Just a pinch of winter salt goes a long way
You can tell snow is coming in Ontario by the blizzard of salt that hits the roads and sidewalks before the flurries even fly. Once there was a time when we, a hearty winter people, beat back the snow with shovels. Now, lazier, we do it with fist and truckfuls of salt.
Salt rusts your car, devours concrete, kills street trees, ruins your shoes and causes white stains that will creep up your fancy pants and elegant long coats all winter long. My dog, who refuses to wear those little dog boots, yelps in pain when we walk after a salting.
A friend, who uses a wheelchair, says rock salt can damage her wheel bearings and gets on the push rims of manual chairs and, subsequently, her hands, clothes and mouth. She has to wipe off her rims each time she comes in. The salt also sticks to her tires and, since she can’t take them off like shoes, gets all over her floors.
The salt we throw on the streets and sidewalks doesn’t stay there or magically disappear either: it increases salinity in our water, causing further problems. Road salt may have even contributed to the Flint, Mich., water crisis.
“For organisms that live in the water, it’s the equivalent of changing the atmosphere that they’re living in, like smog days for us,” says Angela Wallace, manager of watershed plan- ning and reporting at the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA). “The most sensitive species will be killed earliest and other impacts will be felt later in the more tolerant ones.” Some GTA streams can be as salty as seawater at times, Wallace says, such as Duffins Creek in Pickering that TRCA considers generally healthy.
“A few years ago, salt water Blue Crabs got into Mimico Creek and survived for a long time,” she says. “Salt water creatures shouldn’t survive in freshwater, but the salt was so high they could. If salt water entities can survive, it suggests native freshwater species won’t for long.”
Though winter salt is a necessary evil, we can use it much more sparingly than we might think and still be effective.
“In documented cases, we use 100 times more salt than what is required,” says Tim Van Seters, senior manager of the TRCA’s sustainable technologies evaluation program. “That’s a phenomenal amount of salt. You actually have to sweep it away.” The right amount of salt can change slightly, depending on conditions.
“The University of Waterloo has done quite a bit of research to see what the right level is,” he says. “The emerging consensus is about 58 grams per metre squared. What that looks like on the road or sidewalk is just a slight scattering of salt with a lot of space in between the rock pieces, not covering the whole surface. A lot of individuals think you need to cover the entire surface to be effective but that’s not true, that’s not how it works.”
Salt, he explains, gradually melts, and that meltwater gets under adjacent areas and melts it there. A little goes a long way.
Cities such as Toronto have begun using an anti-icing liquid brine mixture that is applied to roads before a snowfall, appearing like lines of white dust on the road. This, says Van Seters, means upwards of 30 per cent less rock salt can be used later. For individuals, he recommends shovelling early and often and, if you must use salt, using a shaker to more evenly spread less of it on the surface than you can by hand.
Businesses and institutions that use contractors are anoth- er area that needs work.
The Milton-based Smart About Salt Council is a not-forprofit that offers training and certification in good salt practices for contractors, but it’s not mandatory. Beyond changing our regulations to require certification, Van Seters points to New Hampshire where government didn’t mandate certification, but instead provided indemnity in cases of slip and fall if a contractor or property owner is certified.
“It addresses the key reasons why we apply too much salt,” Van Seters says. “Fear of liability.”
This way, there’s a built-in incentive to make sure contractors are certified, and contractors and property owners can mount a due diligence defence if they are sued.
“What that requires is that you have tracking software so you know when, where and how much salt you put down. If you have those kinds of records you can fight these things in court.”
Snow clearing contracts can also pay by event or season, rather than the amounts used, and require efficient spreading equipment. “Specifying a lot of these things is not necessarily going to make it more expensive, just weed out less scrupulous contractors that aren’t using these best management practices,” he says.
This winter, try picking up that shovel first instead of reaching for the bag of salt. This is Canada, after all.