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Battery-free solar desalination system produces up to 5,000 liters of water per day
(alpha.leofinance.io)
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
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Hang on a sec. I'm trying to understand something here. Lets say there is a huge amount of salt from all the processing, is the salt so bad that it cannot be consumed, or there is just too much salt that it exceeds consumption?
It's just a lot of salt. Seawater (on average) is 3.5% salt. So for 1kg of water (aka 1 liter) you get 35 grams of salt. For 5 thousand liters, thats 175kg of salt. While we do use salt for industrial purposes, that salt is usually treated and chemically processed for sanitary reasons. Given the average person uses 310 liters of water a day (drinking, cooking, cleaning, ect...) 5,000 liters gets you slightly more water than 16 people are going to consume in a day. And 175kg of salt is way more than 16 people are going to use in a day. Now figure this system runs all year round, and we have 63,000kg of salt. Just so 16 people could drink desalinated sea water all year.
There are a number of theories put forth in recent years how best to desalinate sea water for drinking water and disposing of that salt, most of them involve dumping it in the desert, burying it in old mines, or possibly deep sea operations where salt concentrations are already too high for most life to exist, so adding salt to those regions won't have a ecological impact and it's possible for currents to spread that excess salt over a wider area.
Every one of these options has downsides, but we do need water to live and oceans are a vast source of water we aren't really tapping so you can see the desire to utilize them when majority of the global population lives within a hundred km or so of a coast line.
Thanks for taking your time to explain! Guess its now how risk adverse are we, and judging by that, not really are we?
You have to put it somewhere. And salt tends to be bad for its surroundings. Even if you put it back into the water, You'd have to spread it very far for it to get diluted enough to not be a problem
And I would have to guess that the resulting salt is not remotely clean enough for human consumption. So you'd have to process it before you could sell it (if there would even be a big enough market)
Urgh. So that means its just not economically viable, even if it is possible huh. (And not to mention not so environmentally friendly)
well, it just needs to compete with other methods in the area. which are all expensive and energy intensive.
Every little improvement helps, tbh