Ahh, such a great evening. Snow drifts past your window as the fireplace roars. Zeus is curled up at your feet, and your Tetris crown sits atop your head. And then you hear the whining. “Oh jeez, Zeus needs to go for a walk again. How am I supposed to properly reign as King Tetris when my dog constantly keeps me from playing?”
You look out the window and groan at the sight of piles of snow on your sidewalk. “Guess I’ll go get the shovel. Some salt would be good too.” You’re about to grab the bag, but something stops you. You see a hairy paw blocking the bag opening. Zeus is in your way.
Now why would your dog keep you from applying road salt to your sidewalk? So he can fulfill his dream of becoming an H2O hero, of course! Road and sidewalk salt has a huge impact on our waterways. Melting snow carries all of that salt into our lakes, rivers and streams. A mere five pounds of salt can easily pollute 1,000 gallons of water.
Help protect our environment and drinking water! By shoveling frequently and using more environmentally friendly de-icers sparingly, you can help save our river.
Be sure to spend 15 minutes watching “Improved Winter Maintenance: Good Choices for Clean Water,” a video produced by the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization in 2011. You’ll learn the best tools for keeping driveways and sidewalks safe this winter, what deicers work under different winter conditions and whether you should use them at all, the impacts of sand and deicers to our lakes, streams and groundwater, and how you can protect your pets from salt of course. Complete with comments from the sweetest Russian grandmother ever now living in Minnesota (she obviously knows her snow), the video highlights tools for snow removal you might not have considered and tips for how many pounds per square feet to apply if you do choose salt.
For more information you can visit HRWC’s Use Less Salt page.