In sustainability news, my son just showed me this article:
Sounds like it might actually scale and be economically feasible.
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Definitely promising. A problem to consider is what to do with the leftover salt. You don’t want to be poisoning a bit of the ocean with excess salt, for example. Maybe develop a side business of selling sea salt?
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Turn it into a fancy-looking exfoliating skincare product that guys at malls can harass passers-by to “sample.” It worked for Dead Sea salt, at least for a while. 
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In Israel, they pipe the concentrated salt water offshore miles from the coast, and reportedly have seen no problems. Around here, there have been proposals to put in desalination plants, and release the water into the bay systems on the gulf coast of Texas, which would be disastrous to the marine ecology there.
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There are areas of the deep Mediterranean that are rather salty anyway, so there might be a suitable setting, or they may do some good mixing to dilute it adequately, though it might also just be that no one looks too closely right were things are being released. I do know that strategies like you describe as being proposed in Texas are harmful where they have been done. (Note also that taking water from springs in dry areas of west Texas to supply the cites farther east is a very bad idea for the springs, the endemic species, and regional water table).
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It sounded to me like these devices were for households, not towns. So you wouldn’t have industrial scale wastewater to deal with. Maybe everyone has their own little salt box on their roof or something. Maybe people just toss it in the garbage and it ends up in landfills.
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I deal with some invasive plants species that can only be killed in three ways:
- fire hot enough to sterilize the soil up to two meters deep
- potent herbicide that has to be applied when the plant is blossoming
- application of heavy brine or rock salt
I could use a steady supply of salt!
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Really promising invention although it has some weakness. It needs water to work, so can be operated only by the ocean or other water source. The equipment has a price which raises the question of who will pay the equipment if a poor family does not have money. Maybe also a problem of waste salt although it will be a problem only if there are many equipments working in a small area. Despite these weaknesses, it might be a life-saving invention.
For societies, large desalination plants are a more effective solution. The problem is that such plants are very expensive to build and expensive to use. The water will have a price and poor families do not necessarily have enough of money to buy the water. A family-owned small device might be an answer to that problem.
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Claiming it’s a weakness that a desalination device requires water to work seems a little unfair. Yes, the whole point is to take salt out of seawater and make it drinkable. It presumes you have seawater you want to drink. That’s like claiming a bread maker has a weakness in that it requires flour and yeast to work. 
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I was thinking of those living in arid areas far from oceans. These form the majority of people suffering from the lack of fresh water. The innovation is very positive but probably cannot help these people unless they emigrate to the coastal areas. Perhaps the equipment could also purify polluted water, which would widen the scope of people that can benefit from it.
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When visiting the Canary Islands and parts of southern Spain, we saw how desalination through a process known as solar desalination or solar-powered desalination, plays a crucial role in providing drinking water to the population and supporting tourism. But also, countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel have heavily invested in desalination technology due to their arid climates and limited freshwater resources. The city of Dubai, for example, relies on desalination for a significant portion of its drinking water.
My penfriend in Australia told me that they have several desalination plants, particularly in areas prone to water shortages like Perth and Adelaide. These plants help ensure a consistent supply of drinking water. But doesn’t California have a number of desalination plants along its coastline, with the largest being the Carlsbad Desalination Plant in San Diego County? These plants already help supplement the state’s water supply during droughts, but I got the idea that the article was treating it as something new.
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Desalination plants are infrastructure and up until this point, I think the technology is fairly expensive. This article was talking about an invention that was for households, not towns. It would affordably provide a single family unit drinking water if they had access to the ocean. Clearly, it’s not going to single-handedly solve the looming global water crisis. But it’s one sustainable solution in the toolkit we need to be working on.
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Yes. If you are one of the millions of subsistence fishermen living on small islands, something like this could make a real difference. It solves a specific problem, it does not need to power warp drive as well.
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Collect the salt in a container along with the recycle and dump back in ocean. Balance would stay the same. Just recycling.
VMIMan
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Assume ten million people in some coastal city are doing this: the quantity of sea salts involved is such that salinity off that piece of coast would spike to deadly levels.
One option could be turning the salt into large blocks, like half a meter diameter, then transporting each day’s salt out to the middle of an oceanic gyre and dropping these overboard. The blocks would sink and the salt would return to the sea slowly as they dissolve.
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Dry the salt properly, and send it to Detroit, Michigan, where we can just fill the old salt mines back in with newly reclaimed salt.
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That would work.
Assuming the salt originally came from the ocean adding it back should not change the balance.
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Or sell it as “artisan salt”
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The trick is “adding it back” in a way that doesn’t boost local concentrations too far from the norm.
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True that a sane approach would be required. The process would be distributed around the world.