If you have to mine sand (and it’s hard to imagine the modern world without doing so), these active sedimentary systems are the wrong place to mine. Instead you should be looking for what are known as “fossil deposits”: sands that were once part of an active river or coastal system but now, hundreds of millions of years later, lie inert. And that’s precisely where most sand comes from in developed nations, where sand removal and land reclamation are heavily regulated. But elsewhere there is strong evidence that sand is being mined from active systems.
