[OKC] From the Green Lantern: Salting the Earth

[Miles, Karen]

the green lantern 


Salting the Earth


Does road salt harm the environment?


By Nina Shen Rastogi
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2010, at 7:13 AM ET 

________________________________

Every time it snows, the road crews in my neighborhood spread loads of
salt all over the sidewalks and roads. I know it wreaks havoc on my car.
What does it do to the environment?

This is definitely an issue worth thinking about, considering that we
toss more than 20 million tons of sodium chloride on our roadways every
winter. That's about 13 times more salt than is used by the entire food
processing industry
<http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/salt/myb1-2008-salt.pd
f>  (PDF). Salt lowers the freezing temperature of water and thus melts
street-clogging snow and ice. But its public safety benefits do come
with some ecological drawbacks. 

The biggest concern with road salt is how it affects water quality. The
stuff doesn't just disappear when the snow and ice melts: It washes away
into lakes and streams or seeps into groundwater supplies. Researchers
in Minnesota recently found that, in the urban Twin Cities area, 70
percent of the salt applied to roads
<http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-02/uom-uom021009.php>
stays within the region's watershed
<http://www.epa.gov/owow/watershed/whatis.html> . Once it gets there,
the contamination is difficult and expensive to remove. (The study was
the first to analyze salt retention over an entire metropolitan area; in
other places, a greater proportion of the salty run-off may wind up in
the ocean.) 

Article continues at URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2244156/

 

Copyright 2010 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

 

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