Heavy brines or bromoacetic acid (78 per cent in water) can be used for drug production, serving as a catalyst and solvent, depending on chemical reaction. Moreover, heavy brines have low toxicity, are environmentally friendly and can be re-used several times, according to Chemada.

"Heavy brines can be recycled, you can recover it from one reaction and use it in the next reaction," Noam Greenspoon, deputy general manager research and development, told In-PharmaTechnologist.com.

"One can do this many times, which makes you feel less guilty about pollution. Also, the cost will be much less."

The most common applications for heavy brines are in bromination (the process of introducing bromine into a molecule), chlorination, halogenation and fluorination.

The medium currently in use in the same reactions uses aluminum chloride, which need to be decomposed and discarded as waste as there is no way of recycling it, according to Chemada.

The procedure is exactly the same except for using heavy brines as the solvent but the end product will still be the same.

Greenspoon claims there are no technical start-up barriers for the industry to take on the novel method. One can simply use the reactors that are already in place.

Heavy brines is currently in use as completion fluids in the oil drilling industry.

Chemada is a leading manufacturer of fine and specialty chemicals, located near Kibbutz Nir Itzhak in the south of Israel. The firm is a private limited company owned by Kibbutz Nir Itzhak (52 per cent), Kibbutz Sufa (22 per cent) and ICL Industrial Products (26 per cent).