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Desalination pours more toxic brine into the ocean than previously thought
Technology meant to help solve the world's growing water shortage is producing a salty environmental dilemma.
Desalination facilities, which extract drinkable water from the ocean, discharge around 142 billion liters of extremely salty water called brine back into the environment every day, a study finds. That waste product of the desalination process can kill marine life and detrimentally alter the planet's oceans, researchers report January 14 in Science of the Total Environment.
"On the one hand, we are trying to provide populations — particularly in dry areas — with the needed amount of good quality water. But at the same time, we are also adding an environmental concern to the process," says study coauthor Manzoor Qadir, an environmental scientist at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Hamilton, Canada.
I would take some salt, but it probably contains microplastics.
The state of desalination and brine production: A global outlook (DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.12.076) (DX)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20 2019, @05:04AM
I agree. Barring the occasional asteroid impact, we live in a closed system which has limits that we're bound to bump up against. However, there may be ways to mitigate the harmful effects of desalination.
Instead of discharging brine into the ocean, maybe we could get it to the right salinity level by mixing it with a stream of treated waste water. Since there'd never be enough waste water reclaimed to desalinate all (or even most) of the brine to ocean levels, we could create an artificial lake somewhere nearby and store the excess. Many of the places where desalination is needed are quite arid, so there ought to be lots of uninhabitable land available to make something like that.
An arid climate would also help control the water level through evaporation, such that the salty waste would be kept under water, and the expansion of the lake would be gradual enough to be viable for a while. That would give us time to invent uses for the brine lake sediment, which perhaps could be chemically altered into a less dangerous state. Wouldn't want it to go the way of the Aral Sea if it ever dried out, leaving behind toxic dust. Or the Salton Sea. But done right, it might be possible. Still, all the extra handling of brine would exacerbate the energy cost of desalination, and compound the issue of global warming driving the need for desalination. Unless those arid places were all about solar power, which they're currently not.