Worried about the environment? Here are 14 safer alternatives to road salt.
Road salt, or its scientific name, weird-ass fuckin’ blue shit, has a habit of seeping into the earth, contaminating groundwater and increasing salinity of surface water past safe levels for aquatic life and human consumption. For any Carletonian readers interested in curbing the harmful effects of oversalting, here are 14 alternative methods to clear away the ice.
- Sand — it works for fire, and ice is fire’s cool older brother. Why not give it a try?
- LDC veggie sausage — the chemicals in one patty are strong enough to melt most of Greenland and all of Antarctica.
- Hair dryer — what’s a sidewalk but a big scalp made of pavement? Yowch! Hot enough to melt multiple things.
- Henry Cavill
- Table salt — when did we decide our roads were too good for the salt of the common man? Elitist salt made especially for roads has no place here.
- Wear shoes — this may sound crazy, but if you stop going outside and walking around in just your socks, you will be less likely to slip on ice.
- Gasoline — long used as an environmentally conscious alternative to wind, maybe gasoline works for this too.
- Compress the rest of winter into a montage — it worked when Forrest Gump ran from coast to coast and from the screen into our hearts, and it will work for our ice too.
- Do nothing — in life, you slip a little, but you can get back up. I believe in you.
- Lick it up — yum!
- Remove sidewalk instead — can’t slip if there isn’t a sidewalk for ice to form on. Plus, when I was your age, we were lucky to get a two-foot wide strip of gravel to walk on, and we didn’t complain when it turned to quicksand during monsoon season. Now your nice, smooth pavement is too slippery for you? Give me a break.
- Wire the ice $130,000 in exchange for its disappearance from the public sphere — maybe now it won’t release those graphic videos.
- Cover the ice with snow so we don’t notice it -—this’ll work.
- Pick it up and carry it away — rolling up our sleeves as a team and lifting up thousands of square feet of ice before majestically toting it to St. Olaf and barricading all the doors could be the perfect team-building exercise.
