so there are little bits of the dead sea in cars and soda cans and exactly. so you got, what, 20 employees? 20 employees work here. meanwhile, at the other end of the lake, sam would love to expand the company his dad built. he says he s got a great product. it s pure, it has 21 different minerals that you don t see in other salts. oh, yeah. oh, that s nice. i love my salt, man. me too. and since he took his product to the fancy food show, he says he has plenty of demand. i have a bowl of tomatoes and all the sea salt i brought with me to the dead sea and i couldn t get enough. the following year i went and it s the same feedback. and that s when we got the whole gourmet line. his only problem, complicated local politics. let these guys go past. is that military going by? what is that? those are our neighbors.
palestinian named sam hallack. this is the only palestinian address on the dead sea. that s right. we are the last of the mohicans. at the other end of the lake is the massive fertilizer factories of dead sea works. these are part of a $7 billion israeli chemicals empire run by noam goldstein. how would you characterize the profitability of an operation this big? this is a perfect plant. every year his operation pumps 42 billion gallons of water out of the deeper sections of the dead sea into 60 square miles of shallow ponds. after that water evaporates, they vacuum up the millions of tons of minerals that go into everything from fertilizer and pesticide to soda cans and car engines.
that was a dock? yeah. oh, my gosh. so you can see the disaster here. but the optimism runs thin as the dead sea runs away. like sam, the big boys down south, both jordanians and israelis put the majority of the water back, but for him, it is a question of scale. and it goes back to the sea. we re living off of it. the main reason for the water level to go down off the dead sea is because there is no water entering into the dead sea. this is why. this is because of too many people. lot of people around, they want to drink. they want industry. so you blame the farmers, the water management systems up in the north? no, we are not blaming anyone. this is the fact which was published by the government. so you can say that our contribution to the reduction of the level of the dead sea is
pond of a giant potassium mind. this is the water of the dead sea. the dead sea used to be there. would you be willing to take home less of a profit if it meant saving this body of water for an extra century or two? i think that government should look for long-term always. you d pay more for that concession, if they asked? i didn t say that. you re asking me one thing, now asking a different thing. back up north, sam just wants everyone taking water from the dead sea to be mindful of the collective impacts. it s okay to have great businesses and be prosperous, but at the same time, you re not creating a situation where you re going to destroy the whole thing. yeah. it s frustrating, but at the same time, i think humanity eventually wins. you know, i hope so. that s my that s my hope. it will overcome.