1998

Sweetener Road Salt!!

The Rochester radio stations have been covering the opening of a company which sells a new kind of road salt. This new road salt is made from a mixture of the dregs of corn sugar and lithium chloride. The mixture has a melting point of minus ten degrees Fahrenheit. In theory, that makes this material twenty times as effective as our regular road salt. Either part by itself works only as well as any other salt.

Rock salt or sodium chloride is the road salt of choice in western New York because of our salt mines. In some parts of the country, calcium chloride is cheaper and therefore preferred. Road salt is useful when we have snow and ice on the road and the temperature is near freezing. These chemicals lower the freezing of their mixture with water by about two degrees per molecular weight of salt in a liter of water. If you do the scientific conversion, it takes quite a bit of salt to lower the freezing point more than a few degrees.

In Short Tract our colder temperatures usually offset the use of salt and limit it’s usefulness. The new mixture would be much more effective. However, we do not know what other problems could be involved. We do think out highway department should try a small amount to find out how useful this new material is.

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