The awareness of chloride contamination in our natural waterways is growing exponentially! Unfortunately so are the amounts of chlorides in our waterways.

Extrapolating that finding for all of North America, at least 7,770 lakes are at risk of elevated salt levels — a likely underestimate, the researchers said.

We need a grassroots movement to educate industry professionals on the dangerous and erroneous trend of using more salt to melt faster and reduce costs when the opposite is true.

No federal body tracks how much salt gets spread on our roadways or makes its way into our lakes. So the researchers gathered a vast number of data sets, produced by states, municipalities and universities. The study was the product of several “big, nasty, hairy heterogeneous databases,” as co-author Kathleen Weathers, an ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York, described it.

Please share this article to increase awareness of chloride pollution and how we can help.