Why Salt Is Vital — But Potentially Catastrophic
Summary
TLDREl guiño esencial de la sal en la economía mundial, desde su influencia en la historia y la política hasta su uso en la industria alimentaria y la química. La sal, con más de 14,000 usos y un valor de mercado global de más de 13 mil millones de dólares en 2021, es fundamental en la vida cotidiana, desde la alimentación hasta la construcción de infraestructuras. Sin embargo, su presencia en exceso puede ser peligrosa para el medio ambiente, corriendo el riesgo de salinización de aguas dulces y daños estructurales. La innovación busca soluciones más ecológicas, mientras que la gestión sostenible de la sal es clave para el futuro del planeta.
Takeaways
- 🧂 La sal es fundamental en nuestra economía, con ciudades nombradas en su legado y guerras libradas por ella.
- 💵 Se ha utilizado como moneda y el término 'salario' proviene de la práctica romana de pagar a los soldados con sal.
- 🌍 La sal se encuentra prácticamente en todo el mundo y tiene más de 14,000 usos distintos.
- 💹 En 2021, el mercado global de la sal valía más de 13 mil millones de dólares, dominado por Morton Salt, Cargill y Compass Minerals.
- 🛠 La sal se procesa de diferentes maneras dependiendo de su uso, con la sal de mesa refinada para consumo humano y la sal de descongelación no producida en condiciones alimentarias.
- 🌊 La mayoría de la sal proviene del mar a través de la evaporación del agua o la minería, y la sal de mesa proviene a menudo de la minería por solución.
- 📉 El mercado de la sal no se limita a la comida, y en realidad, la mayoría de la sal vendida en los EE. UU. no es para el consumo alimentario.
- ❄️ El uso más común de la sal en los EE. UU. es como sal para descongelación, que representó el 42% del consumo total de sal en 2022.
- 🏭 La industria química es el segundo mayor mercado para la sal, con 39% de las ventas en 2022, utilizando la sal para producir cloro y soda cáustica.
- 🚢 La sal solar, que solo representó el 8% del mercado en 2022, es una parte importante de las importaciones de sal a Norteamérica.
- 🔄 Existe una tensión con la sal en el entorno debido a su necesidad en la vida cotidiana, pero también los efectos dañinos que puede tener una sobreexposición de sal en el medio ambiente.
- 🛑 La sal puede ser un problema pero también una solución, con innovaciones que buscan hacerla más ecoamigable y el uso de sales alternativas como el cloruro de calcio y el cloruro de potasio.
Q & A
¿Por qué es fundamental la sal en la economía humana?
-La sal es fundamental en la economía humana porque ha sido clave en la nomenclatura de ciudades, ha motivado guerras, ha sido objeto de tributos y a veces se usaba como moneda. La palabra 'salario' proviene de la práctica romana de pagar a los soldados con sal.
¿Cuál es el valor del mercado global de la sal en 2021?
-En 2021, el mercado global de la sal tenía un valor de más de 13 mil millones de dólares.
¿Cuáles son las tres principales empresas que dominan el mercado de sal en los Estados Unidos?
-Las tres principales empresas que dominan el mercado de sal en los Estados Unidos son Morton Salt, Cargill y Compass Minerals.
¿Cómo se procesa la sal para el consumo humano?
-La sal para el consumo humano es de grado alimentario y debe ser refinada. Se procesa mediante métodos como la evaporación en un vacío, lo que también puede cambiar la forma de las granos de sal.
¿De dónde proviene mayormente la sal que se usa en los Estados Unidos?
-La mayoría de la sal que se usa en los Estados Unidos proviene de la minería de sal, principalmente a través del método de minería por soluciones, donde el agua se bombea en yacimientos subterráneos de sal para crear breas artificiales.
¿Cuál es el uso más significativo de la sal en los Estados Unidos?
-El uso más significativo de la sal en los Estados Unidos es como sal para deshielo, que representó alrededor del 42% del consumo total de sal en 2022.
¿Cómo afecta la sal al medio ambiente y por qué es un problema?
-La sal, especialmente cuando se usa como sal para deshielo, puede ser perjudicial para el medio ambiente. La corrosión causada por el cloro puede afectar la infraestructura de transporte, como las carreteras, y la salina en el agua puede afectar la calidad del agua y provocar fenómenos como la síndrome de salinización de aguas dulces.
¿Qué es la síndrome de salinización de aguas dulces y cómo se manifiesta en la vida cotidiana?
-La síndrome de salinización de aguas dulces es un fenómeno que ocurre cuando el agua dulce se vuelve más salada, lo que puede causar corrosión de electrodomésticos, deterioro de infraestructuras viales y tuberías que fluyen con agua salada.
¿Cómo están las empresas de sal abordando el problema del impacto ambiental de la sal?
-Las empresas de sal están innovando para hacer que la sal sea más ecológica, utilizando sustitutos como el cloruro de calcio y el cloruro de potasio, y desarrollando productos que reduzcan la cantidad de sal que se derrama en el medio ambiente.
¿Cómo varía el precio de la sal en función de las condiciones climáticas?
-El precio de la sal tiende a subir en años con inviernos intensos y nieve abundante, ya que se necesita más sal para deshielo. Por otro lado, en inviernos suaves, los productores pueden tener excedentes de inventario que no pueden vender, lo que provoca que los precios bajen.
¿Qué es la sal solar y por qué se importa a gran escala a Norteamérica?
-La sal solar es una forma de sal que se produce al dejar que las breas, incluyendo las artificiales, se evaporen al sol. Se importa a gran escala a Norteamérica porque los lugares cercanos al ecuador, como el Caribe, tienen condiciones más propicias para su producción debido a la abundancia de sol y el clima árido y ventoso.
Outlines
🧂 La Importancia Histórica y Económica de la Sal
La sal ha sido fundamental en la economía a lo largo de la historia. Ha dado nombre a ciudades, causado guerras, sido objeto de impuestos y utilizada como moneda. El término 'salario' proviene de los soldados romanos que eran pagados en parte con sal. En 2021, el mercado global de sal valía más de 13 mil millones de dólares, dominado en EE. UU. por Morton Salt, Cargill y Compass Minerals. La distribución de sal ha llevado a una industria más concentrada debido a cambios históricos en la demanda. La sal afecta la vida diaria en alimentación, energía y transporte, pero un exceso en el medio ambiente puede ser peligroso.
❄️ Diferentes Tipos y Usos de la Sal
Hay varios tipos de sal con distintos usos, desde la sal de mesa hasta la sal para deshielo. La sal de mesa es refinada para consumo humano, mientras que la sal para deshielo no lo es. Históricamente, la sal se extraía del agua de mar o mediante métodos de minería, pero la mayoría de la sal de mesa hoy proviene de la minería por solución. Esta técnica implica bombear agua en depósitos subterráneos de sal para crear salmuera artificial, que luego se evapora para obtener sal. El mercado de sal no solo se limita a la alimentación; la mayor parte de la sal en EE. UU. se usa para deshielo y en la industria química.
🌍 Impactos y Problemas Ambientales de la Sal
El uso excesivo de sal, especialmente en la deshielo de carreteras, puede tener efectos perjudiciales en el medio ambiente, como la corrosión de infraestructuras y la salinización del agua dulce. Esto provoca la corrosión de metales y el deterioro de carreteras y tuberías. La sal también se libera al medio ambiente desde materiales de construcción. La EPA advierte que el síndrome de salinización del agua dulce es difícil de remediar. Existen alternativas más ecológicas como el uso de cloruros de calcio y potasio, aunque son más costosos. Innovaciones en productos de deshielo están tratando de mitigar el impacto ambiental.
🏙️ Innovaciones y Futuro de la Sal en la Sociedad
Las ciudades están buscando maneras de usar menos sal, ya que la investigación ha aumentado la conciencia sobre sus impactos negativos. Se desarrollan productos de deshielo más eficientes y duraderos. La sal ha sido crucial para el desarrollo humano y seguirá siendo importante en el futuro. A medida que el clima se vuelve más extremo, la demanda de sal para deshielo puede aumentar, afectando los precios. Reflexionar sobre el equilibrio entre desarrollo y conservación es esencial para proteger las generaciones futuras y gestionar el impacto de la sal en el medio ambiente.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Sal
💡Economía
💡Conservación de alimentos
💡De-icing
💡Salinidad del agua
💡Minería de sal
💡Vacuum pan
💡Industria química
💡Solar salt
💡Corrosión
Highlights
Salt is the foundation of our economy, influencing city names, wars, and taxes.
Salt was once used as currency, with the word 'salary' derived from ancient Romans paying soldiers in salt.
The global salt market was worth over $13 billion in 2021.
The US salt market is dominated by three big players: Morton Salt, Cargill, and Compass Minerals.
Harvey Salt, as a distributor, can procure salt from all major suppliers, reflecting industry consolidation.
Salt is used in various ways, from food seasoning to road de-icing and chemical manufacturing.
Table salt is refined for human consumption, while de-icing salt is not produced in food-grade conditions.
Historically, most salt was harvested through saltwater evaporation or mining.
Modern table salt often comes from solution mining, where artificial brines are created and processed.
The largest use of salt in the US is for de-icing roads, making up 42% of total salt consumption.
Salt production is led by rock salt, accounting for 43% of the market.
Chemical manufacturing is the second largest market for salt, using 39% of salt sales.
Salt has a low value-to-weight ratio, making long-distance transportation economically unviable.
Solar salt, produced by evaporating brine in sunlight, is a significant part of the salt import market.
Salt's environmental impact includes groundwater salinity and infrastructure corrosion.
Innovations in salt use include eco-friendly de-icing products and methods to reduce environmental impact.
Freshwater salination syndrome is a growing problem, with increasing salt levels in rivers and streams.
Flint, Michigan's water crisis highlighted the dangers of high chloride levels in water.
The salt market is influenced by weather patterns, with heavy winters driving up prices and mild winters leading to excess inventory.
Salt's role in history and its potential future impact underscores its significance in shaping economies and environments.
Transcripts
If you think about it, salt is the foundation of
our economy. Cities have been named in its legacy.
Wars fought over it.
It's been taxed.
It occurs naturally nearly everywhere on
earth. And at times it was even used as money
itself. Think of the word salary.
It comes from ancient Romans that paid soldiers
partially in salt.
That's a political fact of life everywhere you
look. If salt gets expensive, people get
angry.
There are over 14,000 different uses for salt.
And in 2021, the global salt market was worth
over $13 billion.
Now the US market is dominated by three big
players: Morton Salt, Cargill and Compass
Minerals. And only one is publicly traded.
Be cause Harvey Salt is a distributor, we have the
ability to procure salt from all the major salt
suppliers.
So now we have a much more concentrated
industry than we've had before.
Perhaps it's a response to how demand for salt
has shifted through history.
This is an issue that affects everybody on a
daily basis.
What they eat, the power that they get, the roads
that they drive on.
If too much salt permeates our
environment, the effects can be dangerous.
Here's how Salt became one of the most
game-changing minerals in the world and what
will happen if the world keeps getting saltier.
So in front of me, I have two different kinds
of salt. We have Morton's table salt and
we have Cargill's Diamond Crystal brand
de-icing salt.
Both of these are 100% sodium chloride.
The biggest difference is how they're processed.
So for the table salt, this is food grade.
So it needs to be refined for human
consumption. Whereas the de-icing salt is not
produced in food grade conditions.
So you really wouldn't want to eat this.
And most plentiful of the ocean's treasures, salt
can be taken from the sea.
Throughout history, most salt was harvested
through salt water evaporation of some kind,
and eventually good old fashioned mining methods.
However, the salt on your dinner table, it
most likely came from solution mining.
Water is pumped into these underground salt
beds, making artificial brines.
Without water, salt pretty much looks like
this. But to get it to food grade like this, we
have to use another method.
Vacuum pan.
So the artificial brine is then pumped back up
into a facility above ground where heat or both
heat and a vacuum evaporates the water,
leaving the sodium behind.
This is also how the shape of the grain can
change, like your finer table salt or a coarser
pink Himalayan salt, or even something super
fancy like this really flaky salt.
The market for salt doesn't start and end
with food. Actually, most of the salt used or
sold in the US doesn't even come from vacuum pan
. We're seeing a slight decline in food use every
year. For example, in this chart, table salt
isn't even explicitly identified, but somewhere
between food processing and distributors like
grocery stores. Table salt is only some part of
that 13% of the market.
That might be because salt in the food industry
was once even more important.
Provisions to last us on the long journey.
It was needed for preservation, not just to
make food taste better.
There was very little food you could export
without salt.
Vegetables, meat, fish, it all needed salt.
So you could not have an international economy if
you didn't have salt.
It's packed for shipment to markets all over the
world.
Thanks to refrigeration.
Don't worry about things souring and spoiling this
summer.
And frozen food. The electronic oven to
defrost.
Demand has shifted dramatically.
To this.
The majority is de-icing salt.
Which is about as prosaic a use as I could imagine.
Highway de-icing salts accounted for about 42%
of the total salt consumed or sold in 2022.
This is the largest salt mine in the world.
De-icing salt like what I have right here primarily
comes from rock salt.
And US salt production is led by rock salt at 43%
of the market in 2022.
So it makes sense that most rock salt mined ends
up as an ice melt product.
And since the US uses an estimated 20 million
metric tons of salt on roads every year,
governments take bids from a bunch of companies
to buy in bulk.
There are governments in the US every year that
need to buy large quantities of salt.
Companies like Compass Minerals or Morton Salt
or Cargill will have to submit bids each year for
volumes and prices.
So for the salt companies, they can bid a
fixed price. Then they essentially take on the
risk of can they deliver the salt for that price
and still make a good profit.
If it doesn't snow the phones do not ring.
Salt only costs pennies per pound, but it costs
dollars per bag to move it.
It's very heavy.
And rock salt is at the lower end of the price
scale for salt products, averaging $60 per bulk
unit in 2022, compared to vacuum pan salts,
averaging $230 per bulk unit.
And that makes sense, right? The vacuum pan
salt takes a lot more time, machinery
processing, you name it, to get to that food grade
status. But the largest market for sodium
chloride behind deicing salts is chemical.
It made up 39% of salt sales in 2022.
Salt is needed to manufacture chlorine and
caustic soda, which are then used to create
products like household cleaners and plastics.
So think back to this solution mining process
and the artificial brine before it's processed.
The chemical industry uses that artificial
brine as a chemical feedstock.
Of 40% salt in brine used in 2022, most of it 91%,
was used to make chemicals. And it's even
cheaper than rock salt, averaging $8.50 per bulk
unit.
Salt has a very low value to weight ratio, meaning
you can't transport it that far to make it
economically viable.
So you can't really ship salt all around the
world.
However, there is one slice of the salt market
that relies on plenty of imports.
Solar salt.
Solar salt made up only 8% of what was used or
sold in 2022.
As the name suggests, brines, including
artificial brines, are organized into ponds that
are left to evaporate in the sunlight.
It's classic economics.
Where else is there more sunshine to make solar
salt than somewhere a little closer to the
equator?
It actually is less costly to bring it in
from the Caribbean, where the warm waters
there and the arid and windy climate are the
most conducive to production of solar salts
generated from seawater.
Solar salt is the biggest chunk of salt imports to
North America by far.
We are adjacent to the port of Baltimore, so
that is where oceangoing vessels bring in the
majority of water treatment salt, what we
call solar salt, water softener, removes the
hardness ions, which can develop scale inside the
pipe. So a food processing plant,
pharmaceutical facility, education market, K-12,
hospitals, retirement communities, nursing
homes, people that use a lot of water need to
soften and condition that water.
Industries don't want hard water that could
reduce the life of equipment.
But the issue goes even deeper than that.
There is a fascinating tension with salt in the
environment because we do need salt in our
everyday lives.
It's kind of like a Goldilocks type thing.
Too much or too little, you just need the right
amount.
Salty water can be dangerous.
Freshwater getting saltier is a widespread
problem in the US and globally.
The problem is the groundwater is now nearly
as salty as the ocean.
Some of the major rivers and streams in the world
have been showing these increasing trends.
A third of the rivers have become more salty in
the past 25 years.
Why? Because salt is corrosive.
Chloride corrodes metal.
It can affect the roads that we drive on.
There's rebar metal structures that hold
roads together. And when it interacts with that
rebar, it can dissolve the rebar and then it
causes the road to buckle.
The most obvious way salt enters the environment,
the very same deicing salts keeping our roads
safe. They're estimated to cause anywhere from
$800 to $3300 in structural damage for
every ton used, according to the EPA.
Overall corrosion of US transportation
infrastructure costs are in the billions.
Sodium chloride isn't even the only kind of
salt. Mineral salts are abundant.
You know, we think about building up areas like
with parking lots, pavements, buildings and
all that. And when they break down, they release
salts because there's calcium and carbonate
that's used to make the built environment.
It breaks down releasing salts into the
environment, which can affect water quality.
That backwashing salt water would flow through
the limestone and ruin millions of rich
producing acres.
Imagine metal pipes with saltier water flowing t
hrough.
Then it goes through a whole labyrinth of pipes
to homes. That salty water can interact with
the pipes and mobilize more metals.
Water with more chlorides is going to leach metal
from the wall of the pipes, making the water
corrosive. This can create what the EPA calls
salt chemical cocktails.
What happens is it can't be removed from the water
treatment plant. Instead, they try to
treat it as best as they can.
People are taking it more seriously now
because they've seen evidence of these
leaching phenomenons.
What the pipes are producing.
In Flint, Michigan, dangerous levels of lead
were discovered.
Flint River. It was a complicated issue, but
they had switched their water to the Flint River,
which had elevated chlorides and
corrosivity.
The buildup of salt can cause a phenomenon called
the freshwater salination syndrome.
We might experience in our everyday life
corrosion of a home appliance, a road falling
apart or pipe running rusty black water.
We do take the impacts of salt with a grain of
salt and we don't know, you know, all the impacts
yet.
The EPA says freshwater salination syndrome is
not easily remedied.
So salt can be a problem, but it can also be a
solution. For example, other salts are being
used instead of sodium chloride, like calcium
chloride and potassium chloride.
They're substitutes for de-icing salts, but right
now they come at a higher cost.
We've seen significant increases in the amount
of ice melter that we have sold with lower
fewer chlorides in it versus straight rock
salt, which has a significant amount of
chlorides in it.
Innovation is happening to make salt more
eco-friendly.
You know, then we're also seeing new products go
into de-icing salt.
I think part of the innovation that allows a
coating of salt to stay on the road longer, part
of that does reduce the runoff that goes into the
water. So when salt companies are innovating
to you, say pre-storm salt versus having to
wait till it snows and then salting the roads,
a lot of that pre-storm salt is an upgraded
product that can last through an entire storm
versus having to put two or 3 or 4 layers of salt
down on the roads that likely leads to less salt
being run off in the waterways.
And some cities are figuring out how to use
less salt. Turns out, less is more.
I mean, we have a lot of dedicated people trying
to reduce salt in the environment and they're
cognizant of the problem. I mean, people
weren't completely aware of this issue like over
the last decades. But as more and more research
has come out, they've become more aware and
they're really trying the best that they can.
It's hard to imagine a world without salt,
especially increasing severe weather, that may
result in more road salt to keep drivers safe.
In years when there are heavy winters and there's
a lot of snow, we do see salt prices tend to rise.
But when there's winters that are very mild, the
salt producers tend to have excess inventory
that they couldn't sell because nobody buys salt
when it's not snowing.
When that happens, we see prices tend to fall.
Salt was immensely critical in shaping the
world we live in today.
A slab of rock salt.
Transparent crystal cubes and the kind you
use on your table.
So it's no surprise that salt could transform the
world ahead of us, too.
It's funny because I have a son and you watch these
movies like Wall-E, right?
The last robot on Earth.
It's a cute movie where it talks about how Earth
is polluted and people have to move off of it
for a while. By thinking about how we develop
versus conservation can really do future
generations a lot of good because the more we
develop the saltier the water is going to get.
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