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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."
a salt-loving leafless shrub
you mean a potato?
Great Atrocit
Out of curiosity, what is a "health salt"? I've never heard of such before...
(oh, and for some reason, this keeps coming to mind: http://www.angryflower.com/nacl.gif.)
--
viqsi - See "vixen"
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
"Our interest in salicorni cultivation was mainly to reclaim salty soil."
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
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....
--it's the totality of the process, and the potential. First, this is India, any job is a good job there,and right now that's a lot of wasted space that could be farmed. After the salt sucker plants are used for enough seasons, it's back to normal farming with the reclaimed land. The plants produce a salt with micronutrients that could be packaged as a "seasoning salt" in the spices section of the grocery store, or perhaps put into capsules with some other stuff as a dietary supplement, again, useful. The plant also produces some sort of oil in decent extractable quantities, but the article didn't say if it was edible, or useful for something else, my guess is it's useful for *something* practical, as most vegetable oils are. Fuel if nothing else, maybe biodiesel for their tractors? So it's a win/win/win/win deal for them. The patent idea I have no clue on, unless they invented a unique process for extraction. Lot of prior art on using plants for whatever.
The article said they were primerily looking for a crop that would extract salts from the soil to make it habitable for planting food and other money producing crops. It said they filed for a patent on the process for extracing the salt form the plants. Nowhere did it say they plant to make "salt farms" and try to make money selling the salt they could extract with their newly developed process.
It said they expect the total cost of the "vegitable salt" to be around 10-12 Rupees per Kilogram... which works out to about 10 cents (american) per pound, give or take a penny.
I don't know what the price of refined salt is in India, but I'm guessing that won't be very competative. The only way they're going to sell it at that price is by marketing it as a dietary supplement.
They DO mention, however, that the plants provide an edible oil from thier seeds, so I'm sure the intention here is more like: "Hey look, one more thing we can sell to make desalinating land more worthwhile!" (As if gaining usable farmland from wasted fields wasn't good enough, but I dunno what their situation is)
=Smidge=
There's an Australian plant called Salt Bush that does this - the leaves actually have salt crystals on them.
They can be used to reclaim over-irrigated soil...
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!
The word potassium is derived from the word potash, literally meaning "pot ashes". The word alkali comes from the Arabic qalay, "to fry or roast in a pan", and al-qalay , "the substance that had been roasted." The English word soda is derived from suwwad, the Arabic name of a plant of which the ashes are rich in sodium carbonate (paraphrasing from the bottom of this reference). This most recent effort is most certainly not the first time salt has been extracted from plants, and in fact is such an ancient practice that it has given rise to the names of some of the alkali metals.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
I could remove the salt from my own urine and market it as a "health salt" - the health food industry is one of the biggest scams out there.
All I have to do is make a few vague claims, and dream up some useful obfuscation ("... extracted from the very life process that it is intended to promote, our exclusive uri-salt promotes healthy kidneys....") and I'm rolling in money.
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