A Salty Situation- How Does Road Salt Affect Freshwater Ecosystems?

Living in Canada, icy roads are a major problem we face for a large portion of the year. As we know, icy roads can lead to slips and falls, among other inconveniences. A quick and easy solution to this problem is road salt, but recent research suggests that this may not be the perfect solution after all. Scientists have found that road salt has an extreme negative impact on the environment, including harming freshwater and other aquatic ecosystems. Are the public safety benefits worth harming the environment for?

Source: ThoughtCo.

The biggest concern with road salt is how it affects our water freshwater ecosystems. Canadians toss more than 20 million tons of road salt onto our roads every winter, and these huge amounts of road salt don’t just disappear. When snow and ice melt, road salt washes away into our lakes and streams, then reaches our groundwater supply. This increases the salinity of our water, resulting in saltwater creatures appearing in our freshwater streams and lakes.

For example, road salt contamination is thought to have brought the Blue Saltwater Crab into Mimico Creek in Etobicoke. The Blue Saltwater Crab typically lives in the briny waters off of Nova Scotia, which makes it so strange that this organism has appeared in the GTA. At first, it may not seem like much of a problem to have more species in an ecosystem-- the more, the merrier, right? But the introduction of any new species to an ecosystem drastically changes that ecosystem and can do more harm than good.

Fortunately, scientists have found some potential alternatives to road salt. Some scientists believe that solar panels could replace asphalt to melt ice and snow in the winter by heating water pipes embedded in the road. This would eliminate the use of road salt on our roads. However, something that we can all do now is to use unconventional de-icers like beet wastewater, pickle juice, potato juice, and cheese brine. These alternatives tend to be cheaper than road salt, and just as convenient. But these alternatives aren’t all perfect-- beet wastewater and cheese brine don’t smell the best, and beet wastewater can cause oxygen depletion in waterways.

There are several major organizations that are trying to mitigate this problem. For example, the National Center for Biotechnology Information researches the long-term effects of over-salting the roads and the impact on the aquatic ecosystem. They also help raise awareness about this issue. Another organization is ‘Smart About Salt’ which is a non-profit organization/winter salt management program that monitors the salt in the watersheds in Ontario. The Government of Canada also has a program to encourage large municipalities and provincial governments to effectively reduce their salt use on roads.

If using road salt is so problematic, why are we still using it? The answer is that it is cheap to use. Environmentally-friendly alternatives tend to be more expensive to use than road salt, and doing so would require the Ministry of Transportation to invest in new spreading equipment. Plus, the existing alternatives come with their own downsides. Using road salt in Ontario is practically unavoidable. So far, no one has invented a cheap, yet eco-friendly way of getting rid of snow and ice off our roads, except perhaps the shovel.

By Isaac Leung and Aaniqa Karmali