In the wintertime, Wisconsin is one salty place: all over our cars, our shoes and boots, tracked into buildings. It’s a mess. Thankfully salt season is almost over, but it’s never over for our lakes or even our drinking water wells.
Find out what happens to all that salt when winter is over, and hear from an advocate who’s working to teach all of us out to be salt wise.
Host:
Amy Barrilleaux
Guest:
Allison Madison, Wisconsin Salt Wise
Resources for You:
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Transcript:
Amy Hello and welcome to another episode of The Defender, Wisconsin’s environmental podcast powered by Clean Wisconsin, your environmental voice since 1970. I’m Amy Barilleaux. It’s that time of year, you know, when the snow’s melting, everything’s soggy and muddy, you have to wipe off your dog’s feet five times a day. It’s not just kind of a pain, it’s also the time of year when our environment gets hit hardest by road salt. Because all that salt we put down over the winter doesn’t just disappear in the spring. It gets carried away. with the snow melt and runs right into our water supplies. And when I say all that salt, I mean a lot of salt.
Allison As a state we put down probably roughly between one million to two million tons of rock salt a year across the state.
Amy But there is a growing movement to finally get a handle on Wisconsin’s salt problem. I talk with one dedicated advocate who’s leading the way to make all of us salt wise. That’s right now on The Defender. In the wintertime, Wisconsin is one salty place. It’s all over our cars. It’s in our cars, tracked into buildings, all over our shoes and our boots. It’s a mess. Thankfully, though, salt season is almost over, but it’s never really over for our lakes and even our drinking water wells. A little chemistry lesson, salt is made up of sodium and chloride, and when those chemicals mix with water, they form a solution and they stay there. Getting salt out of water once it’s in is really hard And I’ll see you in the next video. really expensive. That means education and prevention is key because most of us are probably using way more salt than we need. Joining me is Allison Madison with Wisconsin Salt Wise, a small but mighty effort to teach everybody about how to stop oversalting in the winter. So where does all the salt we saw all over the ground this past winter ultimately end up?
Allison So after salt melts snow and ice, it makes its way into our fresh water, making it less fresh every year. So we see salt levels spike up in local streams in the wintertime as it makes its way directly into our surface waters, sometimes during the storm, sometimes during later melt events. And we are also seeing salt water make its way into our groundwater, which is our drinking water.
Amy So, I mean, we’ve been putting salt down for a long time, decades, why is it suddenly like we’re thinking about this issue or this issue is kind of coming up?
Amy Now that’s a great question. So I think for the average person, we don’t have a lot of like historical memory. So we just think, well, this is what we do in the winter. It’s all always been this way. And it hasn’t, like you said, it’s been a number of decades, but, um, salt use started roughly in the 1960s in, in Wisconsin. And after that, um, we saw that it helped, um, reduce number of accidents and people got. on board and salt was relatively cheap. So it went down in larger and larger quantities and we’ve just kind of ramped up our salt use in the last several decades. And every year as we put it down and it makes its way into our water, we’re slowly salinizing our water. So the problem is getting worse year after year and it’s gotten to the point now where it’s having an impact on our freshwater ecosystems. It’s also having an impact on our groundwater, our drinking water quality.
Amy It used to be, speaking of things that we used to do, I feel like it used to be I’d see more sand, you know? It was just kind of like wintertime and sand and now I hardly ever see sand. Does it seem like people are putting salt down, and not just everyday people, I think more like the people who put salt down in shopping centers and things like that. They’re putting salt down to keep people from slipping, like for traction.
Allison Yeah, so I think there have been some shifts in the last, let’s say 20 -ish years. I mean, I grew up in Northern Wisconsin, North of Eau Claire, and there’s definitely a different mentality up there compared to Madison area, Milwaukee area, kind of Fox Valley, in terms of what people’s expectations are for winter weather, right? And the type of shoes that you need to wear the right footwear, right? Or thinking about your tire tread. So I think there have been some shifts to try to accommodate people and have bare pavement everywhere and salt is one tool and has become kind of the the primary tool for winter weather. You know there are other tools right shovels and snowblowers and the use of sand. Sand doesn’t melt snow and ice the way that salt does but it can provide traction it can safe, you know, traveling surfaces. I know the federal highway administration has really made a big push away from sand on roads where people are gonna be traveling at higher speeds, but on lower speed roads or areas where people are walking, sand is a great alternative.
Amy I mean, it’s really, when we think about, okay, where do we use salt in the winter, I think we think about sidewalks and roads, but we don’t always think as much about parking lots. But when I’m out and about in the winter, and when you realize that too much salt is around, then you see it everywhere. And so when I’m out shopping or whatever, I see a lot of salt at stores, you know? Even under awnings that are covering sidewalks, you know just salt everywhere. So, um, why is it that, yes, roads use salt, you know, municipalities use salt, but, um, when you’re at a shopping center, it feels like the salt is crazy.
Allison Yeah, I definitely would agree that we see the highest rates of use and perhaps overuse of salt on parking lots and kind of commercial sidewalks where we have businesses that are concerned about their liability. So I really do believe it’s kind of the fear of that slip and fall lawsuit that drives the over application of salt salt itself has a little bit of a cost. Um, to apply it, there is a lot of damage that salt does once it’s applied, destroying sidewalks and doing damage to buildings and of course, damage to our water, but the cost of one slip and fall lawsuit really outweighs that, um, in the minds of most property owners, owners, property managers. And so, um, there’s really a push and on the contractors to just go out there and people. the business owners want to see that salt is down and they feel like that’s their best insurance policy against a lawsuit.
Amy But is it really an insurance policy against a lawsuit? I feel like, you know, in the winter, things can get snowy and slippery, and you’d have to really try hard to prove negligence in the middle of a snowstorm.
Allison So, unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case right now. It’s really easy to go after contractors, even if there’s just one, you know, small patch of, of a slick surface and an entire parking lot, so they can be held liable for that in the state of Wisconsin right now. There is one state, New Hampshire, has a limited liability protection for contractors and the property owners. that says if a contractor gets trained in best practices and they follow those best practices in terms of winter maintenance, snow removal, salt application, and they document what they do and they’re calibrating equipment and applying the correct amount based on the pavement temperature that they are protected against a lawsuit. Because like you said, it’s winter, right? In these snowy states and there is some responsibility on the individual. and just some knowledge that, yeah, you’re out in the winter and there can be inclement weather and we can only expect kind of that due diligence, right? The lack of negligence on behalf of the people maintaining those surfaces.
Amy So I know you and Wisconsin Salt Wise have done a lot of work trying to educate contractors, letting them know how much is too much. So how much is too much? When we’re out walking around, what are the things to look out for when we might kind of know, hey, this is too much salt?
Allison Yeah. So that’s a pretty big question, Amy, um, because I think it, it comes down to at some level, kind of like our norms and expectations. Um, I had somebody visiting me this summer from Germany. And when I was telling him about the work that I do, he was really confused because he said, you know, you, you can put salt down on sidewalks. He’s like, in my city, you can’t do that. It’s illegal to put salt down on sidewalks.
Amy Why is Germany better than us all the time?
Allison So I looked it up and there are a number of municipalities in Germany where you cannot put salt down. You can use some sort of material like sand for grit for traction, unless you have a very steep area or some steps, that would be the exception to allow the use of salt. So just the idea that we’re gonna put salt down at all on like a flat sidewalk surface is kind of questionable, right? Like, is that really needed? In terms of thinking about how much is needed, we have a rough estimate for people who want that. I think for me, I try to go out there and shovel as much as possible. I’ll go back out actually with a broom and sweep the remainder, and then I usually don’t have to put any salt down. But there are different circumstances based on if you’re on a south -facing or north -facing kind of. side of the building and yeah, whatever those expectations might be at your property. So a 12 ounce kind of mug of salt is enough for about 10 sidewalk squares. So you really wanna distribute that salt out with like a few kind of inches between grains of salt and give it a little bit of time. I think time is a key part of this salt does lose its effectiveness as pavement temperature drops. So, you know, when you’re just below freezing, a little bit of salt goes a long way as the temperature starts dropping, more salt is needed. But by the time we get to 15 degrees Fahrenheit, most public works agencies stop putting down granular salt because it’s determined that salt isn’t effective below 15. they want to switch to use either sand like we talked about earlier and just kind of aim for some traction or a lot of municipal agencies will add in some magnesium chloride or calcium chloride that have lower effective melting temperatures than straight rock salt or sodium chloride.
Amy So when people find out that you work with Wisconsin Salt Wise and you are trying to advocate to get us on a low -salt diet here in Wisconsin, or at least our roadways on a low -salt diet, do they start coming to you with like salt horror stories and like sending you pictures and just inundating you? Because that’s what I feel like doing right now is, oh, you know the other day how much salt I saw. Do you get that a lot?
Allison I do get a lot of pictures sometimes, yeah, from email or social media. And I do try to follow up as much as I can. Although we’ve got a lot of resources on the SaltWise website to try to make that easy for individuals to kind of, you know, make that phone call with some talking points or send the email. And I’m happy to be CC’d on those, but it really helps kind of relieve the burden on me if people can kind of make that first touch. And also I think it’s helpful for business owners to know that their customers are seeing this and see this as a problem and not as something done to protect their safety.
Amy Yeah, so there’s a store that I go to once a week. And it’s a store that says it cares about the environment, right? And every wintertime, I go in and I say, hey, there’s a lot of salt down. It’s too much. And you’re very close to a municipal drinking water well that already has a problem with too much salt getting into that drinking water. And every time, they say, well, we don’t handle maintenance on this building, the property manager does, but we’ll try to get a message to the property manager. So what advice do you have for people like me who, I mean, I try to do the right thing and say something, and I feel like it’s just kind of passed off to somebody else and there’s not really, you know, this store is the main property in the shopping center, there’s not really an advocate past me.
Allison Yeah, I mean, I think at that point, if you’re in Wisconsin, especially in the Madison area, that’s where I do have a lot of contacts with different contractors and could potentially do a little extra digging. Sometimes I know, you know, the individual, if you know the contractor, make a phone call and I can sometimes get things done a little bit more quickly, but yeah. also been in that situation where you go into the store and the employee needs to try to get the, you know, the manager’s number and then the manager maybe knows the property manager and the property manager has to get the word down to the contractor and hopefully that gets all the way to the frontline, you know, individual that’s out there doing the application or sometimes coming back and sweeping up the extra salt. But I am working right now, it’s like in the works, with some more local contractors to try to really solidify what would be understood as best practices, maybe like a salt -wise kind of like silver and gold, but also what are the practices that really just are not okay anymore. As we see the city of Madison work really hard to try to dial in their salt application rates. and drop cell use by about 40% on average. We really need everyone else to be coming to the table here as well and be part of some, some real kind of like roll up our sleeves conversations about what are we doing and how do we move forward together.
Amy And you mentioned sweeping up the salt. So, you know, if you’re putting down salt and it doesn’t come out right, or if you think, okay, it’s gonna get cold and everything’s gonna freeze and then it doesn’t and everything’s warm, you can just go ahead and sweep it up and use it again.
Allison So I would recommend finding a dry day and sweeping that salt up and then trying to use it again that winter. I have made the mistake of sweeping up salt when there’s some moisture in it and salt also is hygroscopic, which means it absorbs moisture from the air and that salt turns into a brick in my five gallon bucket. So that’s still in my basement.
Amy Yeah, you’ll use it one day. Yeah, one thing, because I learned about this issue years ago when Madison Water Utility started discovering higher and higher sodium and chloride levels in one of their drinking water wells. And so, you know, you go around just looking at salt on the ground all winter, kind of getting frustrated. But last winter I walked into a coffee shop that had used to be just terrible on use. and I saw the perfect distribution of salt grains. And I was, I mean, I think I gave him a shout out on my limited social media following. media follows. But I think it shows that, you know, all it takes is kind of like one shopping center or salt applicator group at a time to kind of start to see a difference.
Allison Yeah, I am really hopeful. I’ve seen a lot of kind of progress in the Madison area this last year. I actually worked with SIMA, the Snow and Ice Management Association, which is an international organization, U .S. and Canada, and we hosted the first ever Midwest Snow and Ice Conference. So that was held in Pewaukee, Waukesha County Technical College, and we had over 100 snow professionals come. mostly from Wisconsin, but, you know, Minnesota, Illinois, kind of Ohio, Indiana. Um, and, you know, I was one of the presenters, but a lot of the people presenting were winter maintenance contractors and talking about, you know, how they’re dialing in rates and the kind of the, the benefits of that to them and switching over to incorporate or go fully into liquids. And there are just so many individuals that I get to work with who are Really? passionate about this work and have become kind of evangelistic, even though they’re not necessarily the people who want to be on the podcast or on TV, right? So part of my work, I think, is being a cheerleader and encouraging and then trying to get some of those folks to stand up and to, yeah, just going to be recognized a little bit for the work that they’re doing.
Amy And it’s hard work because change is hard, especially when it comes to public safety and there’s a lot of misinformation around how much is needed and things like that. So on the flip side, the other day, I was at a different shopping center and it was 41 degrees outside and there were big, crazy piles of salt. I mean, I actually posted this on my social media and I haven’t posted about salt in a long time. because it was so, so bad. And so if there are people out there like me who see a lot of salt, what is the next step that they should do?
Allison So, if you are in the city of Madison and you see salt left on a public sidewalk and really it can be any amount of granular salt left more than a day after the storm event, you can actually take a picture of that and you can report it to the city through their report a sidewalk problem and the building inspection team goes out, will follow and starts out with just education and information to the property owner, but then could eventually if it becomes a repeat problem, follow up with a fine. So I think from my brief conversation with folks on the building inspection team that has, they feel like it’s actually been a pretty successful program. They’ve had some good conversations and seen some change. I hope to actually do a followup kind of webinar with them about that in the next few months. But if you see it, an egregious spill of salt somewhere else, I would say you can reach out to me, wisaltwise .gmail .com and or Dane County Public Health, but they can only really follow up if there’s more like a salt spill or something that’s really kind of considered over the top where some action could be taken.
Amy And I guess, you know, start with kind of going inside too and trying to educate them. Yeah.
Allison Starting first, I think recognizing that for the average person, like when salt goes down, they’re seeing it as a good thing. They’re looking out for safety. And a lot of people still don’t recognize that all that salt does have an impact.
Amy I think the numbers that I’ve heard is one teaspoon of salt pollutes five gallons of water. When you say that to people, what’s the reaction?
Allison I think it, it is impactful. Um, I think it’s shocking to a lot of individuals who, um, put down, um, not teaspoons, but tons of salt, hundreds, thousands of tons of salt. I mean, as a, as a state, we put down probably roughly between 1 million to 2 million tons, um, of rock salt a year across the state. So it is staggering. And I think it’s hard to even kind of wrap your head around what that means in terms of if one teaspoon hurts five gallons of water, like how many gallons of water, you know, polluting with the amount of salt we’re putting down every year. Um, but I do see that that is a number that sticks with a lot of individuals. Cause like I said, as I work, um, have worked over the years with different, um, municipal staff. and I hear them talking to one another and I see some of their presentations, they’ll reuse that statistic. So it is something that I think does stick with people and makes that impact. And then I like to focus on the flip side of that, that every teaspoon of salt that we don’t apply, we’re protecting five gallons of water.
Amy That’s a really more happier way to look at it. Now, Wisconsin’s been working on this salt issue for eight to 10 years probably, trying to lower the amount of salt that we use across the state. And I think we’ve made some progress, but where do you want us to be eight to 10 years from now? What is your hope for Wisconsin?
Allison What I would really like to see is that we just raise the bar in terms of how winter maintenance is done both on the private side as well as on the public side with public works agencies. So I think that part of that requires greater awareness and understanding that salt is a pollutant in our water. We need that to be kind of common knowledge in the public. And then we need to have our agencies, public agencies, kind of committed to adopting best practices, as well as incentivize contractors and potentially, and I’m hopeful that part of that is removing that, that big barrier to them, that, that fear of liability. So I see Wisconsin Salt Wise as really working to accelerate that adoption of best practices by getting the information out there. by providing more events for knowledge sharing and really showcasing the incredible successes that we have out there. So a lot of agencies have dropped their salt use 30, 40, 50 plus percent on average on an annual basis. And so we have those early adopters, we’re starting to get the word out, but we really need everybody to follow these best practices.
Amy And so the website for people to go to to learn more?
Allison wisaltwise .com.
Amy Great, Allison, thank you so much for being here and explaining this tough challenge but I think with people like you at the helm we’ve got a real a real shot at finally getting a handle on all the winter salt use. So thank you so much.
Allison Thank you so much, Amy.
Amy And thanks for listening to the Defender podcast. If you have a question, an environmental issue you’d like me to talk about, or just want to share some thoughts, send me an email, podcast@cleanwisconsin.org. I’m Amy Berrilleaux, and you’ve been listening to the Defender, talk to you later.
