Jennifer Schurer hopes 500 signatures gives her petition a chance to persuade the City of Ottawa to reduce how much road salt it uses.
Schurer’s petition asks the city to consider
beet brine, an organic mixture of beet juice
, to lessen the harmful environmental impacts of traditional salting.
“I just think it’s a really neat alternative,” she said. “I’ve always felt that it’s important to be a responsible steward of the earth.”
Beet brine and other alternatives to salting have been adopted by municipalities across Canada and are less corrosive while also being just as effective at de-icing roads.
There’s already a high concentration of chloride, an element of salt, in Ottawa’s waterways despite only being a month into winter, according to a post on the Ottawa Riverkeeper website.
“Salt can’t be that silver bullet for all of our winter woes,” said Laura Reinsborough, the CEO of Ottawa Riverkeeper.
While road salt helps keep cars and foot traffic safely moving through winter, excessive use is bad for the environment. Road salt washes into watersheds, damages infrastructure and harms wildlife.
Across the 32 sites monitored by Ottawa Riverkeeper volunteers this winter, 64 per cent of the watershed samples had “chronic toxicity,” with 21 per cent at “acute toxicity.” Only 14 per cent — often in rural areas — had “safe levels.”
“That’s pretty extreme, and we wouldn’t normally expect that that early in the season,” Reinsborough said.
Ottawa west had the highest level of chloride concentration, at 613 milligrams per litre, but Ottawa centre (394) and Orléans (478) also had levels well above what a graphic on Ottawa Riverkeeper sets out as the safe amount of 120 milligrams per litre.
“Every single urban creek that we’re testing in Ottawa-Gatineau are already reaching toxic levels this year,” Reinsborough said.
Ottawa has used an average of 156,000 metric tonnes of road salt for each of the past five winters —
the most in Canada
.
The city said that’s due to Ottawa having one of the country’s largest geographic areas.
“This wide transportation network means that winter maintenance operations, including salt application, are delivered across a more expansive network than many other municipalities,” said a statement from Christopher Paquette, a program manager.
The statement added that the city used best practices to help “minimize environmental impacts” from salt while still meeting safety requirements.
Schurer said supplementing traditional salting with other methods, like her petition’s proposal to use beet brine, would have fewer environmental consequences. She added she was not asking for the city to completely redo its winter safety system.
“I think we can all agree that there’s just a lot of salt and there are better alternatives out there.”
Our website is your destination for up-to-the-minute news, so make sure to bookmark our homepage and sign up for our newsletters so we can keep you informed.
