If you dump it into an evaporation pond, you can pick up all the minerals and metals left behind such as lithium.

good. we got the minerals.

but now where do we put all of the salt?

Send it to Northern countries for road deicing?

They need less salt due to there being less ice due to global warming.

I seem to remember reading that dumping the brine byproduct from desalination in the ocean can screw up marine life. I don't have a reference ready, will look for one. I guess there might be a "right" way of dumping brine in the ocean without harming marine life, but I have no idea what that would be.

Plan it to be combined with waste water treatment or other cooling water from power plants to dilute it, or disperse it over a larger area. It goes into the ocean currently.

You can also dilute it with lots of seawater

It would cause areas of higher salt concentrations where it is dumped. They only way to not cause this (for large volumes of brine) would be to dilute it first and of course that defeats the purpose of salination.

You can dilute with treated waste water.

Pump it through pipe a few miles off coast?

It still doesn’t solve the issue.

Two of the major problems is brine doesn’t homogenize well and its denser than seawater. You end up brine that settles into ever nook and cranny on the sea floor without mixing back into the ocean.

Probably a solvable problem, but not something that has a good solution right now.

Pump it through pipes with holes in it, so that it leaks n% brine every x% miles. This assures dilution of the brine.

I worry about the waste which can destroy habitats and soil forever. I'm not a scientist, but I know what happens if someone pours salt on a garden, or a water habitat becomes too salty. Not good. Cheap is great, but something has to be done with the waste so that it doesn't cause more environmental damage.

https://news.sky.com/story/woman-whose-allotment-was-sabotag...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea