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Winnipeg students hype hemp at city hall hoping to slash salt use on slippery winter roads | CBC News

It felt like the trio of Westwood Collegiate students had appeared at city hall dozens of times.

Grade 11 students Jasper Bain, Angela Gamayao, and Megan Morant came to the Infrastructure Renewal and Public Works committee to make the case for mixing salt — with hemp hurd.

The city is exploring ways to cut its use of road salt as a means of providing traction on slippery winter streets. 

Inspired by a contest — Caring for our Watersheds — sponsored by agricultural company Nutrien and administered through Ducks Unlimited at Oak Hammock Marsh, the trio started the project as part of their chemistry class.

With the help of their teacher they began experimenting by mixing salt with locally-gown hemp.

"Hemp hurd is actually created from the stalk of the hemp plant. So, the stalk is something that is not used for a lot of different things right now. But we think that using it as an aid to salt-based de-icers on the roads could be a really good place that it could be used," Bain said.

The students found a third of the salt mixed with hemp hurd successfully melted ice nearly as much as salt on its own. 

The approximately 26,000 tonnes of salt the City of Winnipeg uses to de-ice the streets not only erodes concrete, bridges, vehicles and other infrastructure, but has an ongoing impact on the environment. It leeches into the soil and waterways and harms plants and trees.

"At the end of the winter season you see all these white marks on the roads and you never really knew what they were from, but that was a result of dried up salt residue on our roads and it really make me think about how much we really are using and the fact that it's everywhere," Gamayao said.

The three students' project was in the top 10 of 365 written proposals and went on to place second among those finalists, winning $900 for themselves and their school. 

In the next phase, they can use part of $10,000 provided by Nutrien to find external partners and do further trials of their idea.

An eye was always on the prize of pitching to the city. 

"We were really working hard together for this project and our end goal was to get the city to notice. I know in our project this morning I talked about how we are going to start this pilot project, but we are hoping to that we be able to use within our school division and even our city," Morant said. 

The trio received praise from committee chair Coun. Matt Allard (St. Boniface), who received their request to present at city hall and bumped them up on the agenda to hear from them first.

"They reached out to my office last week and we forwarded their study and methodology to the public works department for their review. I'm also very interested in the outcome of their pilot project at Westwood Collegiate next winter, and feel a great sense of optimism and inspiration for the future hearing them speak," Allard said in an email to CBC. 

The trio will push their effort into a trial stage in their Grade 12 year by spreading a mix of salt and hemp hurd on the parking lot and walkways of the school and taking watershed samples for analysis. 

The three students credit the help they received from chemistry teacher Dave Shoesmith along with guidance from Amanda Benson at Ducks Unlimited to get this far. 

They say the many hours of work strengthened already good friendships and look forward to getting to the next phase of the work. 

The committee didn't just hear from the three students about alternatives to road salt.

Diana Nicholson from Cypher Environmental told councillors her company has an anti-icing product — a salt derivative that looks and acts like salt, but is non-toxic and non-corrosive and is environmentally friendly. 

Corrosion costs the world an estimated $2.5 trillion USD – RCI | English (rcinet.ca)

Scientists in Canada and around the world are bringing attention to issues of corrosion which can harm human health, damage infrastructure and cost trillions yearly. Scientists at Western University and others have proclaimed April 24, 2021 Corrosion Awareness Day.

Water from lead pipes may be toxic

One of problems in Canada and elsewhere is that there is a long history of using lead pipes to distribute drinking water. These pipes are susceptible to corrosion and the lead released into drinking water can result in reproductive toxicity, anemia, kidney and brain damage. Some Canadian cities and towns have begun to replace their lead pipes but have left it up to citizens to replace the portion of pipe that is on their own property. This is expensive and not everyone does it. For example, in 2016, it was reported that more than 200 homes in London, Ontario had lead pipes replaced but estimates suggest that about 4,350 homes were still fully dependent on lead pipes.

Spent nuclear fuel must be safe from corrosion

Another corrosion problem stems from the storage of used nuclear fuel. About 15 per cent of Canada’s electricity is generated from nuclear sources. Waste fuel takes about 100,000 years for its radioactivity to diminish to the level of natural uranium. There are about 2.9 million used fuel bundles that require safe storage and protection from corrosion. 

Road salt corrodes steel rebar causing concrete to fail

A third major corrosion issue in Canada is the effect of salt on steel-reinforced concrete used in roads and highways. In winter, road salt is used extensively to lower the melting point of ice so that roads are less slippery. The salt corrodes metal parts in vehicles and as ice melts, the salty liquid seeps into the steel-reinforced concrete of bridges. This accelerates corrosion of the steel rebar and eventually causes the surrounding concrete to break off. The damage is costly and if not repaired, can lead to safety problems.

Scientists give the example of the Gardiner Expressway through the heart of Toronto where, in 2012, multiple sections of concrete broke away and fell onto the road. 

How a B.C. snow plow dispute made its way to the Supreme Court of Canada | National Observer

The Supreme Court of Canada will review a case on whether or not the city of Nelson, B.C. is responsible for a leg injury a woman sustained while climbing over a snow bank created by the city’s snowplows.

The dispute started in January 2015, when Nelson resident Taryn Marchi parked her car in Nelson’s downtown core on a snowy day. While exiting her car, Marchi found herself blocked in by a snowbank left over when the city had plowed the adjacent sidewalk.

Marchi decided to try to get to the sidewalk by walking over the snowbank in her running shoes. What happened next was a severe leg injury that landed her in the hospital.

The courts did not initially favour Marchi, who decided immediately to sue the city of Nelson for negligence. When the case was first taken to the B.C. Supreme Court, it was dismissed by Justice Mark McEwan on Mar. 8, 2019. In his decision, he said that Marchi was “the author of her own misfortune” citing her choice of footwear on a snowy day. He ruled that the city of Nelson has followed their regular operations and held no liability in the case.

But it was the issue of liability that Marchi was specifically seeking out. She had already settled damage costs with the city, after incurring a severe knee injury that had to see her transferred to a Kelowna hospital.

o she decided to appeal. On Jan. 2, the B.C. Court of Appeal found that McEwan’s decision favoured the city and neglected Marchi’s claims that the city was responsible for creating pathways for pedestrians as part of their plowing operations. The judge's ruling was overturned and the court ordered a new trial.

In response, the City of Nelson sought leave to appeal from the Supreme Court of Canada, which the court granted on Aug. 20.

The difference between the initial ruling and court of appeal’s view boils down to the difference between policy decisions and operational decisions made by the city of Nelson.

In McEwan’s view, the city was not liable because they were policy based — the city had specific policy-based plans on how roads were cleared. They’re based on the availability of workers and prioritize getting roads cleared first, in a specific order, before dealing with snowbanks. Policy-based decisions are immune from liability.

But the court of appeal said McEwan was wrong to assume that the circumstances that led to Marchi’s accident were because of policy. They first pointed out that the city didn’t actually have any policy about snow banks left from plowing and whether passageways should be made through them for pedestrians. So they ruled that McEwan’s ruling, which assumed that everything was policy-based, was subject to argument.

The Supreme Court of Canada will hear the case, but has yet to set a date.

Marchi’s dispute with the city could change the way future liability cases are handled in Canada.

In their appeal, B.C. judges referenced a horrific case in 1989, when a man named John Just sued the province after a boulder from a rocky slope besides a highway crashed down into his car, killing Just’s daughter and leaving him severely injured. The court ruled that maintenance of rock slopes was outlined in the province’s policy, and so they were immune to liability.

The difference between “policy” and “operational” was as ambiguous back then as it is now. In the Just ruling, the judge noted that it was an issue that was “difficult to be fixed” but “essential that it be done.”

Marchi’s case will depend on how the court defines the city’s actions. While at its core, this is a case between one woman and a city, the implications of the ruling could come to redefine liability laws when it comes to public authorities and push governments across the country to reconsider the scope of their role in public safety.

Supreme Court of Canada set to help settle snow-clearing squabble | National Post

OTTAWA — It’s starting to feel like spring for many Canadians, but the country’s top court is about to wade into the issue of snow removal from wintry city streets.

The Supreme Court of Canada hearing Thursday could also help settle the question of when a public body such as a municipal government can be held liable for its decisions.

Taryn Joy Marchi alleged the City of Nelson, B.C., created a hazard when it cleared snow from downtown streets after a storm in early January 2015.

The removal effort left snow piles at the edge of the street along the sidewalk early in the morning of Jan. 5.

Late in the afternoon of Jan. 6, Marchi parked in an angled spot on the street and, wearing running shoes with a good tread, tried to cross a snow pile to get on to the sidewalk.

Her right foot dropped through the snow and she fell forward, injuring her leg and winding up in hospital.

Marchi contended the city should have left openings in the snowbank to allow safe passage to the sidewalk.

She pointed to the neighbouring municipalities of Castlegar, Rossland and Penticton in arguing there were preferable ways to clear the streets so as to ensure safe access for pedestrians.

However, a judge dismissed her case, saying the city was immune from liability because it made legitimate policy decisions about snow clearing based on the availability of personnel and resources.

In any event, the judge concluded, Marchi assumed the risk of crossing the snow pile and was “the author of her own misfortune.”

The B.C. Court of Appeal overturned the decision and ordered a new trial, saying the judge erred in addressing the city’s duty of care and the question of Marchi’s negligence.

Certain decisions of the city’s street cleaning crew may properly have been characterized as “operational in nature” as opposed to policy decisions, the appeal court concluded.

The ruling prompted the City of Nelson to seek a hearing in the Supreme Court.

In a written submission to the high court, the city says its actions are “a clear example of a core policy decision” that should be immune from liability.

The city’s written and unwritten snow-removal policies plainly engage in a balancing of interests among competing parties, the submission says. “This is the core of a political decision — allocating scarce resources based on a good faith exercise of discretion.”

In her filing with the Supreme Court, Marchi says city employees made a number of operational decisions that fell below the expected standard of care of a municipality — decisions not required by the written policy.

“With respect to standard of care, the trial judge never properly addressed the reasonableness of the decision to create the hazard and leave it in place for 30 hours,” Marchi argues.

“Instead, the trial judge rested his analysis on the fact that the city had followed its policy.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 24, 2021.

Summerside woman spurs action after city dumps snow, road scrapings on garden | CBC News

The city of Summerside is reviewing its guidelines for snow clearing after a homeowner raised concerns when a pile of snow loaded with road salt and asphalt scrapings was dumped on her organic garden.

Kim Lyon says she spent thousands of dollars planting tomatoes, herbs, beets, potatoes and other vegetables and flowers on the south side of her property last summer.

She fears the salty snow has caused significant damage to the soil and plants.

"I was standing at the window and I watched a snowplow going by and they basically put four feet of very dirty, slushy snow and salt scrapings from the road all over the garden," she said.

"It just seemed really wrong to me, to put that stuff. I went out and looked at it and I was pretty upset because I understand what salt does to gardens."

That was on Feb. 22. She contacted her councillor, Norma McColeman, that day and she quickly responded.

Lyon said the city has been good about responding to her emails, but as of Saturday nothing had been done.

In an email Friday, the Summerside CAO Ron Philpott apologized to Lyon and agreed to "clean up what it can." The email also said the city is "working on some guidelines which will be communicated to residents, regarding the marking and delineation of areas that our snow clearing operations will seek to avoid in future."

In an interview with CBC on Saturday, McColeman said those guidelines could include signs alerting the plow operators, or implementing a system where residents could notify the city of gardens or other sensitive areas on private property to be mindful of.

"If the crews are not aware that there is anything under the dead of snow, or if it's a weather system and a big storm, they have no idea unless the residents would have some type of a designation."

Plow operators try to work quickly

McColeman said for safety reasons, plow operators are often trying to clear the roads as quickly as possible and need to pile the snow somewhere.

"As I say and I do as a comparison with Charlottetown, if you're from Charlottetown you see what Charlottetown does, they leave it in the middle of the road, so I mean I think when we're dealing with a very short street, they only have so much area from say the curb to the property owner, and they try to do the best they can."

Lyon said she understands the need for safety and plowing the snow, and understands the need for a certain amount of salt. But she said her circumstance was different.

"This wasn't snow. Snow we don't mind. They can put as much snow as they want on our yard during the winter. This was the road scrapings."

She would like to have the dirty snow trucked away as it is cleared.

"This will be ongoing and it will affect everybody or a lot of people over time it's not just a simple, 'Oh, I got hurt' sort of thing," she said.

"I don't want anybody punished, I don't want to create problems. I just don't want something like this to happen again."

Editor’s Notebook: Next Gen Deicers - Snow Magazine (snowmagazineonline.com)

For decades, rock salt has been the main tool snow fighters employ to manage and mitigate ice buildup on pavement surfaces. It’s ideal because rock salt is relatively cheap and – with a little heat and moisture – it’s highly effective.

However, rock salt has been generating headlines lately for its negative impact on the environment. Most notably, rock salt has been linked to rising salinity levels in freshwater bodies, which poses a risk to aquatic inhabitants. As a result, the race is on to find more a next-generation deicer that is environmentally conscious, yet cost-effective. In addition to integrating brine to reduce salt use in ice mitigation practices, researchers and industry innovators have sought more unique alternatives, such as beet juice, fermentation castoffs, and exotic compounds.

However, scientists now are taking cues from the animal world. Researchers have known insects and spiders native to Alaska create antifreeze proteins that lower the freezing point of water by a few degrees and allows them to survive frigid temps. Similarly, some fish create antifreeze proteins that prohibits their blood from freezing in extreme climates.

Unfortunately, outside the body these antifreeze proteins break down quickly, making them ineffective and impractical for snow and ice management.  

However, researchers at the University of Denver recently reported they’re working on a synthetic version of these antifreeze proteins known as polyvinyl alcohol (PVA). According to the researchers, PVA is a simple, inexpensive compound that is nontoxic to humans and aquatic life. In fact, it’s found in everyday personal care products. It also doesn’t degrade quickly, which makes it more practical as a spray-on ice mitigation tool or as a coating to other deicing substance.

To make it applicable for snow and ice management, though, research must first engineer PVA to be more like the antifreeze proteins utilized in the animals that endure in extremely cold habitats. No timetable was given for when this next generation ice mitigation product will be ready for testing or available to the commercial snow and ice industry.

Study finds Toronto rivers and watershed contaminated with road salt — even in summer | The Star

Road salt applied in wintertime is threatening at least two-thirds of the aquatic life found in the four rivers within the Greater Toronto Area.

A new University of Toronto study, published Thursday, shows that even during the summer, almost 90 per cent of the 214 sampled sites exceeded the federal chronic exposure guidelines for chloride.

The United States and Canada, respectively, apply roughly 24.5 million and seven million tonnes of road salt annually. In Ontario, chloride enters water systems primarily through the annual application of three to five million tonnes of road salt, used as an anti-icing method for winter road maintenance, according to the city of Toronto.

“Our results suggest that even presumed low seasons for chloride show concentrations sufficient to cause significant negative impacts to aquatic communities,” the study concludes.

Canadian Lauren Lawson, a graduate student at the University of Toronto, and Donald A. Jackson, an ecology and evolutionary biology professor at University of Toronto, were lead authors of the study.

The study was funded by the NSERC Discovery Grant and funding from Fisheries and Oceans Canada and published in FACETS, Canada’s first and only multidisciplinary open access science journal.

The study looked at Humber River, Don River, Etobicoke Creek, Mimico Creek and their associated tributaries from headwater locations north and northwest of Toronto.

Almost all sites in Toronto surpassed the chronic threshold for chloride of 120 mg/L during summertime. For the most part, only upstream sites away from the urban areas, such as largely forested regions sampled in the less urbanized upper Humber River, show concentrations below the chronic threshold.

https://undark.org/2021/03/11/road-salt-imperils-aquatic-ecosystems/

DURING THIS UNUSUALLY snowy year, the rumble of snowplows and salt trucks has become a familiar — and comforting — winter soundtrack across the northern U.S. In southern Vermont, where I live, we received more than 100 inches of snow through February, about twice the typical snowfall for that time of year. Undoubtedly, de-icing salts have prevented numerous accidents on otherwise slick roads.

Although salt contributes to road safety, it racks up high hidden costs. In the U.S., salt damage to infrastructure and the economy is estimated to total between $19.8 billion and $45 billion annually. That includes damage to roadways, bridges, vehicles, tourism, and property values. For example, salt can leach calcium out of concrete and rust steel rebar, a process sometimes known as “concrete cancer” that rots bridges from the inside with few outward warning signs.

For all their economic costs, road salts may take an even steeper toll on the environment. As salty runoff infiltrates streams and lakes, it can upset freshwater ecosystems. Authors of a 2017 study estimated that 7,770 North American lakes — about 20 percent of those in the study region — may have elevated chloride concentrations. And this number may be an underestimate, say the authors.

If trends continue, the study concludes, many of these lakes will be too salty to support life within 50 years. Lakes with roads and parking lots nearby are most at risk; 70 percent of these lakes are likely to have elevated chloride levels, based on the study’s sample.

Excess salt can damage entire aquatic food chains, including zooplankton, salamanders and frogs, fish, shellfish, and aquatic plants. At high concentrations, salt can stunt the growth of some fish, making them more vulnerable to predators. It can tilt male-to-female ratios of amphibian populations out of balance. And it can kill off algae-eating zooplankton, allowing algae to grow unchecked into smelly, goopy, hazardous blooms.

Even organic additives made from natural substances like beet juice and molasses, used to improve salt’s melting power, can have unintended consequences. One study found that two common additives, GeoMelt and Magic Salt, caused mosquito larvae to mature and hatch earlier than usual.

Flora Krivak-Tetley, an ecologist at Dartmouth College who co-authored the 2017 study, says that salt concentrations in most lakes have not reached the threshold the Environmental Protection Agency’s deems lethal for aquatic life. But salt can throw an ecosystem out of balance well before that happens, she notes.

And this is to say nothing of the enormous carbon footprint associated with transporting and distributing the salt, much of which arrives on barges from countries such as Chile and Egypt.

How, then, can we balance our need for safe roads with our duty to protect the environment?

If trends continue, the study concludes, many of these lakes will be too salty to support life within 50 years.

In 2015, the not-for-profit FUND for Lake George, in upstate New York, launched an effort to answer that question. They started by working with towns around Lake George to determine just how much salt they used. Maintenance managers deployed GPS to track trucks’ speed and position, and used sensors to measure how fast salt was being released. This feedback allowed road crews to calibrate their distribution rates, saving money, salt, and effort.

Next, leaders in the Lake George region experimented with ways to keep the roads clear using less salt. They found it worked well to pretreat roads with salt brine before winter storms. The liquid prevents snow and ice from bonding with the asphalt, making it easier to scrape roads clean. Unlike grains of rock salt, which often bounce onto road shoulders, brine largely adheres to its target.

Area officials found that, pound for pound, brine was far more efficient than traditional rock salt. They could protect a lane-mile of road with a solution containing under 100 pounds of salt, roughly one third the amount used by rock-salt trucks.

Last, the towns switched to live-edge plows, which have flexible blades made up of multiple, independently moving sections mounted on springs. These state-of-the-art blades are more thorough than conventional ones. And starting with brine makes the plows even more efficient, says Eric Siy, executive director of The FUND for Lake George. If live-edge snowplows are like razors that hug the curves, brine is like shaving cream.

The sweeping changes to road care required a culture shift within the towns’ maintenance departments. But black roads and shortened plowing times ultimately convinced road crews near Lake George to embrace sustainable winter management. Over two years of using brine and live-blade plows, these communities cut their salt usage in half, a drop that maintenance officials say can’t be explained by weather variations.

Today marks the start of the 2021 World Salt Awareness Week. The effort is designed to help bring awareness of the damaging effect of too much salt on our health, and while the focus has typically been on salt in diet the negative impacts of salt related to poor winter maintenance practice also have a detrimental impact on human health.

The use of best management practices (BMP's) in winter maintenance has been empirically proven to help with the problem.

The Smart About Salt Council (SASC), is a not-for-profit organization that has been working transnationally to address the growing challenge of over-use of salt in winter maintenance. SASC offers award-winning training, certification and program verification. Learn more at www.smartaboutsalt.com.

Driving into the Future: When will autonomous cars be ready for Canada? | Driving

On March 10, Driving is presenting the latest in its series of Driving into the Future virtual panels: When will autonomous cars be ready for Canada? This may come as a surprise but we at Driving are as confused as you are about the future of autonomous automobiles.

That’s not because self-driving cars are incredibly complicated; rather, it’s the conflicting messages being put forward by automakers, politicians, and industry analysts. On one hand we have reports of Waymo self-driving cars already running around driverless in California. On the other, delays in the commercialization of self-driving cars seem endless.

Making the matters more confusing for Canadians is our harsh climate, which creates even more challenging needs—the snow, ice, salt and sand that are a Canadian winter—making the production of robotic cars even more problematic.

That’s why we’re presenting our When will autonomous cars be ready for Canada roundtable. In our discussion, we’ll disseminate the differences in levels of self-driving, from the merely automated driver aids we are familiar with today through the semi-autonomous and all the way to fully-robotic Level V autonomy. We’ll look into the differences in technologies needed to make self-driving work—cameras, radar and even lasers.

Most of all however, we’ll try and determine how long it will be before the promise of self-driving is fulfilled. Will Canada, again because of its weather, lag behind more temperate climes? Can robots safely navigate a snow-covered road? How can we make these computerized cars more reliable when they’re covered in salt and sand? And, perhaps most importantly, if completely autonomous driving is in our future, will we even be allowed to drive our own cars?

Helping us answer all those questions is Dr. Ryan Eustice, senior vice-president of Automated Driving at the Toyota Research Institute; Stefanie Bruinsma, University of Waterloo’s industry engagement officer; Paul Rudy, co-founder and CMO of Kyocera SLD Laser; and Raed Kadri, head of Ontario’s Autonomous Vehicle Innovation Network.

Join us on March 10, 11 AM as we explore yet more boundaries in automotive technology. What you learn may not only determine what you’ll drive in the future, but how you’ll be driven.