Hyde Park, Vermont Reduces Road Salt by 40 Percent with Sustainable Salt Use Practices

Road salt, used to ensure safe travel on winter roads, negatively impacts the environment by entering waterways, killing vegetation, and contaminating soils and groundwater—including drinking water wells—as it runs off roads. To help minimize such impacts, communities are taking action to reduce the amount of road salt used during winter snow and ice management. One of those communities is Hyde Park, Vermont.

Led by Mark French, Road Foreman, the highway department team in Hyde Park, Vermont, has reduced rock salt use on its 21 miles of black top roads by about 40% by implementing a variety of sustainable salt use practices. Their efforts to implement these practices began in 2016 when they started calibrating their equipment and tracking salt distribution. The following year, they began using air-ground temperature sensors. Rather than simply salting an entire route from end to end, they could determine whether or not to salt in any given location based on current road conditions. For instance, if they observed that the pavement in one location was already at 35°F and the day was forecast to get warmer, they could skip salting there as they knew ice would not form. However, if the pavement temperature in another location was closer to or below 32°F, then they would salt to prevent ice from forming.

In 2019, Mark purchased a used brine maker and worked with his team to set up a few trucks to pre-wet the salt they were spreading. By applying a salt-water mixture (called brine) to dry rock salt immediately before it is applied to a road surface, road salt application is both more efficient and more precise. To effectively prevent ice formation on surfaces (which is the goal of road salt application), rock salt must be wet. By using the brine, the team ensures the road salt is effective immediately upon hitting the road. Pre-wetting the road salt also makes salting more precise, with the wet salt sticking to the road rather than bouncing off the road surface, as dry rock salt may.

By 2023, the Hyde Park highway department had saved enough salt through this combination of sustainable salt practices that community leaders supported Mark to upgrade their existing brine maker. Mark opted to upgrade the Hyde Park system to Cargill’s Accubrine® automated brine maker. This brine maker has the capability to mix up to 6,000 gallons of brine per hour. To make the brine, Mark or his colleague, Ryan Nolan, sets the desired rock salt-water concentration of 23.3% on the main controller and adds a bucket loader of rock salt to their ~2,200-gallon tank. Then, water is added to the tank automatically. The brine maker mixes the solution of salt and water while measuring the concentration of the solution. Once the 23.3% solution is made, the brine maker automatically pumps it to the outside tank for storage and future use. Ahead of or during a storm, the Hyde Park team loads brine from the outside storage tank into the tanks on their trucks so it can be used to pre-wet the salt. They spread the brine at about 7 gallons per minute onto the dry rock salt at the spinner, which is a spinning device that distributes the salt from the plow truck. You can see this entire process in this video.

For municipalities or others interested in learning more details about the Hyde Park practices and cost savings they achieved that allowed them to make further investment in their new brine maker, and/or to access training videos and other resources that aim to help municipalities, commercial salt applicators, small businesses, custodians, and individuals reduce use of salt during winter, visit the Salt Savvy Champlain website.