SaltyCo – water availability for humans and farming, using desalination

London saltwater over freshwater the issue of waste brine

Only 3 percent of the world’s water is freshwater and only 1 percent of that is drinkable. This finite resource is shared by 7.5 billion people around the world, and one in ten of those struggles to access this human right. This increasing water scarcity has encouraged companies to push towards desalination processes. Since the development of desalination facilities in the 1960s, there are more than 15,000 plants globally. Each day 100 million gallons of seawater are pushed through semi-permeable membranes to create 50 million gallons of water and it is expected that this quantity will be on the increase.

There are two types of commonly-used desalination processes. The less frequently used of the two is thermal, a process which involves the heating and cooling of seawater, allowing freshwater to form and be collected, through condensation. The more widely used method industrially in desalination plants, is reverse osmosis which involves pumping seawater through a semipermeable membrane which blocks the larger salt particles and allows the water molecules through. Whilst desalination plants are becoming more efficient, they are