Posted: January 27, 2025
Take action on road salt overuse!
Today marks the start of our annual Road Salt Reduction Week! This year, we’re shining a light on the harmful effects of road salt on our waterways while sharing solutions to reduce its impact.
New 5-Year Road Salt Monitoring Report
Today, we are releasing the findings of our 5-Year Road Salt Monitoring Report, shedding new light on the urgent need to protect our streams from road salt overuse. Ottawa Riverkeeper is grateful for the work of dedicated community scientists who have collected over five winter seasons.
The five-year results are in, and they are alarming! Chloride levels in most streams consistently exceed acute toxicity thresholds after winter trigger events, causing immediate harm to aquatic life. Collective action is needed to shift our culture of oversalting.
The report offers practical recommendations for everyone, from municipalities to individuals. These include creating and updating road salt management plans, calibrating equipment for more appropriate road salt application, and restricting salt use in sensitive areas. On a personal level, applying just the right amount of salt can make a big difference, with every small action adding up.
Take the Road Salt Reduction Pledge
This year, you can go even further to tackle road salt overuse: take the Road Salt Reduction Pledge!
Individuals and businesses can commit to simple, impactful actions like learning about road salt’s effects, reducing or eliminating its use, and spreading awareness to others.
By signing the pledge, you’re helping to build a culture of smarter, more sustainable winter practices. Together, we can protect our waterways, safeguard urban ecosystems, and inspire others to take action. Help lead the way!
Examples of how to achieve each of the actions in the pledge can be found below!
Reduce or eliminate your road salt use with these tips:
If you, or your landowner, are spreading road salt on the property of your home or business, there are many ways you may be using more than you need to. This overuse not only damages our shared ecosystems, but also harms your property and infrastructure, and costs you money.
Take some time to re-examine the use of road salt on your property, or if you live somewhere as a tenant or renter, advocate to your landowner to reduce road salt use. Here are some guidelines to help reduce, or eliminate, road salt use as part of your winter safety preparations:
- Don’t use road salt at temperatures colder than -7 C
- Road salt works by making a solution with water, and this new solution doesn’t freeze at temperatures between 0 C and -10 C, meaning ice won’t form. However, this solution will start to be less effective at temperatures colder than -7 C, and become completely ineffective when colder than -10 C, making the application of salt when the forecast calls for those temperatures a harmful waste.
- Use alternatives for traction, such as sand or gravel
- Salt is used to prevent ice from forming by creating a solution with water. It isn’t meant to give you a grip on ice that is already there. If you want something to go between your boot and the ice, consider something like sand or gravel instead.
- Shovel often to prevent ice buildup
- Salt is used to prevent ice from forming by mixing with water from melting snow. If you shovel away the snow early and often, there won’t be water present to form ice at all, and applying salt will be unnecessary.
- Use only as much salt as you need
- Applying road salt is all about creating a solution of salt with water, which means getting the proportions right. One common source of overuse is just putting down way more salt than you need. If you do need to apply salt, try to use only 2 tablespoons of salt per square meter of pavement or road. As a rule of thumb, you should only need about a coffee mug full for a 2 car driveway. If you are stepping on more than 7 grains of salt in a single step, you’ve used too much!
Spread awareness about road salt overuse with these resources:
If you want to easily share how people can reduce their road salt use, consider sending someone our blog with 5 Tips to Reduce Your Road Salt Use, an easy explainer about why and how people can cut back on using salt in the winter.
You can also send those curious to our Road Salt Usage Quiz, a great interactive way to learn about how much salt to use and when.
If you know a teacher, consider sharing our Teacher’s Resources with them. They include a module on how to teach students about issues with road salt, helping to shift our culture of overuse by educating the next generation in the proper application and usage of salt.
Finally, if you spot an overuse of salt in your neighbourhood and want to spread the word about needing to cut back, we have an easy resource that you can print at home and share. This bilingual flyer points people in the direction of learning more about the harms of road salt overuse!
Spread the Word
Help make Road Salt Reduction Week a success! Follow us on social media for daily facts, tips, and stories about road salt and its impact. Together, we can protect local waterways and create a healthier future for the Ottawa River.
Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Thank you for supporting Ottawa Riverkeeper’s mission to protect the river and its watershed! Go a step beyond and share the pledge online using the buttons below:
Something is different this year with the kind of salt being used. It leaves a white powder that remains, gets tracked into our houses, and coats electrical cords such as battery warmers and block heaters so that it is impossible (for me) to plug and unplug them. I have NEVER seen this before in my 35 years in Ottawa. So yes, you can buy a product to counteract this, but why should I have to spend more money to fix this new and vexing problem. Also your blog about salt says NOT TO SALT COLDER THAN -7 DEGREES! THERE IS ENTIRELY TOO MUCH SALT BEING USED! The salt I buy for personal use has NO white powder residue. What’s going on this year with the salt being used on Ottawa’s roads?! PLEASE LISTEN!!!
Please see Blhom St in front of St Thomas Moore school where the city has literally carpeted the sidewalks with metric tons of salt and way beyond what is necessary.
As a 22 year resident of the area I am concerned about what this is doing to our environment.