Originally published at: Beachcomber shares his recipe for making sea salt - Boing Boing
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I also like a lot of contaminants in my food, and I’ve been looking for a way to get it that also involves emitting a lot of carbon dioxide, soot, and volatile organic compounds.
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Too much effort to make what is one of the cheapest products I can buy in any store in America.
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Also, via Popkin!
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Also incredibly energy inefficient to boil off a whole pot of seawater. Commercial salt producers usually start with a salty brine then rely on solar evaporation to do most of the work.
Of course there’s always the more convoluted, old-school technique of luring a bunch of irresponsible boys to an island, giving them booze, cigars, and ample opportunities to make asses of themselves, then shipping them off to work in the salt mines:
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Yeah, if you’re just willing to be patient you can do this with next to no emissions, no soot or VOCs and just use a large, shallow pan and sunlight to evaporate the water. If you’re producing salt for personal use and cooking you never need that much at a time anyway, so being patient is easy.
Doesn’t solve the contaminant or microplastic issue, BUT is the sea salt you buy at the store or artisanal shop any better? If the seawater is sourced from somewhere relatively clean there will be fewer contaminants. A person could also use something with a finer pore size than a t-shirt to filter the water, and get more microplastics out of the final product.
If you need salt for cleaning/deodorizing and exfoliating, a commercial product is more efficient.
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Funny thing is, the sea salt you buy in the store is probably no more safe or pure than this.
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I’ve flown over a HUGE sea salt processing “farm” in Mexico, and the number of evaporating pools they have going is staggering. As I understand it, a lot of the sea salt you buy in the store comes from there.
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I believe much of southern California is covered in them. It’s also one of the main ways that lithium is extracted for the battery industry.
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