TOT Pollution

[alan_m]

With the environmentalists warning that all are seas and oceans are becoming more polluted should so many of the major food companies be putting SEA SALT on, and in, what we eat?

[The Natural Philosopher]

The sea is an awfully big place.

4 billion tonnes of radioactive natural uranium 'waste'. For a start.

And Nature is very good at producing organisms to break down any kind of shit it encounters.

Environmentalists simply don't understand very much about the 'environment' - there are not many career opportunities for an 'expert' who says 'nothing to see here: please move along'...

[Rod Speed]

alan_m [e-mail]> wrote

Just more mindless greenshit.

Corse there is no pollution in the non sea salt.

[Theo]

[Paul]

Think about it.

It doesn't have to be ADDED salt, it can just be contact with seawater that does it.

Even if you wash a sardine carcass off, it's still loaded.

Even fresh water now, has plastic in it. At the nano level. The sand filters used for fresh water, are no match for such small pollutants. Neither are the sand filters any good for estrogen or similar things. This is why we return pill bottles to the chemist for "disposal". It's to try to avoid pill residue from getting into the water supply (by one means or another).

Some day, everything we touch, will have to go through a reverse osmosis filter. Or, distillation. But even distillation is not "perfect" as a solution. Distillation is not microbiologically clean, and there are additional steps afterwards to purify it for human consumption (ozone, UV light, chlorine as long as there are no organics present).

Maybe some day, we will make our drinking water, from the exhaust of power devices running off H2 and O2.

Mixing chlorine gas with plastic water, makes carcinogens. As a chemist, one of the things you learn, is anything with a chlorine group on it, is a "potential carcinogen". When you then work in the lab with such substances, you take appropriate precautions. You don't want to die, like the people who figured this out the hard way.

We had a run-in with DDT. We successfully stopped the flow of DDT. It's not all gone yet. But plastics are a bitch, and hearing government officials waxing skeptical about the topic, means we may just be stuck with the issue forever. That's why I'm buying stock in reverse osmosis companies :-) (By the way, reverse osmosis devices use PLASTIC for the filter element. The filter is disposable.)

Do you see how clever we are ? Banana for scale.

Paul

[The Natural Philosopher]

Stupid emotional ArtStudent Boolean Bandar LogIc comment.

The plastic in the sea is in micro quantities and is biologically almost inert. That's why it's still *in* the sea. If it were bioactive something would have eaten it already.

Most plastic is just a hydrocarbon. 100% organic. There's a bit of chlorine in PVC, but the sea is loaded with sodium chloride.

It's as stupid as the people who are scared of long lived radioactivity. Like the 9 billion tonnes of uranium that is still in the earth and the sea after 4 billion years.

[Paul]

Sir. Keep reading the articles.

Paul

[Animal]

inevitable, given the existence of aricial substances on land.

definitely, sea salt is healthier than rock salt because it contains so many different minerals.

[Rod Speed]

BULLSHIT with salt and hydrochloric acid.

[Chris Hogg]

Rock salt is formed from and was at one time, sea salt. Sea salt becomes rock salt when a salty sea dries out.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yes, but the process of drying out is a kind of distillation. I *think* sea salt is richer in potassium chloride.

The sea has loads of other stuff in it, and rock salt tends to have lost most of the other elements.

Anyway, I absolutely prefer sea salt to table salt.

I *think* rock salt didn't *quite* taste the same, but you know how it is - you try something, it works for you, and you stop looking at alternatives...

[alan_m]

And probably harvested from the sea close to the sewerage outlets :)

[Tim Lamb]

Last time I bought water softener salt tablets, I was told it comes from Turkey!

>

[The Natural Philosopher]

And is now 4 times the price it was a decade ago.

[Chris Hogg]

It all adds to the flavour!

[Paul]

Indeed.

"Studies have found some microplastic contamination in sea salt from the US, Europe and China.[19] Sea salt has also been shown to be contaminated by fungi that can cause food spoilage as well as some that may be mycotoxigenic.[20]"

But the message there, is that it's mostly conventional salt, and if you're on a low-salt diet, would be no better or worse for you than conventional iodized table salt.

Chemists use precipitation and recrystallization, as parts of attempts to purify stuff. But in many of these scenarios, they start with analytical grade chemicals and use distilled water. Then, if you grow a crystal in that scenario, it is starting from relatively clean materials. The purity of your recrystallization, can be measured by the dislocations or defects in the crystal structure. Like, if you got a perfect cube of something, with not even a scratch on the razor sharp edges, it might be pure.

Chemistry is like cooking. Some people get it. Many don't.

The manufacturing of white crystalline sugar (sucrose), is an example of one of the cheapest, mass produced, pure organics. Chemists love to collect chemicals from biological specimens, so they don't have to make it from lab chemicals (more expensive). "Natural extraction" is a big part of lab chemistry, to impress on people to look to nature first, for "feed stock", before "making it from scratch". The sugar we get, is beautiful stuff.

This is why Tamiflu is made from "flowers" as a starting point, since this saves about half the reaction steps. the reason I like Tamiflu as an example of a chemical process, is two of the steps remaining to be done, are explosive. The "reactor" for that, is out in the yard of the plant :-) The reaction conditions are adjusted, so the odds of explosion are reduced.

"Oseltamivir was discovered by scientists at Gilead Sciences using shikimic acid as a starting point for synthesis; shikimic acid was originally available only as an extract of Chinese star anise; but by 2006, 30% of the supply was manufactured recombinantly in E. coli."

Kooky or what. I view this process, as "craftsmanship". I don't think they make a lot of money off that necessarily, but look at the lengths and the research they put into it. It's part of preparing to make something more important, later. It's more of a "demo chemical" project, than anything else.

Sea salt then, is not really the domain of a chemist. It's a food stuff of sorts. You could not grow defect free crystals from it, without the crystals trying to sort themselves into the "constituents". There would be occlusions, with bits of lava or fungi or whatever in the spaces.

Paul

[Joe]

Many people are on a low-salt diet because of poor kidney function, and you don't want *any* potassium chloride then.