The Egyptian Salts and Minerals Co. (EMISAL) is located on the southwest shore of Qarun Lake, Fayoum. The company was established to extract 300,000 t of salts from the lake Qarun. Beside the economic feasibility, it was envisaged that this would also improve the water quality and protects the aquatic life in Qarun Lake, which was facing death hazard due to the continuous increase in the lake salinity. An area of about 5 km2 was separated from the lake by an embankment and has been divided into lagoons as evaporation ponds. The original plan was to produce 100,000 t/y of sodium sulfate in addition to the extraction of 200,000 t/y of sodium chloride, and 20,000 t/y magnesium salts as the last stage. The sodium sulfate plant was implemented while the start up of other plants was postponed. The residual mother liquor from the production plant has been discharged to a further set of auxiliary evaporation ponds. In the first set of ponds, NaCl has been precipitated and harvested, resulting in a stockpile of some 1 million tons of coarse NaCl. Following NaCl precipitation, the residual liquor, bittern, has been discharged to a final set of lagoons, where as a result of continuous production a substantial reserve of bittern solution has been accumulated, which contains about 80,000 t of a mixture of magnesium sulfate and magnesium chlorides, beside other smaller quantities of other salts. An additional 20,000 t of bittern are produced annually. The bittern now represents an environmental hazard in two respects: (a) the concentrated bittern inhibits all natural growth in the lagoons and provides a source of high groundwater contamination, potentially, affecting neighboring agricultural lands if not controlled, and (b) the storage capacity of the lagoons is limited and a means of disposal must be found if the factory is to continue its prime environmental function of removing salts from Qarun Lake. Therefore, the company is planning to implement a project, which aims to extract the component salts from the bittern for commercial use.