The ocean has often been announced as a sustainable source of important materials for civilization. Application of the same extraction processes to desalination concentrate, rather than to unconcentrated seawater, will necessarily be more energetically favorable, so the expansion of seawater desalination in recent decades brings this dream closer to reality. However, there is relatively little concrete commercial development of ‘concentrate mining’. This review assesses the technical and economic prospects for utilization of commercially viable products from seawater. The most important technologies for economic use of products from desalination plant concentrate are technologies for more economic separation and technologies for more economic concentration. The most promising separation technologies are those, such as nanofiltration, which separate brine into streams enriched/depleted in entire classes of constituents with minimal input of energy and reagents. Concentration is becoming more economic due to rapid advances in Osmotically-Assisted RO technology. Despite very active research on many aspects of desalination concentrate utilization, it is likely that commercial development of the non-NaCl components of desalination brine will depend on the available market for NaCl, as the challenges and costs of extracting the other mineral components from bitterns in which they are highly enriched are so much less than those faced in direct treatment of brines.

Chain polymerizations are defined as chain reactions where the propagation steps occur by reaction between monomer(s) and active site(s) on the polymer chains with regeneration of the active site(s) at each step. Many forms of chain polymerization can be distinguished according to the mechanism of the propagation step (e.g., cyclopolymerization – when rings are formed, condensative chain polymerization – when propagation is a condensation reaction, group-transfer polymerization, polyinsertion, ring-opening polymerization – when rings are opened), whether they involve a termination step or not (e.g., living polymerization – when termination is absent, reversible-deactivation polymerization), whether a transfer step is involved (e.g., degenerative-transfer polymerization), and the type of chain carrier or active site (e.g., radical, ion, electrophile, nucleophile, coordination complex). The objective of this document is to provide a language for describing chain polymerizations that is both readily understandable and self-consistent, and which covers recent developments in this rapidly evolving field.