The study, published in the journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, focused on an academic facility operating a hybrid Moving Bed Biofilm Reactor combined with Zero Liquid Discharge technology, a configuration known as MBBR-ZLD. Between January and July, the team collected sludge samples fortnightly and subjected them to a battery of analytical techniques, including wet peroxide oxidation, density separation, stereomicroscopy, ATR-FTIR spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray analysis, and Nile Red fluorescence microscopy. The result was one of the most comprehensive portraits yet of microplastic pollution in an institutional treatment system in a developing country.

The numbers are striking. Microplastic concentrations in the sludge ranged from 120 to 1,145 particles per kilogram of dry weight, with considerable variation across the sampling period. Particle sizes spanned an enormous range, from just 7.02 micrometers to 4,592 micrometers, roughly the difference between a bacterium and a grain of rice. The 500 to 1,000 micrometer fraction emerged as the most prevalent size class, suggesting that mid-sized fragments and fibres survive the treatment process most effectively and become concentrated in the sludge matrix.

When the researchers examined particle morphology, a clear hierarchy emerged. Fibres dominated the assemblage, accounting for 43.3 percent of all microplastics identified. Fragments followed closely at 39.5 percent, while films made up 11.5 percent. This distribution tells a story about the sources of contamination on campus. Fibres typically originate from synthetic textiles shed during laundry, fragments from the mechanical breakdown of larger plastic items, and films from packaging materials. The near-even split between fibres and fragments suggests that both domestic activities and disposable plastic consumption contribute substantially to the pollution load.

Polymer identification using infrared spectroscopy revealed eight distinct plastic types in the sludge. Nylon-PA6 was the most abundant polymer at 37.7 percent, followed by low-density polyethylene at 16.0 percent. The remaining polymers included polyethylene terephthalate, polypropylene, polystyrene, polycarbonate, polymethyl methacrylate, and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. Each of these materials points to a specific origin. Nylon fibres are shed from synthetic clothing during washing, LDPE is ubiquitous in packaging and plastic bags, PET appears in beverage bottles, and polycarbonate and PMMA are common in laboratory equipment and consumer electronics. The diversity of polymers reflects the diversity of plastic use across a residential and academic campus.

One of the most methodologically important aspects of the study was its rigorous validation approach. The researchers used co-spiked reference materials to assess recovery efficiency, finding an overall recovery of 81.66 percent with a standard deviation of 2.51 percent. Crucially, recovery varied depending on particle type and size, meaning that some categories of microplastics were systematically undercounted or overcounted by the extraction procedure. To address this, the team applied correction factors to their raw data, improving the accuracy of their concentration estimates. This kind of methodological transparency is increasingly recognized as essential in microplastic research, where extraction losses can dramatically skew reported abundances.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding came from the temporal analysis. The researchers observed a strong positive Spearman rank correlation between campus occupancy and monthly mean microplastic concentration, with a correlation coefficient of 0.756 and a p-value of 0.049. In practical terms, this means that when more people were on campus, more microplastics ended up in the sludge. The relationship, while statistically significant at the conventional threshold, sits right at the boundary of the p-value cutoff, suggesting a real but not overwhelming signal. Still, the implication is clear: human activity is a primary driver of microplastic loading in institutional wastewater systems.

This finding has implications that extend far beyond a single university. Campuses, office complexes, hospitals, and other institutional facilities generate concentrated, predictable patterns of plastic consumption tied directly to occupancy. Laundry from hostels, cosmetics and personal care products washed off in showers, hygiene products, food packaging from canteens, and laboratory plastics all converge on the treatment plant. The study’s authors note that these diverse daily emissions from laundry, cosmetics, hygiene, packaging, and laboratories collectively shape the polymer profile found in the resulting sludge.

The broader context makes these findings particularly significant. Sewage sludge is increasingly recognized as a major reservoir and environmental pathway for microplastics. When sludge is applied to agricultural land as fertilizer or disposed of in landfills, the embedded microplastics can migrate into soils, waterways, and ultimately the food chain. Recent research has documented microplastic contamination in soils amended with treated sludge, raising concerns about long-term ecological and human health effects. Understanding the concentration, composition, and temporal dynamics of microplastics in sludge is therefore a critical step toward designing effective mitigation strategies.

The choice of an MBBR-ZLD system as the study site adds another layer of relevance. Moving Bed Biofilm Reactors are widely deployed in India and other developing countries as compact, efficient treatment solutions, while Zero Liquid Discharge systems are designed to eliminate liquid effluent entirely by recovering water and concentrating waste into solid form. If microplastics accumulate in the sludge of such advanced systems, it suggests that even sophisticated treatment infrastructure cannot fully prevent plastic particles from concentrating in residual waste streams. The researchers argue that institutional usage patterns play a decisive role in microplastic accumulation within these systems, a conclusion that could inform both facility management and future regulatory frameworks. As plastic production continues to grow globally, studies like this one provide the granular, site-specific data needed to understand where microplastics come from, where they go, and how human behavior shapes their environmental trajectory.

Subject of Research: Microplastic contamination in sewage sludge from a university wastewater treatment system in India

Article Title: Occurrence, quantification, and characterization of microplastics in sewage sludge from a university wastewater treatment system

Article References: Gupta, S. K., Vadla, P., & Palani, S. G. (2026). Occurrence, quantification, and characterization of microplastics in sewage sludge from a university wastewater treatment system. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 198(9), Article 997. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-026-15866-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10661-026-15866-1

Keywords: microplastics, sewage sludge, wastewater treatment, MBBR, zero liquid discharge, ATR-FTIR spectroscopy, Nile Red staining, polymer identification, campus occupancy, India, environmental monitoring, fibres

The team, led by Wenchang Feng and Jixiong Zhang with colleagues including Meng Li, Zhibo Cui, Zhangyu Li, and Yuzhe Zhang, set out to tackle two intertwined environmental burdens. Decades of high-intensity coal extraction have left vast stockpiles of coal gangue and fly ash that occupy land, risk spontaneous combustion and landslides, and can leach contaminants into soil and groundwater. Meanwhile, groundwater dissolving soluble minerals in coal-bearing strata produces mine water so laden with salts that discharging it untreated would salinize soils and pollute waterways. Desalination plants at the mines can strip the salts out, but the process concentrates them into a brine whose disposal is both difficult and expensive, with evaporative crystallization currently the dominant — and energy-hungry — fallback.

The researchers’ proposal was elegantly simple: let the brine do useful work. They prepared a high-salinity concentrated mine water-based coal-based solid waste cemented backfill, abbreviated HW-CB, using crushed coal gangue as coarse aggregate, fly ash as fine aggregate and supplementary cementitious material, and Portland cement as the binder. A parallel series made with tap water, TW-CB, served as the control. The brine itself came from the treatment plant at Jinqiao Coal Mine in Jining City, and its chemistry was striking: sulfate concentrations 313 times those of tap water, sodium 244 times higher, potassium nearly 40 times higher, and chloride about 17 times higher, all at a near-neutral pH of 7.52.

Flow behavior proved to be the first sensitive variable. As the solid content of the slurry rose from 74 to 82 percent by weight, slump declined gently at first and then collapsed — the material held a workable 278 to 282 millimeters up to 76 percent solids, then lost 28, 60, and 76 millimeters for each successive 2 percent increase. The team attributes the cliff-like drop to a threshold near 78 percent solids, beyond which free water can no longer coat every particle, friction and particle bridging take over, and flowability deteriorates drastically. Replacing fly ash with more cement improved slump in both water types, because the fly ash’s free calcium oxide slakes rapidly and consumes water within minutes, while cement’s calcium is locked in slow-hydrating silicate minerals. Yet at every cement dosage, the saline mix flowed slightly worse than its tap-water twin, since the dense ion soup suppresses electrostatic repulsion between particles and accelerates the formation of early hydration products that thicken the slurry.

Strength told a more surprising story. The 28-day unconfined compressive strength of the saline backfill rose linearly with solid content, gaining roughly 0.86 megapascals for every 1 percent increase in solids, with a coefficient of determination of 0.997 — climbing from 2.9 to 9.6 megapascals across the tested range. More intriguing was the interplay between cement dosage and salinity. At cement proportions of 6 percent or higher, the saline mix outperformed the tap-water mix at every age, with 3-day, 7-day, and 28-day strengths all higher. Below about 4 percent cement, the pattern inverted: early strengths were still boosted, but the 28-day strength fell below the tap-water control, with the 4-to-6 percent range acting as a transition interval.

Microscopy and diffraction explained why. X-ray diffraction revealed that the intensity of the ettringite peak tracked the strength results exactly. When calcium was plentiful, the sulfate, chloride, sodium, and potassium ions in the brine continuously drove ettringite formation while accelerating the dissolution of the aluminate phase, producing a dense microstructure in which well-developed, thick ettringite crystals interlocked into a three-dimensional skeleton and abundant calcium silicate hydrate gel filled the pores. Scanning electron microscopy showed the saline mix riddled with only small, disconnected pores, whereas the tap-water counterpart contained large connected voids and finer, shorter crystals. Thermogravimetric analysis sealed the case: mass loss between 100 and 200 degrees Celsius, which reflects bound water in the hydration products, ranked in precisely the same order as the measured strengths.

The mechanism behind the low-cement failure is a classic case of too much of a good thing. With insufficient calcium available, the brine’s acceleration caused hydration products to form so quickly that they encapsulated the unhydrated particles, sealing off the pathways later reactions needed. The result was short, sparse ettringite, unfilled voids, and a weaker final structure than the slower, steadier tap-water hydration achieved. In effect, the high-salinity environment acts as a throttle on the hydration clock — helpful when there is enough fuel to sustain the reaction, harmful when the fuel runs out early.

The economics may prove as compelling as the chemistry. At Jinqiao Coal Mine, the current zero-liquid-discharge scheme combining membrane concentration with evaporation and crystallization costs about 15.83 yuan per cubic meter of treated water, with throughput that can exceed 10,000 cubic meters per day during high-inflow periods. If the concentrated brine from the reverse-osmosis stage is diverted into backfill production instead, the downstream evaporation and mixed-salt disposal steps can be skipped, cutting the unit treatment cost by roughly 8 to 9 yuan per cubic meter — a reduction of more than 50 percent. On an annual treatment volume of 120,000 cubic meters, that translates into savings of roughly 960,000 to 1,080,000 yuan, before counting the simplified flowsheet and reduced capital costs.

The researchers are careful to note the boundaries of their findings. The backfill is designed for unreinforced goaf filling, so the brine’s chloride content poses no steel-corrosion concern in this application, but long-term strength evolution at 90 or 180 days, durability under sustained saline exposure, the effects of varying brine compositions, and full-scale field trials all remain open questions. Still, the core result stands: with the cement dosage tuned above the critical threshold, a waste stream that mines once paid to destroy becomes an active ingredient in the very material that stabilizes the voids coal mining leaves behind — turning two liabilities into one structural asset.

Subject of Research: Using high-salinity concentrated mine water as mixing water in coal gangue and fly ash cemented backfill and its effects on flow, strength, and hydration

Article Title: Performance and hydration mechanism of backfill materials prepared by coal-based solid waste and high-salinity concentrated mine water

Article References: Feng, W., Zhang, J., Li, M., Cui, Z., Li, Z., & Zhang, Y. (2026). Performance and hydration mechanism of backfill materials prepared by coal-based solid waste and high-salinity concentrated mine water. Case Studies in Construction Materials, 25, Article e06558. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cscm.2026.e06558

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.cscm.2026.e06558

Keywords: cemented backfill, coal gangue, fly ash, high-salinity mine water, ettringite, hydration mechanism, unconfined compressive strength, solid waste utilization, mine water treatment, zero-liquid discharge, Portland cement, X-ray diffraction

The research team modeled a commercial-scale plant producing 105 kiloliters of ethanol per day, a typical capacity for Indian distilleries that supply the country’s ambitious ethanol blending program. Rather than evaluating a single technology, the researchers compared six different wastewater treatment schemes against a conventional baseline plant with no ZLD configuration. The options included bio-methanation, in which anaerobic microbes digest the organic load and produce biogas; bio-methanation coupled with reverse osmosis membranes; multiple effect evaporation, which concentrates the effluent using staged evaporators; reverse osmosis followed by evaporation; evaporation combined with incineration of the concentrated residue; and composting of the spent wash with press mud, a solid byproduct of sugar milling.

Methodologically, the study is notable for combining two assessment frameworks that are usually applied separately. The environmental side used a gate-to-gate life cycle assessment, meaning the analysis covered only the plant boundary rather than the full supply chain from sugarcane field to fuel pump. Impacts were quantified with the IMPACT World+ midpoint method, which tracks categories such as climate change, acidification and water use, and cross-checked with the ReCiPe 2016 endpoint method, which aggregates those categories into broader damage measures for human health, ecosystems and resource scarcity. On the financial side, the team applied discounted cash flow analysis to calculate internal rates of return, payback periods and net present values for each configuration, then resolved the inevitable trade-offs between the two dimensions using multi-criteria decision analysis.

The headline environmental finding is striking. The conventional baseline plant emitted the equivalent of 8.86 times ten to the fourth kilograms of carbon dioxide per day, a substantial climate burden attributable largely to the energy demands of wastewater handling and the methane and nitrous oxide releases associated with untreated or partially treated effluent. When bio-methanation was paired with reverse osmosis, that figure dropped by half to 4.43 times ten to the fourth kilograms of CO2-equivalent per day. The reason is elegant: anaerobic digestion converts the chemical energy in the waste into usable biogas, which displaces fossil fuels on site, while the membrane step recovers water that can be recycled back into the process, cutting both freshwater intake and the energy needed to evaporate remaining effluent.

At the opposite end of the technological spectrum, the most aggressive ZLD option, multiple effect evaporation with incineration, takes a different route entirely. Instead of treating the spent wash biologically, the scheme evaporates it down to a thick concentrate and then burns that concentrate, recovering energy in the process. The study found that incineration recovers energy equivalent to three tons of steam per cubic meter of concentrate, a significant thermal credit for a plant that needs steam throughout fermentation and distillation. This recovered heat substantially offsets the environmental burden of the evaporation train, which is otherwise the most energy-hungry component of any ZLD system.

Financially, the rankings shift in ways that expose the gap between environmental virtue and commercial reality. The evaporation-plus-incineration scheme delivered the strongest economics, with an internal rate of return of 20.8 percent and a static payback period of just 3.6 years, driven by steam recovery and the elimination of costly effluent disposal. Bio-methanation alone, despite its environmental appeal, remained the weakest performer at 15.7 percent internal rate of return, reflecting the modest value of biogas relative to the capital and operating costs of the digesters. Reverse osmosis systems, meanwhile, carry membrane replacement costs and high pumping energy that erode their financial advantage even as they deliver the largest climate benefit.

The study’s most policy-relevant contribution is its treatment of carbon credits. When the researchers added revenue from carbon credits priced at 2.35 dollars per ton of CO2-equivalent, the internal rates of return of the cleaner schemes rose by four to six percentage points, and payback periods shortened by up to two years. That sensitivity matters enormously in emerging economies such as India, where a compliance carbon market is taking shape and where distilleries are simultaneously being pushed toward ZLD by pollution regulators and toward higher ethanol blending by energy policy. The analysis suggests that carbon pricing could be the decisive lever that makes environmentally superior wastewater treatment financially rational, aligning two regulatory agendas that currently pull plant operators in different directions.

The multi-criteria decision analysis pulled all of these threads together, weighting environmental performance, financial return and technical robustness into a single comparative framework. Two configurations emerged as the most balanced choices: bio-methanation with reverse osmosis, which offers the deepest climate benefit with respectable economics, and evaporation with incineration, which offers the best economics with meaningful environmental credits from energy recovery. Neither dominates on every metric, but both outperform the conventional baseline and the intermediate options across the combined scorecard. For plant operators facing ZLD mandates, the study effectively narrows the decision from six possibilities to two defensible pathways, depending on whether a given facility prioritizes carbon intensity or cash flow.

The broader significance of the work lies in its methodological template. Life cycle assessments of biofuels have often been criticized for ignoring wastewater treatment or treating it as a black box, while techno-economic studies frequently omit environmental externalities entirely. By integrating IMPACT World+ and ReCiPe 2016 impact assessment with discounted cash flow modeling and formal multi-criteria decision analysis in a single gate-to-gate framework, the researchers have demonstrated how the full trade-off surface can be mapped before capital is committed. The approach is directly transferable to other agro-industrial effluent problems, from palm oil mill effluent in Southeast Asia to vinasse management in Brazilian sugarcane ethanol, where similar ZLD debates are unfolding.

For an industry racing to scale, the message of the study is ultimately one of cautious optimism. Zero liquid discharge is not a compliance tax that destroys returns; configured correctly, it can be a value-creation opportunity, converting waste streams into biogas, steam, recycled water and compost while earning carbon revenue on top. But the configuration matters enormously, and the difference between the best and worst choices amounts to several percentage points of return and tens of thousands of kilograms of daily CO2-equivalent emissions. As governments tighten discharge norms and carbon markets mature, the distilleries that thrive will be those that treat wastewater not as an afterthought to be piped away, but as a design problem worth solving with the same rigor applied to ethanol yield itself.

Subject of Research: Life cycle and economic assessment of zero liquid discharge wastewater treatment options in molasses-based bioethanol production

Article Title: Integrating zero liquid discharge options in molasses-based bioethanol plant: comparative life cycle and economic analysis

Article References: Kokate, A., Kachhwaha, S. S., Kodgire, P., & Cross, J. S. (2026). Integrating zero liquid discharge options in molasses-based bioethanol plant: comparative life cycle and economic analysis. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 30(4), 2017-2033. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00137-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00137-6

Keywords: bioethanol, molasses, zero liquid discharge, life cycle assessment, wastewater treatment, vinasse, bio-methanation, reverse osmosis, multiple effect evaporation, carbon credits, multi-criteria decision analysis, distillery effluent

The scale of the disposal problem is considerable. Coastal discharge can deliver salinity shocks to marine ecosystems, harming corals, seagrasses and shellfish that cannot tolerate hypersaline conditions. Elevated salinity disrupts the osmotic balance of marine organisms, causing dehydration, impaired reproduction and elevated mortality among juvenile fish and larvae. Chemical residues from antiscalants, coagulants and chlorine-based disinfectants add a toxic dimension, while heavy metals such as lead, mercury and chromium, released through pipeline and equipment corrosion, accumulate in marine sediments and can bioaccumulate through the food chain. Thermal desalination plants, which use multi-stage flash and multi-effect distillation, discharge brine at elevated temperatures that can trigger thermal shock in sensitive species and promote algal blooms, whereas reverse osmosis plants produce cooler brine with fewer temperature-related impacts.

Inland disposal carries its own hazards. Deep-well injection risks aquifer salinization if brine migrates through geological formations into freshwater reserves, and poorly lined evaporation ponds can leak salt and contaminants into surrounding soils and groundwater. Regulators have responded with an increasingly complex patchwork of rules. The United Nations Environment Programme recommends limiting discharge salinity to no more than 5 percent above ambient seawater, while the International Maritime Organization’s MARPOL Convention classifies brine as non-harmful only if pre-treated to remove toxic additives. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency enforces limits on total dissolved solids and boron under the Clean Water Act, and California’s Carlsbad plant now recovers 98 percent of its brine for industrial salt production. Saudi Arabia mandates offshore diffuser systems, and the United Arab Emirates caps brine temperature at 3 degrees Celsius above ambient seawater.

Yet the same chemistry that makes brine an environmental liability makes it a potential treasure trove. Sodium chloride constitutes roughly 60 to 70 percent of the dissolved solids in brine and can feed the chlor-alkali, Solvay and Hargreaves industrial processes. Magnesium, present at 1350 to 1660 milligrams per cubic decimeter, can be precipitated as magnesium hydroxide and converted into fertilizers or magnesium oxide. Calcium supports the production of gypsum and calcium carbonate, materials consumed at more than 200 million and 100 million tons per year worldwide respectively. Potassium and sulfate are valuable for fertilizers, and trace elements including strontium, boron, rubidium and cesium serve niche markets in drilling fluids, glass and electronics.

The most coveted target is lithium. Although seawater-derived brine contains only about 0.17 milligrams of lithium per cubic decimeter, surging battery demand has strained terrestrial supply chains and focused attention on unconventional sources. Recent pilot projects have achieved lithium concentrations 43,000 times seawater levels through iterative membrane sieving, and electrochemical intercalation and manganese dioxide-based adsorption offer selective extraction routes. Market analyses project that global demand for lithium will rise by 300 percent by 2030, with magnesium demand growing 50 percent, underscoring the strategic value of securing these elements from an existing industrial waste stream rather than opening new mines.

Brine also offers a surprising climate benefit. Its high magnesium and calcium content makes it a potent medium for carbon dioxide mineralization, in which carbonation reactions convert these ions into stable carbonates such as magnesium carbonate and calcium carbonate. The process can sequester up to 2 tons of carbon dioxide per ton of magnesium while producing marketable materials for cement and soil stabilization. A California brackish water treatment plant already produces calcium carbonate pellets that offset 15 percent of its operational emissions, and electrodialysis-coupled carbonation systems have demonstrated feasibility at pilot scale. Advances in pH control and antiscalant-free precipitation are narrowing the gap between laboratory success and commercial deployment.

The salinity gradient between brine and freshwater represents a third avenue of value: renewable energy. Pressure retarded osmosis and reverse electrodialysis harness the chemical potential difference across semi-permeable membranes, and pilot-scale systems have achieved power densities of 2 to 4 watts per square meter. A 240 cubic meter per day pilot plant combining seawater reverse osmosis with pressure retarded osmosis demonstrated a potential 20 percent energy reduction, while hybrid reverse electrodialysis systems integrated with nanofiltration aim to offset desalination energy costs by 20 to 30 percent. Each approach has trade-offs: pressure retarded osmosis delivers higher power density but is more vulnerable to membrane fouling, whereas reverse electrodialysis offers more stable output with lower pretreatment demands.

The technology portfolio for brine valorization is expanding rapidly. Nanofiltration serves as a pretreatment that separates monovalent from divalent ions, generating enriched streams for targeted extraction, while ultra-high pressure reverse osmosis, osmotically assisted reverse osmosis and high-pressure nanofiltration overcome the extreme osmotic pressures of concentrated brines. Electrodialysis with bipolar membranes produces acid and alkaline solutions, and capacitive deionization achieves unprecedented lithium selectivity through electrochemical adsorption. Eutectic freeze crystallization offers an energy-efficient alternative to thermal evaporation for recovering high-purity sodium and potassium chlorides, and membrane distillation-crystallization enables zero-liquid discharge while recovering gypsum and salt. Even biotechnology is entering the field, with halophilic microbes and algal biosorption providing low-energy pathways for metal recovery.

Real-world deployments are beginning to validate the concept. Saudi Arabia’s Water Authority has developed pilot projects recovering magnesium, calcium and sodium chloride from brine, and the Shoaiba nanofiltration facility generates magnesium-enriched streams of up to 1530 milligrams per cubic decimeter for drinking water supplementation and liquid fertilizers. The UAE’s Masdar Initiative has integrated brine management into its sustainability goals, and the EU-funded SEA4VALUE project has demonstrated a modular multimineral recovery process. In the United States and Europe, brine-to-energy pilots are testing osmotic power generation, though scaling these systems remains technically and economically difficult.

Significant barriers persist. Concentrating hypersaline brine can demand 10 to 15 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter, far above the 3 to 4 kilowatt-hours of standard reverse osmosis, and electrochemical lithium extraction currently requires more than 20 kilowatt-hours per kilogram, exceeding terrestrial mining costs by 50 percent. Adsorption systems that perform well in controlled settings lose efficiency in real brine matrices laden with competing ions, and capacitive deionization electrodes degrade during continuous operation. The review’s authors argue that the path forward lies in modular designs, artificial intelligence-driven process optimization, ion-selective membranes including graphene oxide composites, and emerging photoelectrochemical methods that have demonstrated lithium recovery rates of up to 90 percent at around 5 kilowatt-hours per kilogram. Integrated with renewable energy and circular economy frameworks such as the EU’s ZERO BRINE project, brine mining could transform desalination from a water-security measure into a resource-positive industry aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals on clean water and climate action.

Subject of Research: Recovery of minerals, carbon dioxide sequestration and energy generation from desalination brine

Article Title: Challenges, opportunities, and technological advances in desalination brine mining: a mini review

Article References: Lee, J., & Lee, S. (2025). Challenges, opportunities, and technological advances in desalination brine mining: a mini review. Advances in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, 1(1), Article 7. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44405-025-00007-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44405-025-00007-y

Keywords: desalination, brine mining, lithium extraction, magnesium recovery, CO2 sequestration, salinity gradient power, reverse osmosis, nanofiltration, electrodialysis, zero liquid discharge, circular economy, water scarcity