The snow-white mountain stands tall in the middle of the green plain: Unexpectedly, it is a giant garbage dump!

In the town of Herringen, central Germany, there is a giant pile of sodium chloride (table salt), so large that it is called Monte Kali.  It is the world's largest man-made salt mountain.

Monte Kali's origins can be traced back to 1976, when potassium salts began to be mined from mines around the town of Hessen. Prior to this, potassium was used to make products such as soap and glass, but today it is an important ingredient in some fertilizers, synthetic rubber and even some medicines, so mining has increased in recent decades.

One problem was that mining potash produced a lot of sodium chloride as a by-product, so somewhere to store it was needed. The company that ran the potash mines then started thinking about dumping all the salt in one place a few kilometers from Herringen.

Over the years, they created a giant mountain of salt that the locals named Monte Kali or Kalimanjaro (a play on the word Kalisalz, which means 'potassium' in German).

The giant salt mountain Monte Kali.

As of 2017, Monte Kali has reached an altitude of 530 meters above sea level and covers an area of ​​over 100 hectares, so it is no exaggeration to call it the world's largest artificial mountain .

No matter where you stand in the town of Herringen, you can clearly see the salt mountain Monte Kali, or even when driving on the highway, one can be overwhelmed by its enormity. Over time, it has become a tourist attraction. Many people feel excited when admiring the snow-white salt mountain standing out against the green plains.

In fact, at one point, people could pay to climb this giant salt mountain as part of a guided tour. It takes about 15 minutes on average to reach the 23-hectare summit. From the top, visitors can see the entire Werra Valley all the way to the Rhön and the Thuringian Forest.

This mountain is being fed more than 1000 tons of mosquitoes every hour.

Although it is difficult to estimate how much salt Monte Kali consists of, most sources put its current volume at around 236 million tonnes .

The giant mountain is the size of 114 football pitches and weighs as much as 23,600 Eiffel Towers. With more than 1,000 tonnes of table salt added every hour of the day – around 7.2 million tonnes a year – it is getting noticeably bigger.

A salt mountain of this size in central Germany, near forests and the Werra River, raises a number of environmental questions. Research has found that the growing salt pile, while also producing more brine, has caused the Werra River to become saline , and the groundwater in the area has not been spared the same fate.

Of the 60 to 100 species of invertebrates that once inhabited the area around Herringen, only three remain today.

This could be described as an environmental disaster , but the potash industry is really big in the area, creating thousands of jobs for local people, so closing production was not really seen as an option by the authorities.

Kali und Salz (K+S) , the company that operates the mines, has had its license extended until 2060 and even a request to expand Monte Kali by another 25 hectares was approved in 2020.

If you're wondering how K+S can dump over 1,000 tons of sodium chloride into Monte Kali every hour, they actually have a 1.5km long conveyor belt that doesn't require any human power.