You can tell snow is coming in Ontario by the blizzard of salt that hits the roads and sidewalks before the flurries even fly. Once there was a time when we, a hearty winter people, beat back the snow with shovels. Now, lazier, we do it with fist and truckfuls of salt.Salt rusts your car, devours concrete, kills street trees, ruins your shoes and causes white stains that will creep up your fancy pants and elegant long coats all winter long. My dog, who refuses to wear those little dog boots, yelps in pain when we walk after a salting.A friend who uses a wheelchair says rock salt can damage her wheel bearings and gets on the push rims of manual chairs and, subsequently, her hands, clothes and mouth. She has to wipe off her rims each time she comes in. The salt also sticks to her tires and, since she can’t take them off like shoes, gets all over her floors.The salt we throw on the streets and sidewalks doesn’t stay there or magically disappear either: it increases salinity in our water, causing further problems. Road salt may have even contributed to the Flint, Mich., water crisis. “For organisms that live in the water, it’s the equivalent of changing the atmosphere that they’re living in, like smog days for us,” says Angela Wallace, manager of watershed planning and reporting at the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA). “The most sensitive species will be killed earliest and other impacts will be felt later in the more tolerant ones.”Some GTA streams can be as salty as seawater at times, Wallace says, such as Duffins Creek in Pickering that TRCA considers generally healthy. “A few years ago salt water Blue Crabs got into Mimico Creek and survived for a long time,” she says. “Salt water creatures shouldn’t survive in freshwater, but the salt was so high they could. If salt water entities can survive it suggests native freshwater species won’t for long.”Though winter sal ...
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