of team Salty Solutions who participated in the “Tracking Illegal Sand Networks” challenge part of the third Mothership Mission titled The Big Blue. For more info on the program visit the website.
Modern development has an insatiable appetite for sand. An estimated 40–50 billion tons of sand is poured into cement buildings, roads, hydraulic fracking, solar panels, electronics, glass, and beach restoration projects each year (UNEP 2019). Sand is the most mined material in the world, only after water. With the human population accelerating toward 8 billion, sand demand is expected to increase, and subsequently, sand mining is too.
Sand miners search for angular sands found along rivers, beaches, and deltas. The industry is largely unregulated, and environmental and social impact monitoring is a second thought after profit. Land and aquatic life that sustains local livelihood are threatened, as sand dredgers indiscriminately haul off this precious resource. Sand mafias have recently gained international attention due to violence and corruption. With many government officials and law enforcement officers profiting off sand extraction, individuals are left without a trusted source to protect their land and resources.
Our international team, Salty Solutions, created the application InSabbia for individuals to anonymously report illegal sand mining locations. InSabbia is coded to protect the identity of whistleblowers. InSabbia reports will be manually verified by Salty Solutions using satellite imagery and GIS to confirm the sand miner’s geographic “fingerprint”. InSabbia aims to connect people affected by sand mining with trusted organizations to protect social and environmental rights.
Raising public awareness of the unsustainable foundation of the built world is another key to solving the sand mining problem. Salty Solutions has compiled biologic, geographic, and social issues to educate the public on the destructive impact of unscrupulous sand mining. The goal of InSabbia is to give a voice to vulnerable communities, as well as raise awareness on the hidden cost of sand.
Written By: Chia-Yun Chang, Helen Flynn, Mirko Mannino, Ruben Clerici, Virginia De Melo Ferreira De Sousa
Team Salty Solutions participated in the challenge co-organized with SandStories and UCLouvain.
The Mothership is an open innovation program helping teams to develop a proof of concept and business model for solutions related to the Sustainable Development Goals. The program is co-organized by AI Lab One, Space4Good, and WorldStartup.
