(Un)Salty Solutions: Kinder Deicing Methods

This week’s blog was written by Quinn, a Bucktails alum. Quinn is really curious about nature and enjoys writing about what he learns. He works with the Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful campaign as a Youth Ambassador. When he is not out on the trails near his home, Quinn can be found playing drums, dancing, playing hockey, managing a VR esports team, biking, or hanging out on the couch with his two cats.

Now I’m bound to expect a salty mouthful when I go to Virginia Beach every summer, but in my local Antietam Creek? No. The fish, plants, crawdads, snakes, and microorganisms in that freshwater stream aren’t expecting it either, but too often, they are getting a big taste of it whether they want it or not. Yes, due to the application of deicing solutions like sodium chloride brine and other hard crystal sprays on road and sidewalk surfaces each winter, the nearby ecosystem becomes a repository for the run-off. But are there any less toxic alternatives? Funny you should ask because I spent 2 years researching the impact of 3 kinds of deicers, and I came to a clear conclusion – magnesium chloride is your friend, but sodium chloride and calcium chloride are not – along with trying to use as little deicer as possible.

Ever notice how the bushes or grass nearest to the roadways or even your own street look yellowed, brown, or are susceptible to weeds in the spring more than other areas of your lawn? That’s often due to those big deicing trucks that spray brine and other crystals all over the road. But the damage doesn’t stop there. When the ice melts and the rains come, the solution of salt and water drain into farm fields, wetlands, low lying plains, streams, ponds, and lakes. In some instances, the waterways become saltier than the ocean itself. Needless to say, this salt is not in the right place, and it invades the health and living conditions of nearby flora and fauna.

But there is something that can be done. Granted, deicing agents on road surfaces are needed unless we’re going to stop driving and start walking each time mother nature gives us icy and snowy conditions. But, knowing whether some deicing agents create more environmentally hazardous saline runoff than others, would help us mitigate the problem.

Enter, my science project for the past 2 years. When I treated pinto bean sprouts, which are highly susceptible to salt of any kind, to three types of salt, I found that there were significant differences in the impact on plant health. I exposed the sprouts to sodium chloride (the same salt you sprinkle on your popcorn), calcium chloride, and magnesium chloride. This saline irrigation showed that plants exposed to sodium had a 54% deterioration, and calcium 45% deterioration, but magnesium only caused a 3% deterioration.

This result was beyond my wildest expectations, because the magnesium outperformed just plain dechlorinated tap water. Why? Well, as it turns out, magnesium is an important contributor to plant health. In fact, farm fields often become magnesium-deficient after significant crop usage, which is why it’s one of the ingredients in common fertilizers. It’s actually essential in producing chlorophyll, which is needed for plants to make food for themselves through photosynthesis. If you ever notice that your house plant has a yellowing of its leaves and isn’t growing, that could be due to a lack of magnesium. I have to do more testing, but my guess is that the soil I was using to grow my sprouts from dried beans didn’t have very much magnesium in it to begin with. So when I treated it with the magnesium chloride, the plants just took off compared to the plain water samples. But one thing was clear – the sodium chloride and calcium chloride were extremely harmful to the plants in just 2 weeks of irrigation, whereas the magnesium chloride allowed the plants to thrive.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you go and dump a bunch of magnesium chloride in your flower bed, but I would suggest using it sparingly on your sidewalks and driveways in winter instead of the other alternatives. You should find that you have a lot less damage around the edges of your lawn and gardens in the spring. But buyer beware! So many of the deicing bags state that they are “safe” or “safer” or even “safe for paws”. Safer than what? You can’t be sure, but it is a clever advertising trick. Many of these products contain mostly sodium chloride (the most harmful) and very little of the safer magnesium chloride or sometimes “urea”. Don’t fall for it. You’ll have to pay a little more for it, but choose the magnesium chloride and you’ll be creating a safer environment for everything around your home and wildlife.

But don’t stop there! If you want to help beyond your own backyard, encourage your local municipalities, counties, or state to get on board, too. Many local and state governments are under pressure every year to cut their maintenance budgets. A quick fix is often found in replacing magnesium chloride-based deicing solutions with sodium chloride. I’ve even heard a head of county maintenance report that “we don’t use that ‘dangerous stuff’ like sodium on our roads, we use a brine solution”. Well, brine solutions are nearly all dissolved sodium chloride – the maintenance leaders just don’t realize it. And in areas where communities switched from magnesium to sodium to reduce cost, they eventually found that they were risking even more in economic loss due to environmental damage that threatened their wildlife recreation. Take Montana for example where a local DoT decided to stop using magnesium to save $120,000. The problem was, the state earned $288 million from fishing tourism alone, and salty lakes were going to damage an anglers’ paradise and risk millions to the state’s economy.

So in the end, when it comes to lessening the toxicity of deicing run-off, not only is environmental protection the right choice for a healthy earth, it’s also the right choice for a healthy economy.