Getting Salty With Winter Road Maintenance

Jan. 1, 2011— -- While beautiful to look at, snow turns roadways into skating rinks. Coming to the rescue is the humble sodium chloride, also known as salt, which is far and away the simplest and most frequently used deicing agent on the planet.

But some cities are exploring new ways to make salt work smarter this winter. Perfect timing and beet juice may help put winter roads on a low-sodium diet.

Whatever is used to clear the roads, there needs to be a lot of it since the United States uses 20 million tons of salt per year on road maintenance. Most of that salt comes from American mines, where it's both plentiful and nearly dirt cheap (road salt costs about $60 per ton).

"Cost certainly is a factor -- because salt is around in big quantities, it's basically a commodity, and it's not too expensive," said Wilfrid Nixon, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. "Getting the substance on the road and having it act to stop the snow and ice to stop sticking from the road is relatively easy with salt."

Salt dissolves into ice molecules and lowers the temperature at which they will melt, keeping more ice from forming on roads. But when temperatures drop below 15 degrees Farenheit, regular salt loses its oomph.

There are also environmental concerns. When melting snow washes the salt from the roads, the chemicals can end up in local streams and rivers, spiking salinity and threatening aquatic life. A 2010 study found that water samples from streams in 13 northern cities showed levels of chloride that, according to Environmental Protection Agency criteria, indicate a potentially toxic environment.

"We were actually surprised about what we saw in the water samples," said Steven Corsi, an hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey's Wisconsin Water Center and one of the researchers who conducted the study. "The severity and the frequency of high concentrations of salt weren't expected."

Corsi said that because road salt can take a long time to make its way into shallow groundwater, salt levels can spike long after the snow is gone.