As the founder of the Salt Symposium, I am pleased to write the forward for this special edition of the Environmental & Engineering Geoscience (E&EG) journal. We are grateful for the opportunity to showcase the Salt Symposium and its wide reach. We hope to increase awareness of the need for chloride reduction strategies and forge many new avenues toward a lower salt future.
The Salt Symposium was founded with a mission to increase awareness of the chloride problem and provide insight, networking, and inspiration across the variety of stakeholders moving toward a lower salt future. The year 2024 marked the 25th Salt Symposium, a milestone we could not have imagined when hosting the first symposium in 1999. We salute the many presenters who have shared insights and inspired audiences. Our symposium sponsors play a key role in subsidizing registration so everyone, regardless of financial situation, is welcome to the conversation and has an opportunity to participate.
We understand salt is widely used and serves as a valuable tool in our society. Only recently have we paid attention to the back-end price of salt use. The Salt Symposium was the first event to bring people of diverse backgrounds together to look at the legacy created by our abundant salt use. In the United States, the taxes we pay support government initiatives for the greater good of our communities, and purchasing salt for winter mobility is one of those initiatives. Some of our salt is privately purchased, such as fertilizer salts (with potash being the most common) and water softening salt. However, regardless of who purchases the salt or how it is used, we all pay the price for using chloride because it shortens the life of our infrastructure and threatens aquatic life and the viability of our drinking water. It is a permanent pollutant in water, never biodegrading. Salt sterilizes and destabilizes soils, creating hardships for a variety of plant and animal life. Although we see some of these problems daily, the culprit often goes unrecognized, and I theorize it is due to our comfort with salt. The saltshaker on the dining room table is an unquestioned friend of the family, so we have been slow to associate this with a pollutant of top and growing concern.
To take action, we must first recognize the threat. We need to understand the salt put on our popcorn may not cause a global crisis, but the massive amount of salt imported into our communities each year will disrupt the ecosystem, likely beyond repair. We need to look for innovation across the world to adjust our path forward. We need everyone to share perspectives as we imagine a lower salt future.
The Salt Symposium has long recognized that everyone’s expertise on chloride pollution is needed as we seek to understand the problem and develop practical chloride reduction strategies. Although faced with an enormous challenge, we can imagine a future that includes salt reduction and crop health, salt reduction and winter driving safety, salt reduction and water conditioning, and salt reduction across many industries.
Our typical Salt Symposium agenda features topics and speakers from across the world. In this collection, we offer you a sample of topics that might appear in any given symposium. This issue features articles that provide insight into the chloride problem and includes the following:
Alycia Overbo, PhD, Communications and Strategic Initiatives Unit Supervisor at the Minnesota Department of Health, looks at a way to quantify the chloride contribution from farming in “Examining Chloride in an Agricultural Watershed Using a Chloride Balance Model.”
Okiemute Commander, MS, and Eric Peterson, PhD, Professor of Geography, Geology, and the Environment at Illinois State University, share insights in the “Agricultural Contribution of Chloride to a Saturated Riparian Buffer System: A Case Study in Central Illinois.”
John McDaris, PhD, Education Associate at Carleton College in Minnesota, predicts when the Twin Cities metropolitan aquifers will reach the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s chronic chloride standard of 230 mg/L in “Automated Groundwater Monitoring in Twin Cities Aquifers Shows Anthropogenic Changes.”
This issue also features articles that provide insight to guide our path forward in salt reduction, including the following:
Scott Koefod, PhD, Principal Scientist at Cargill, addresses one of the highest salt use events, freezing rain, with his article “Dilution Rate of Solid NaCl Anti-Icers Under Freezing Rain Conditions.” As the winter maintenance industry retools for liquid deicers and blends, he offers further insight on one aspect of their performance with “Accurate and Simple Prediction of Ice Metling Capacity in Chloride Deicer Brine Blends.”
Catherine Harris, “Pollution Prevention Specialist from Madison Metropolitan Sewerage District”, shares the results of the pilot program, which studied the cost and effectiveness of lowering water softener salt use by incentivizing home water softener efficiency upgrades.
I encourage you to contribute to the growing research pool centered around chloride understanding and reduction. Thank you to the E&EG journal for going above and beyond to share this platform to broaden awareness on this important topic. I hope you enjoy these articles!
If you are interested in presenting, sponsoring, or attending future Salt Symposiums, visit https://www.bolton-menk.com/salt-symposium/ to learn more.
