in the town
of Herringen, in central Germany the locals do not have far to walk,
photograph Wolkenkratzer/Wikimedia Commons, towering over the town is Monte Kali, a heap of sodium
chloride (table salt), potash salt started being extracted from mines
around the town of Hessen, potash was used to make products like
soap and glass, but today it is an important ingredient in several fertilizers,
synthetic rubber, and even some medicines, so extraction intensified over the
last few decades, the problem with potash is that mining it generates a lot of
sodium chloride as a by-product, so you need somewhere to store it. The company
operating the mines started dumping all this salt a few miles from Herringen,
and over the years it created a giant salt mountain locals named Monte Kali or
Kalimanjaro (puns for Kalisalz,
the German word for ‘potash’), and this is just one of many mountains of salt in
the area,
so how big is it? As of 2017, Monte Kali stands at 530
meters (1,740 ft) above sea level and covers an area of over 100 hectares, mass
at approximately 236 million tons. This thing covers an area as large as 114
football fields, and with over 1,000
tonnes of table salt being added to it every single hour of the day – about 7.2
million tonnes a year – it’s only getting bigger, research has found that the
growing heap of salt, which also generates a lot of brine, has caused the Werra
to become salty, as has the groundwater in the area, of the 60 to 100 species
of invertebrates that once called the area around Herringen home, only 3
remain, but local jobs depend on the mining of potash so much there is little chance of production being curtailed, Monte Kali is just the largest of several table salt
dumps in the region which has come to be known as “Land der weißen Berge”
(Land of the White Mountains), so how to get rid of several salt mountain? I guess we could all eat a tad more salt with our food, locally however, there will never be a gritting lorry in snowy weather running out of salt!
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