#brine-management

Conventional desalination discharges 58–78% of inlet water as hypersaline brine that raises local salinity and depresses dissolved oxygen, damaging the inshore marine ecosystems coastal fishing communities depend on for food and income.

A black-lined basin of saltwater under a sloped glass cover: sun evaporates the water, it condenses on the glass and runs off as distillate. No moving parts, no consumables, repairable with local materials — but output is ~4–6 L/m²/day, so area demand is the binding constraint.

A shipping-container RO plant powered by solar PV and battery storage, producing ~75,000 L/day for ~25,000–35,000 people, operated by trained local staff and partly funded through water sales. Capital cost ~US$0.5–0.57M; ~20-year service life.

First large-scale solar desalination plant, built in the Atacama Desert to supply freshwater to a saltpeter/silver mining community and its draft animals using highly saline mine effluent (~140,000 ppm) as feed. The ins…

A containerized solar-PV reverse-osmosis plant installed in 2018 in Kiunga, a remote coastal fishing community south of the Somali border, where residents previously relied on brackish, contaminated water. Solar panels…