The release of seawater desalination brine with a salt concentration about two times that of seawater without any treatment may cause serious environmental problems. Moreover, because of the higher concentration of dissolved salts present, the amount of recoverable resources is greater, but the impurities become more difficult to control. In this study, we conducted a three-step process to recover Mg resources from seawater desalination brine with Mg concentration of 2,340 mg/L, and determined the optimal conditions for minimizing the impurities and maximizing Mg recovery efficiency at each step. The process was as follows: (1) pre-precipitation of Mg using paper sludge ash (PSA) (PSA:brine = 1:40) (g:mL), (2) dissolution of Mg using 1.0 M sulfuric acid (H 2 SO 4) corresponding to one-fifth of the brine volume, and (3) precipitation of magnesium sulfate (MgSO 4) using ethanol (solution:ethanol = 1:1) (mL:mL). Under the optimal conditions, the reaction efficiencies of the three steps were determined to be 98%, 70.8%, and 88%, respectively, and the overall efficiency of recovering Mg from the seawater desalination brine was 61.1%. The MgSO 4 obtained in this study contained no impurities other than Ca, comprising as much as 6.7% of the precipitate.
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