That's misleading. It's not technically a byproduct, but taking literally tons of salt that was spread evenly throughout the ocean and dumping it out at high concentration at the end of a pipe has significant (and bad) ramifications for the ecosystem at the end of the pipe.
Nobody said to dump it out a pipe at one single point. Spread it out leaky pipe style over a large volume of ocean so that the average salt concentration does not significantly rise.
