this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
228 points (95.6% liked)
Technology
59719 readers
2362 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This. I'm curious too, IIRC the byproduct of reverse osmosis is just salt.
The byproduct is a sort of like salt water, but a lot more concentrated. It’s mostly NaCl, but there’s also various other anions and cations such as Al, Ca, Mg, K, SO4 etc. Those metals came from the ocean, so you might be inclined to think that you can dump them back into the ocean. The problem comes when you dump a lot of that stuff and you get very high concentrations locally. When the concentration of those compounds is within the normal range, sea life can handle it. Once it’s above the limit, you can expect things to struggle or die. Eventually, it will get diluted in the ocean, but before that the concentrations will be high enough to cause damage to most living things.