Two Thousand Years On, Pygmalion’s Lesson Still Applies—Especially in How We Treat Brine

Two thousand years ago, the story of Pygmalion warned of a simple but dangerous human tendency—the belief that what we create is somehow superior, complete, and beyond question.

It is a lesson that remains remarkably relevant today.

Across modern industry, companies continue to fall into the same trap. Technologies are developed, refined, and proven in a particular context. Over time, confidence in those solutions grows into attachment. And eventually, that attachment becomes a blind spot. The focus shifts from asking whether a solution fits the system, to defending the solution itself.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the treatment of brines.

For decades, evaporation ponds have been the default approach. They are well understood and, in remote salt operations, can be effective. But they are also fundamentally dependent on vast land areas, long processing times, and ongoing management. Even then, they typically recover only part of the available value, leaving behind significant volumes of residual material with limited or no commercial pathway.

In isolation, this may be acceptable. In today’s operating environments, it is not.

Modern desalination plants are built where water is needed most—near cities, ports, and population centres. These locations are defined by constraint: limited land availability, high land costs, and competing demands for infrastructure and development. In this context, the traditional pond model does not just underperform—it becomes largely incompatible. A land-intensive solution cannot be expected to integrate into a land-constrained system.

At this point, it is critical to distinguish between two very different objectives that are often incorrectly treated as one.

Desalination of seawater is designed to produce clean water. It relies on compact membrane technologies such as reverse osmosis (RO), which operate within a small footprint and do not require large land areas or pond systems.

Valorisation of desalination brine—the concentrated waste stream—is a fundamentally different challenge. Once the objective shifts to recovering the full mineral value of the brine, the system requirements change entirely. At that stage, there are only two practical pathways: land-intensive solar evaporation ponds, similar to traditional salt production, or advanced processing technologies, such as membrane-based systems, that enable recovery within a compact footprint.

The mistake is to treat these two objectives as the same. Desalination solves water scarcity. Valorisation solves resource recovery. They require different systems, different economics, and different thinking.

Yet many continue to apply a single solution across both.