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Comment by isthispermanent | Hacker News Reader

This kind of reminds of when we dump tons of salt on the roads when winter storms come around the east coast. It solves one problem but what other problems is it causing?

It would be incredibly naive to think dumping all these chemicals on the ground wouldn't cause some type of negative externality.

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You are confusing different classes of chemical contaminants. Rock salt which is spread on roads consists of a chemical subset of seasalt - which is completely safe to humans as evidenced by healthy coastal communities.

The contaminants discussed here are of an entirely different class, they are toxic at trace levels. Sea salt and rock salt are ubiquitous natural materials, if they were toxic at low levels plagues of disease would occur until animals evolved resistance to them.

It's not just about humans. Waterways, wildlife, agriculture. The term "Salt the Earth" is shorthand for covering land with enough salt to prevent anything from growing.

Whether it's directly benign to humans is one thing, but the indirect effects are hard to account for.

That phrase appears to be apocryphal, salt quickly disperses in practice and no land has ever been known to be deliberately contaminated by it.

I feel these vague worries about road salting relate to this article about highly toxic contamination as a kind of "what-about-ery" but are even less connected by having been introduced as "kind-of-reminds-me-about-ery".

We're dancing around the point here.

Point being, that we cannot always determine the effects of continuously repeating small, seemingly benign actions. Taking tens of thousands of tons of salt from one place on Earth and dumping it on another where salt is relatively scarce has unknown side effects.

Hand-waving over it with "eh, but it probably won't hurt anything" misses the point of the discussion. That is the attitude that tends to get us trouble.

Smoking: "eh, that's probably not what's causing you to get sick" Climate change: "eh, it's probably not us" etc.

Since you are curious I really suggest you look into it - read some environmental studies and articles on salt pollution, get some details on the actual situation to offer rather than you know, just sayings and analogies.

It rusts cars for one. It could make the soil too salty for growing if runoff accumulates in one place, but usually it will be diluted too much to matter. I don't know if chemicals other than salt are used commonly on roads, that could cause other issues.

Calcium chloride is also used -- it is more effective per pound and is thus cheaper to transport, plus it works at lower temperatures. And it rusts cars even more aggressively.

Zeolites are one of the widely used alternatives developed specifically to replace salt use. They are an oil derivative, so I am not hopeful of their long term effects. They are also very expensive comparatively.

Zeolites? Oil derivative?

Zeolites are used as catalysts in processing oil, but they're not oil derivatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeolite

Yes, I was wrong due to lack of research. I knew someone who had worked a lot on them at Chevron when i was a kid and just presumed.

Northern Maine is too poor to afford significant amounts of road salt, so they supplement heavily with plain dirt and sand.

That's often added for traction. We do that widely in Canada, even when salt is not used.

No, it's because salt stops working below a certain temperature.

The excess salt can disrupt soil ecosystems, but salt is not poisonous or carcinogenic. It's just a matter of having to much in the soil/water, which isn't permanent.

I'm really sensitive to whatever it is they've started using in the last decade or so. Get rashes and itchy eyes/nose just from particles coming in through the air vents. I often entertain moving back to the DC area, but every winter visit adds another notch in the "No way" column.

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