Are we salting the earth?

We never shoveled snow growing up. I chalk it up to the fact that we were two girls with a single working mother. She didn’t feel like shoveling, and she didn’t feel like telling us to shovel, so winter just did its thing. The snow that slid off the roof made a heap that we’d eventually have to climb over to get into our front porch. And it melted every spring, no shovels required.

BUT, I’m a homeowner now, and it snowed four inches the day we moved in.

I bought a snow shovel and did my sloppy best clearing the driveway, leaving in my wake only a few innocuous-seeming piles of snow… which metastasized overnight into nodules of rock-solid ice. I had transformed our driveway into a slippery minefield, just begging to break the ankle of some new homeowner inching along beneath the preposterous weight of an oak desk or the cumbersome, jiggling mass of a queen mattress.

And that’s how I found myself hacking away at my driveway with my new snow shovel. I guess this is why people salt their driveways.

Are we salting the earth? I thought. We wouldn’t dump a bunch of salt on the roads every winter if it weren’t safe, would we?

As it turns out, yes!

(I should note here that as a professional journalist, I have the privilege of writing about the interesting questions that cross my mind. Not only do I satisfy my curiosity, I also get to talk to interesting experts, and I get paid! Life is awesome!)

In the ’50s, the U.S. used 1 million tons of road salt. In 2019, it was 24 million tons. The expectation these days is that roads should be just as drivable in winter as in the summer, even in New England or Michigan. But salt is harmful for soil, water, and animal health. High salt concentration kills plants in roadside soils. Deer like to lick salty roads, which increases the chance of collisions and roadkill. Salt accumulates in water, which is toxic for aquatic life and is associated with higher concentrations of radium.

The solution: Stop using salt.

… which obviously isn’t going to happen. There are alternatives (magnesium/calcium chlorides, beet juice, pickle juice, molasses, using brine in some cases and salt in others, salt-sand mixtures), but they’re still not great for the environment. There are ways to limit salt use (thorough plowing, efficient equipment, training to make sure only as much salt is dispersed as is necessary)… but less salt is still salt. And there’s exciting scientific research (porous roads, solar roads, reverse-engineering anti-freezing molecules from nature) that, even if it does prove to work, will take decades to implement.

As I researched, I found myself asking the question every journalist asks about every article they write: What’s the point of this? Am I applauding the local government for doing its best (it truly seems to be)? Is this an article about groundbreaking research at our university?

And then I thought about how I usually feel when I read the news: helpless, small, and scared. Well, not this story! Salt in the ecosystem is scary, but change is possible, and it happens one person at a time. I ultimately decided to use this article as a way to communicate information and solutions for our readership. The cool thing about my new hometown is that people here seem to really want to do the right thing. That’s something to be proud of, and something I’ll keep in mind when I’m shoveling my driveway.

The finished product: Salty Streams