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The Negative Impact Of Desalination On The Marine Environment

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The Negative Impact Of Desalination On The Marine Environment
While desalination sounds like a great way to solve the world’s water issues, there are many problems related to the sustainability of this process. Obviously, as discussed earlier, desalination has many negative impacts on the marine environment, but there are as well other reasons that it is not sustainable. For instance, desalination requires a very high-energy demand, which contributes to the reliance on fossil fuels and therefore the emission of pollutants such as greenhouse gasses. On average desalination requires 15,000 kWh per million gallons. Compare that to a modest 500 kWh per million gallons on average for traditional water treatment (Cooley 2013). The burning of large amounts of fossil fuels to desalinate water, and as a consequence
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