I went swimming yesterday in our condo pool, and it had salt water in it. Lovely! Seems like this would be a green alternative to chlorine, but this was new to me. What do you know about this? Does it disinfect the pool?

Cory Brennan Permaculturalist and founder of Create Clearwater

EXPERT ANSWER: Salt pools do not remove the chlorine, they only help regulate it. Salt is converted to chlorine with metallic plates, and then reconverts to salt. It is softer on the skin and hair (salt exists in your pool in about the same amounts that it exists in your body) and it eliminates harsh chloramines which give the pool the strong chlorine smell.

Another alternative is ionizing the water with copper and silver, which appears to have far less of a toxic footprint both for swimmers and the environment and may be less expensive than either salt or chlorine.

But natural pools, filtered by plants and soil, are the greenest alternative we know of.