Finding sustainable alternative building materials is key to reducing the environmental footprint of the construction industry — one of the world’s largest contributors to climate change. According to Israeli designer Erez Nevi Pana, sea salt could be one of these materials.

In an effort to showcase how the material can be used as a building block, the designer used five tons of salt from the Dead Sea for his recent Crystalline collection, which consists of four sculptural elements: a ladder, boulder, steps, and a walkway.

All of the Crystalline elements are made from solid salt, except for the ladder, which has an aluminum base. The use of salt aims to draw attention to the amount of salt leftover in the Dead Sea’s evaporation ponds.

“It was essential to present a product that benefits from the use of a large quantity of salt; in order to direct the discussion to the enormous amount of salt, neglected each year in the evaporation ponds,” he told Dezeen. “With Crystalline, the goal is to create an element that looks stable and firm, yet poetic and expressive by using a mass of salt with a definite shape.”

To create the collection, Nevi Pana first extracted the salt from the Dead Sea, after which he treated it in different ways to create the final designs. For one part of the installation, the designer submerged some of the blocks that he had created back into the Dead Sea evaporation ponds, where the natural crystallization process added more salt layers on top of the rigid shapes.

Nevi Pana hopes to later use salt from the Dead Sea and other saltwater bodies as a sustainable construction material for buildings. He says that the salt blocks have a high degree of strength relative to their size and mass.

He believes that the salt building blocks could be a great way of using the brine that is a byproduct of desalination plants, which are becoming increasingly common as water becomes scarcer.

“In environments where the abundance of salt is present, there is no logic in importing sand from disappearing beaches,” Nevi Pana said. “I can imagine salt cities being built right there — white, glossy natural structures emerging.”