Highway maintenance people involved with snow and ice control have two ultimate responsibilities. We are custodians of the roads; we also are stewards of the environment. Therein lies a dilemma. While salt makes us successful in achieving bare pavements in the winter, salt is not perceived as being friendly to the environment. Salt poses the greatest risk at stockpiles. There the concentration is greatest and the potential for contamination looms largest. If we fail there, the significance of how carefully we spread the salt onto our road surfaces is diminished. The damage would already be done.
Achieving our goal of safe, bare pavement is relatively easy with salt or its equivalent. If all of a sudden it were to be taken away from us, our duty as custodians of the right-of-way would become near impossible to fulfill. Therefore, we must use this compound in a manner befitting our role as stewards of the environment in order to retain it as a tool to carry out our other role as custodians of the roads. This paper includes some recommendations to help us do that
