SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 Monday January 21 2019, @02:07PM
This is the theory which has been said and restated for literally hundreds of years. See Malthusian Catastrophe [wikipedia.org], when the world population was something like 1/100th of what we have now. I'll fully agree there is some limit to the number of people the world can support, but why are any of the things you cited clear evidence of this?
If somebody were to grab an axe and kill everybody else in their house, is that evidence that having 5 people in a house is just too many? Or is it evidence that something went wrong situationally?
We may or may not have too many people in the world. However, one thing I was surprised to learn is that you can fit the entire world population in the US state of Texas, and still have enough space to give each family quarter acre lot of land. Obviously people couldn't live in such a situation, but the point still stands... there is a LOT of land and resources out there.
Take this political website link with a grain of salt, but there are some thought provoking ideas here: https://overpopulationisamyth.com/ [overpopulationisamyth.com]