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posted by martyb on Sunday January 20 2019, @02:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the "Sea-Salt"-is-already-a-thing dept.

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)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @09:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @09:48AM (#789493)

    Couldn't you get Sodium from some other source(Sodium sesquicarbonate?) and make NaCl? (or make Potassium chloride or whatever.)