Road Salt Analysis

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Introduction Finally, a warm day after a harsh winter, so what can you expect, all the ice/snow melting and flowing into our drains or into our grass, soil, and plants (Gould, 2013). Alongside with the ice/snow melting away into our environments so is that salt that was previously used to treat the roads (Gould, 2013). Roadside vegetation can become injured or die to due to the runoff from the treated pavements (Gould, 2013). The salt used for treated pavements is usually chloride-based and is applied to roadways, driveways, sidewalks, and highways to melt ice and snow to ensure safety for pedestrians as well as motorists (Gould, 2013). To improve traction de-icing salts can often be mixed with abrasives such as sand, cinders, gravel, and …show more content…
So, the question being is how does road salt affect vegetation? Plants can become injured when the roots and the foliage become exposed to salt water (Gould, 2013). The foliage becomes damaged when water that has been treated with salt is sprayed up from passing by vehicles …show more content…
Previous research stated that these plants tended to be easy to handle for and did not need any real specific care except for the basic water, soil, and sun. After purchasing these plants we decided to take our table salt, which was our dependent variable throughout the study, and put different amounts in each plant. The first plant got no salt and was labeled 0oz. and 0 teaspoon, our second plant got the first amount of salt and this was ½ teaspoon or 1oz of salt, following the second plant, the third plant got a full 1 teaspoon also known as 2oz of salt, the last plant got the maximum amount of salt and this was 2 teaspoons or 3oz. We continued to add the same amount of water to each plant regardless of the amount of salt and gave them the same amount of light treatment which was a mock for the sun. We added the salt to our plants on April 11, 2016, and began documenting our results and pictures around three weeks later. This three week span was enough time to see if our plants and the salt added had any correlation to one

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