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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: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday January 20 2019, @06:01PM (1 child)
Because if you're on some kind of medication it could come out in your urine, and then the urine will mix with water that fish swim in, and one day one of those fish might be caught in a net off taiwan, and it will be eaten by a small child for lunch*. WHY DO YOU HATE CHILDREN?!!
*the child will not be harmed in any way by the one-part-in-quintillion amount of the compound.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:31PM
You're spot-on. Damn environmental idiots complaining about running industrial sludge pipes next to public swimming areas. What are they bitching about? The ocean is big enough to dilute all that. So why the hell do they not want to swim there?
Hmmmm, there IS an idiot here, but I'm starting to think that it isn't the environmentalists in this example.