Toronto

I don't live in Canada, here from " random community ".

Fuck road salt! They know when they need to use it but spray that stuff all over the roads in my state at a hint of snow. Piles of it sitting next to a stream and then we don't even get snow, just rain, it's insane. They used to use a mix that was far more sand than salt in it until the late 90's (maybe even early 2k) and it worked just fine people got where they needed to go. Now with more cars having AWD they should need it less but now it is just straight up 100% salt crystal. It rots out cars and destroys the environment.

I stopped and talked to a worker for USGS (United Stated Geological Survey) and asked them what they monitor at a station down the street from my house at a small stream , i figured it was fertilizers or petroleum/ chems from surrounding suburban sprawl or a major 4 lane road that crosses a few miles upstream. They told me "salinity". It's from the road salt and they monitor it so they know how bad it is, nothing else.

The stream is a feeder creek to a secondary larger stream that feeds a river than a bay. I used to fish the secondary and walk my dog along it a few times a week and it got way worse over the course of 20 years that I was actively fishing.

They really need to be more judicious with the amount of that junk they put down as most of it is wasted and seems to do more harm than good.

There are rural areas near me that have stations for distribution of the salt and people I know who live there have poisoned wells and received a one time offer of $25k to replace damaged plumbing. The problem is even if they install a reverse osmosis system over the long term they still lose money.

Most of the alternatives she listed are just different ways of using salt. Every brine is still just salt. The additives in those brines do usually mean you wind up using less salt overall but you're still spreading a crap load of salt everywhere. The only way to avoid the salt altogether is by using sand instead but that doesn't work quite as well so you need to rely on people actually knowing how to drive.

Overall the best solution is probably to just use sand on most places and use a brine like beet brine only where absolutely necessary. Sand is even cheaper than salt so the cost of brining certain areas will be offset by the reduction in cost of using sand elsewhere.

It surprises me that the cost in damage done by salt doesn’t out way the cheap cost of salt itself. You’d think a city like Toronto would save money in the long run by using an alternative to salt, because infrastructure wouldn’t be as susceptible to corrosion.

Less harmful substitutes would be ideal but... change is hard.