Where do you think salt comes from? Outer space?
Ours comes from evaporation plants around the Great Salt Lake, and when it gets flushed through our softener systems, it drains back to...Great Salt Lake.
Well, ours doesn't. There are salt deposits in and around the Great Lakes where much of it is mined. But it's not in the water until we put it there.
We use a lot of road salt in the winter, too. My ex had high blood pressure and needed to reduce salt and I looked at ways to do that. Turns out our city drinking water, tested and deemed safe, is drawn from a large river and has 6 times the salt in it than well water. Then we're adding in water softener salt so that whoever takes water from downriver gets even higher concentrations.
