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Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

nice. >In these scenarios (0.15g and 0.3g) about 90% they estimate comes from salt.

for a few years now we have switched to rock salt completely at home. it's like 20-40% more expensive and we have to use a hammer/grinder every month or so but we are doing that.

by reducing say 90% of the microplastics, is that.. good?

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I also switched to "Himalaya" (Pakistani) salt, hoping that is low in microplastics.

yep. the exact same thing. i get to buy them in huge 5 Kg rocks because its just a few hundred km away but that is the reason.

Honestly that's kinda cool. And I refuse to imagine anything but a melon sized hunk 'o salt on the dinner table, with a small hammer and chisel for those who want to salt their meal.

nah. we arent those kinds of brutes. we simply buy a big hunk, every other month on a sunday spend time with a hammer and break it down to small pieces. then use a food processor to powder it

I think if you keep the salt exposed at the atmosphere, you'll quickly run into the problem of it absorbing a lot of water.

Quite. I learned this the hard way when I moved to a place with a swamp cooler. My salt lamp started weeping brine and salt sludge onto my side table.

A thing to note there is that there are plenty of other contaminants possible (and found in studies) in brands of pink salt (basically all pink salt is branded Himalayan salt), at much higher concentrations than sea salt, including lead. It also has no added iodine, which depending on your diet and region and such may be a concern.

What makes you think that’ll reduce it?

i am thinking, most of the salt consumed comes from sea salt that has those microplastics. if we use rocksalt, well that microplastics wont come from seasalt.

Sea salt made from current seawater would include microplastics from that water, but rock salt would not as it was formed before these plastics existed. On the other hand, various mines of rock salt may have all kinds of other mineral additions that may be harmful for human consumption, so most rock salt is used for e.g. deicing roads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h23rF0xrhTE

historically this mine for example has been used to extract salt for generations........

In a lot of regions, "farming" sea salt basically means pouring sea water on top of plastic tarps and evaporating water. Over time, the plastic degrades and you get microplastic particles in your salt. You also need to rake these salt fields pretty heavily, which also generates microplastic particles.

Which is sad because salt "farming" used to be done on clay soil near river deltas, which was a perfectly good medium for this job.

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