Christmas and Road Salt:
Foe to Friends of the Creek
By Kate Alexander
February 4, 2022
It’s Christmas-time again, and like many other Americans born in the Northeast, I’ve come home for a holiday of relaxation and cheer in the woods with family and friends. After a few days of being at home for the holidays, the noise inside the house starts to overwhelm me, so I slip away to amble toward my favorite neighborhood creek down the street, past where the streetlamps end. As kids, my sister and I found safe haven down by the creek, making mud cakes and forts every day after school some 20 years ago.
As the sun sags down over the street ahead, I can still see the flurries in my hair and lamplights glistening on the melted snowflake puddles at my feet. The puddles are covered in rock-white salty crystals, known as road deicing agent, just like most of my hometown streets after a big snowstorm. Today, the woods around the creek are surrounded by gates, put there by the town parks department a few years ago. When the gates are closed and locked after dark, I have to make the choice between trespassing and fence-climbing or skipping the scenic route.
By the creek, I grew up with a protect-nature-over-everything mindset, and tonight as I walk I let my mind wander and flow like the water dripping from the salted streets, through the street drains, and into my favorite creek, dividing the woods into fat, snowy piles of Christmas cheesecake. As tots, we used to share the creek with frogs, minnows, and so many other small creatures. Nowadays, I don’t have the time to sit by the creek and wait for the animals to reveal themselves to me, but I believe with all of my heart that their descendants are still all around me, hiding., but I believe with all of my heart that their descendants are still all around me, hiding.
As I age, I see my parents becoming more feeble and susceptible to slipping on the ice. Although I have known for some time that salt is not an environmentally-friendly option, I still appreciate that salt as a deicing agent protects them from bad falls on invisible black ice. But tonight, on my nocturnal stroll, I feel as my creek’s kindred spirit, wondering what the salt does for the little creatures in the creek and if there is an equally effective anti-slip alternative that could protect them from habitat salinization. Good to here, but you haven’t actually said that salt is a problem, yet you have said that creeks need protection.
Eighteen million metric tons of road salt, or Sodium Chloride (NaCl), were applied in the USA in 2018, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest. Almost all of that salt was eventually carried by rain and melted snow to rivers, streams, and groundwater, causing detrimental impacts to drinking water and ecosystem function. A study published the year before, in 2017, investigated long-term chloride trends from deicing roads with sodium chloride in 361 North American freshwater lakes. That collaborative study found that most urban and rural lakes showed increasing long-term trends of chloride when surrounded by more than one percent of impervious land cover preventing water from entering the soil (like parking lots, roads, and buildings). The authors of those findings emphasized that preventing salinization of freshwater lakes is critically important to protecting freshwater ecosystems, drinking water, aquatic habitat, recreation, fisheries, and irrigation.
High levels of salt in surface waters can lead to a phenomenon called freshwater salinization syndrome (FSS), which can be toxic to some amphibians, fish, and bugs. Road salts can also increase the mobilization of metals in the soil and in pipes, leading to radioactive materials like radium becoming more prevalent and concentrated in surface and groundwaters. Concentration of radioactive materials can lead to undrinkable water and harm fish and wildlife.
Great alternatives to replace road salt for mass application are sugar beet juice and calcium magnesium acetate (CMA). Sugar beet juice, a seemingly ridiculous alternative, is a high-performance substitute for road salt and almost completely biodegradable. Calcium Magnesium Acetate (CMA) is more expensive than sugar beet juice, but also an effective road salt alternative. The aquatic toxicity of CMA to freshwater marine life is also low.
After jumping the fence for the second time that night, I start to wander home, placing my boots back into my old snowy tracks from earlier that night. I plan to bring up sugar beet juice and calcium magnesium acetate (CMA) at the town hall meeting before I have to leave next week, making a case for road salt alternative. If I succeed, by this time next year, less salt will reach my beloved creek and the gills of my freshwater friends.