Industrial Sand

Economic importance

Industrial silica is of strategic national importance, being an essential raw material for a wide variety of industries.

Industrial Sand of the quality which is required for high specification products only occurs in a very limited number of viable deposits. Essentially, Industrial Sand extractive operations can only be undertaken in areas where the natural geology allows.

Industrial Sand is an important strategic resource which supports an extensive range of industrial uses. A high degree of purity is critical to many of the high tech and industrial uses such as silicon chips and glass manufacture. However, all grades of Industrial Sand that are produced are matched to the many uses demanded by society and cannot effectively be replaced by other available materials.

The UK remains self sufficient in its supply of Industrial Sand and its importance as a constituent to many other products and its value to the national economy cannot be emphasised enough.

Changes in UK industry can be illustrated by the decline in heavy industrial activities, such as foundries, now replaced by the information technology and the specialist, high specification, casting work in which the UK is a world leader. Since the seventies the number of heavy foundries has fallen from some 4000 to less than 500 yet the overall demand for Industrial Sand has not. The Industrial Sand industry has responded to these changes and continues to meet the requirements of the downstream products.

SAMSA Commissioned the British Geological Survey to update the Mineral Planning Factsheet. This was published in 2020. The key data on the use of Industrial Sand indicates:

The full factsheet is available to download here.