Environmental activist Sue Nissen wears a teaspoon on a string around her neck, which she likes to hand out to lawmakers during hearings in the Minnesota state legislature. That’s because one teaspoon of salt is enough to pollute five gallons of water, making it inhospitable for life.
Road crews dump more than 20 million metric tons of salt on U.S. roads each winter to keep them free of ice and snow – an almost unfathomable number of teaspoons. Now, Nissen’s organization, Stop Over Salting, is pushing for Minnesota to pass a bill to reduce that figure by helping applicators learn how to use less of it — a technique called “smart salting.”
The reason, she said, is because the state’s freshwater bodies are in a crisis: 54 lakes and streams are “impaired” by high salt concentrations, meaning they fail to meet federal water quality standards, while dozens of others are drawing closer to that tipping point, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. But environmental activists and scientists argue that it’s possible to maintain winter safety while reducing the amount of salt spread on streets and highways.
“There are solutions,” Nissen t... Read more
