Slashdot Mirror
Salt From Plants
Makarand writes "Researchers in India have been able to
extract salt from a plant source for the first time.
The plant salt comes from a salt-loving leafless shrub, salicornia brachaita,
that grows under high-salt conditions accumulating salt in its tissues.
This plant's cultivation was being studied as a possible solution to
reclaiming salty soil along coastal areas. While regular sea salt is predominantly NaCl, this plant salt has
salts of potassium, calcium, magnesium and also nutrients like iron and hence could be marketed as a health salt."
It's not so much new ways to get salt. (Not withstanding the fact that this isn't "table salt" to begin with...) It's a way to remove salt from the soil that would otherwise prevent more useful crops from growing there. Ever hear the expression "Salting the earth"? That's one thing waring tribes did to eachother's land... because you can't grow crops in salty dirt! (If you don't believe me, try watering your houseplants with seawater)
This reminds me a lot of the mineral absorbing plants talked about here a long while ago.
As for what you might actually use the potassium, calcium and magnesium salts for isn't really an issue. I have no idea where or if these chemicals are used for anything, and you're right: there's probably easier ways to get them if they are.
=Smidge=
The thing I don't get is how this is claimed to be the first time this is done. Years ago, on a biology class field trip in southern Indiana (USA), a teacher pointed out a plant that took up salt from the soil, and said that the pioneers used to use it as a seasoning, and would sometimes toast (open burning would leave NaO instead of NaCl) it to ashes and leach the salt out of the ash for winter use.
That said, it's still pretty cool that there's a plant that grows in heavily saline soil and can be used to desalinate it. Maybe they can get a cold-climate variety developed and reclaim the marshes around Hudson Bay?
Then the story was written by people who didn't bother to think first. You're right; any plan to sell the salt for a profit will fail. Even if the ideas of using this as a salt production method are used and fail, somebody will probably use this as a way of reclaiming soil and selling the salt to defray the costs. Therefore, it's nice to think about. And who knows, there may be something to the "health salt" ploy. With enough advertising, perhaps people would be dumb enough to fall for it....
There's lots of cool stuff going on right now with bioremediation. My roomate's looking for a postdoc position and one of the labs he was looking at was using bacteria to gather up heavy metals. It was pretty slick: the bacteria were engineered to express proteins designed to bind metal ions on their cell surfaces. They'd eventually have so much metal bound that they would begin to fall to the bottom of your sludge pond or whatever your body of contaminated water was in and they could be harvested. For at least one metal (Mercury? Cadmium? Gonna hafta ask him.) it was looking like the settled-out engineered bacterium-laden sludge from a contaminated site was more enriched in the metal than mined ore!
THis would be really welcome in Oz, where something ridiculous like 45% of arable land is affected by rising salt. And it would give the farmers an alternative source of income while there land is regenerating. Win - Win
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George