I have dealt with R.O plants before and the amount of chemicals spent in treating the water is just to much, from 100% saline water, you get about 80% water and 20% saline water that is supersaturated with salt.
To show how bad the reject water was, we tried using it for irrigation, grass turned yellow in a matter of days, and it's the water that's being fed back into the oceans killing seaweed hence affecting an entire eco-system.
Issue is that we don't have scarcity of resources, we just don't know how to manage them well.
Wait, you're saying that the super-saturated salt water is the rejected water, right? And you attempted to use it to irrigate crops? Doesn't that attempt lack sense? The point is to use the desalinated water, not the saline water.
The issue was to prove how salty the reject water was, we had to show the boss saline water cant be used for irrigation because he kept insisting we use it.
Got it. I guess it was worth a test. But when you say desalination turns 0% valuable water into 80% valuable water, I'd say that's pretty fantastic.