When you think of pollution and cars, what do you think of? Probably the stuff that comes out the tailpipe, like carbon dioxide.
Of course it's much broader than that. The endless rows of rusted cars in junkyards, the oil and gas leaching into the ground, oil spills, and the earth's natural resources used to build cars.
But what if you were to learn that each year local governments all over Canada, the supposed defenders of the environment, dump millions of tonnes of pollution on the road every winter, perhaps for no other reason than because it's accepted practice and it's a cheap solution to an icy problem. If you haven't already guessed, I'm talking about road salt.
We blame road salt for ruining our cars well before their time, wrecking our roads and even ruining our pant cuffs. Blame the salt all you like, but it doesn't end up on the road all on its own.
You're probably thinking we're not talking about much salt to keep the roads clear, just so we can drive to the pizza joint in the middle of a storm when we shouldn't be out at all. Not so fast. Hunting around on the Internet I came up with a small, but eye-opening number. It's not uncommon to read that high-snow areas dump, on average, as much as 19 tonnes of salt on 1.6 kilometres of highway lane per winter.
That number is startling, simply because you can't see it piled up on the side of the road . because it's leaching into our precious ground water as the snow melts.
Do a little research and you'll find all sorts of road-salt studies on damage to plants, wildlife and water, dating back 20 years in some cases. And then there's the decay of our vehicles and the premature repair to roadways due to salt use. It's tough to put all that into dollars and cents, especially when considering the environment, but that's the only tangible thing that government money managers deal with: the budgeting process. Road salt, all by itself, without considering the cost of the damage it does, is cheap and plentiful.
But if we've known that road salt is a problem for decades, why are we still using it? Science can put 10,000 songs on a device the size of a pack of gum and develop computer software to prevent a vehicle from rolling over, but it can't make a better road salt?
Actually, it can, and has, but one report of many I reviewed puts the cost at 10 to 15 times as much as road salt.
But, really, is that so bad if, by its use, we can reduce environmental, vehicular and transportation infrastructure damage that likely costs us billions of dollars per year to fix?
Isn't looking only at the price of road salt tragically short-sighted? And cost aside, isn't it just wrong to dump a known pollutant into the environment in that volume?
Yes, no doubt, but advocates would say it's a small price to pay to save drivers' lives. And maybe, just maybe, we turn a blind eye because without it we seemingly wouldn't be able to travel in the on-demand style to which we've become accustomed. Whatever happened to staying off the road when it becomes icy?
Maybe the bigger question is, how can we change? In my view, local government needs to be subsidized by those who would directly benefit from the cost savings of road salt's replacement: we, the taxpayers.
Before you get out your poison pens (or keyboards), we taxpayers have actually already paid some of the money. Instead of governments spending it on road damage/maintenance due to salt (such as rebuilding concrete bridge decks) and the purchase of salt itself, governments would spend it on the new-and-improved road de-icer, which would presumably become less expensive over time with increased volume.
That's offset by what we would pay ourselves for being able to keep our vehicles longer, with fewer repairs and increased resale values.
To put it into perspective, if we use nine million tonnes of new-style road de-icer per year (which would match our average salt usage per year, according to an older report that cites the National Research Council) at an estimated price of $500/ton (road salt appears to run about $30 per ton), that's $5 billion plus the costs of converting to the new de-icer (trucks, storage, etc).
It seems like a lot, and it is, but consider that we pay nearly five times that amount ($24 billion, according to the International Carwash Association) on "battling automobile corrosion damage" and the issue of cost seems easily solvable . once we can see the big picture and the payoff that comes with it.
And that's just scratching the surface since we haven't talked about reduced damage to road infrastructure and bridges.
There's no question that we need to keep our roads clear of ice and snow for safety's sake, but there appear to be newer and better ways than with road salt.
