If 1 teaspoon of salt pollutes 5 gallons of water to toxic levels, does this mean that even iodized salt used for cooking results in environmental damage?

Question

I try to be as environmentally friendly as possible in daily life. Today I learned about the effects of salt on freshwater and how wastewater treatment plants are not capable of removing salt and chloride from water which results in it being dumped into rivers, lakes, etc and affecting aquatic life. Is this specific types of salt or is this any type of salt including iodized salt used for cooking?

In: 0

Answer 1

In theory, yes. In practice, not really.

All water (as near as makes no difference) eventually ends up in the ocean, where the salt remains because it can’t evaporate. That’s why the oceans are salty. And the salt that we use either 1) came from the ocean or 2) came from a salt mine which is…just old ocean salt from an ocean that dried up and got buried.

So it’s basically a closed loop. We don’t create appreciable amounts of new salt or destroy it, it just keeps going round and round on a geological timescale.

Locally, it’s entirely possible to over salinate things and kill off whole areas. That’s what put the “dead” in the Dead Sea. That will eventually even back out, albeit on timescales far longer than humans typically care about.

The amount of salt you introduce through cooking “runoff” is a rounding error on a distant decimal point compared to industrial or environmental salt concentrations.