[flowerthoughts]

No critical thinking at all in this article. So you take out the water and 50% of the lithium. You still haven't addressed what happens to the remaining NaCl, which was the main headline.

The headline should be "thing can extract lithium from sea water at 50% efficiency. It also produces potable water."

[adrian_b]

The potable water is the main product and lithium and other minerals are possible byproducts.

Assuming 55% extraction efficiency, the amount of lithium that can be produced is around 0.1 grams per ton of potable water.

Even by price, the lithium would bring less revenue than the potable water.

The amount of solid salt that this produces is many times less than the amount of liquid brine produced by other methods. Thus even storing it as waste is much simpler. Moreover, the salt may be useful for various purposes, even as table salt, assuming that the water had been properly filtered and treated before evaporation.

[v1ne]

Well, salt may be less volume than brine. But the demand for table salt is pretty limited. Thus: Why pay for its disposal when you can discharge brine for free?

[tim333]

I think the idea is the salt is solid rather than in brine form. It can be sold as sea salt or whatever.