I recently read an expert interview (in French) on the Chilean strategy concerning the production and transformation of lithium. The photos of salt ponds in the Atacama desert made me think of all the evaporated water which is not captured, although placing plastic screens over the ponds would be difficult at this scale.
But I imagined a continuous system where a hydrophile belt picks up a thin film of saltwater which is quickly evaporated into freshwater then the resulting salt is scrapped from the belt