Saltwater corrodes firefighting equipment and may harm ecosystems, especially those like the chaparral shrublands around Los Angeles that aren’t normally exposed to seawater. Gardeners know that small amounts of salt – added, say, as fertilizer – does not harm plants, but excessive salts can stress and kill plants.

  • frezik@midwest.social
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    9 days ago

    It is. But there’s way more salt produced that way than the market wants to buy.

    There is work to combine lithium extraction with desalination plants. We would also have more lithium than we would ever need for batteries.

      • ryathal
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        9 days ago

        In small amounts. It’s not economical at all to extract on it’s own, maybe as part of desalinization, but even then it’s probably marginal.

    • DerArzt@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      But there’s way more salt produced that way than the market wants to buy

      Artificial scarcity from Capitalism yet again!

      • booly
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        8 days ago

        We want to desalinate water so that we have fresh water.

        Doing so generates salt as waste and requires safe/responsible disposal.

        We can sell some of the salt, as a product.

        But the market won’t buy all of the salt.

        So the salt just goes back to the “waste” category, and we need to find disposal methods.

        I don’t see where scarcity (whether artificial or natural) comes into play. The world has lots and lots of salt, and anyone who wants it can get it very cheap.

        • vaultdweller013
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          8 days ago

          Constitute it into bricks and dump them into old salt mines. Itll at least slow down mine erosian.