ESSA is a salt production facility located in Baja Mexico. It is located a unique location. The geographic conditions needed to produce salt through solar evaporation occur only rarely. Finding a site large enough to produce salt in commercially viable quantities is even more unusual. The ESSA facility located in Baja, Mexico is a joint venture between the government of Mexico, which owns 51 percent of the business, and Mitsubishi Corporation of Japan which owns the remaining 49 percent of the company.
ESSA exports salt produced by solar evaporation of areas flooded with sea water. A byproduct of the production process is salt brine. The environmental problems that ESSA is having revolve around the impact that ESSA has had on the ecosystem in which the facility is located. These problems were widely publicized when 94 black sea turtles, which are an endangered species of sea life, were found dead near the ESSA facility. A lengthy scientific investigation to the deaths of the black sea turtles revealed that they had died when an accidental leak from the ESSA facility resulted in toxic levels of salt brine being released into a relatively small area of a lagoon the turtles were hunting in at the time of the leak.
The deaths of these endangered turtles prompted environmentalists to question whether the ESSA facility could be operated safely in such an ecologically diverse and fragile area. Environmentalists also reminded the general public that the ESSA facility was close to the spawning grounds of the gray whales. ESSA has argued that there is no evidence to support the conclusion that its operations are harmful to gray whales, noting that the gray whale population has increased during the decades that ESSA has been in operation. However ESSA is careful not to take credit for this population increase, which probably has more to do with the ban on commercial whaling than on any activities by ESSA in Baja, Mexico. ß
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