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A salt monopoly could spike car accidents in the Midwest
- baybal2 6y agoA big irony is how America got a salt monopoly, while China has just scrapped its own. I believed China was the one, and only country in the world still left with a salt tax, and a salt monopoly.
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y agoCapitalism in action. It's not because of too much regulation that many of these monopolies exist. (That's not to say there aren't industries where this isn't the case.)
- orolle 6y agoWe have anti-trust laws. Still the anti-trust laws are not enforced.
- minikites 6y agoBecause it would be political suicide to do so. Many people in this country love big companies and build their entire identities and personalities around brands like Tesla or Apple.
- adamcstephens 6y agoMany small and medium businesses also have been hurt by the monopolies. I don’t think it’s political suicide, and the winds seem to be shifting back towards anti monopoly.
- giantg2 6y agoA vast majority of laws are not enforced, especially not consistently.
- Faaak 6y agoNot a single mention about "positive" impacts that less road salting will have on aquatic ecosystems.. Interesting article though
- vmception 6y agoThis reminds me that this is what annoys me about comedians doing news. Everyone thinks their favorite late night talk show host is better news because they raise awareness in a digestible format. But they arent willing to realize that every single topic - if it is on their show - is presented in a pejorative view. Between the quick cuts to “here’s a funny photoshop” (said in John Oliver’s voice), it should be a red flag that they aren’t actually balancing out the purpose of an organization or system or how it got to be that way Its just “system you aren't a part of is bad, we raised awareness, we did it you’re informed!” Trevor Noah, John Stewart, Steven Colbert, John Oliver, Hasan Minhaj, all do/did it the same This bothers me. All part of the same polarizing filter bubbles we want to think that only people with different beliefs are in.
- ccsnags 6y agoThe news is more about cutting a good promo than informing the public. Anyone who gets their news from comedians should be laughed at and any comedians who think that they are important should be ignored.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoI don’t know how people can stand the John Oliver/Hasan Minhaj schtick. The shows are so formulaic with some out of context clip followed by a crude analogy. “That would be like if so and so did this and that and blah blah”.
- BurningFrog 6y agoIf you think a comedian is giving you good news coverage, you might be a lost cause...
- lupire 6y ago
- peteradio 6y agoGod I hate road salt. My poor poor Jeeps! Perhaps this will spur a shift towards alternatives? I've heard beet juice of all things is effective but I have no clue if its economical.
- amelius 6y agoPerhaps corn syrup would work too. If we take it out of our foods, then we can solve two problems at once.
- ginko 6y agoMy guess is that you'd run into problems with mold or bacterial growth pretty quickly if you spread glucose syrup on roads.
- clajiness 6y agoMaybe, just maybe, more people could start buying winter tires. I wish our local governments would require them during the winter.
- null_object 6y agoStudded winter tires are a major health hazard though[0][1] [0] https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-10/cuot-swt100118.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-10/cuot-swt1001... [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110105121137.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110105121137.h...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- neartheplain 6y agoWinter tires and/or tire chains were uncommon where I grew up in a midsized city of the Great Lakes region. We regularly got multiple feet of snowfall, and depended mainly on city plows and salt trucks. I only encountered tire chains with any frequency when I moved to the West Coast, mostly in the context of driving to Lake Tahoe.
- jillesvangurp 6y agoMany Scandinavian countries require cars to switch over from summer to winter tires and the other way around in spring and in autumn. Some even allow tires with spikes, which damage the roads, but only in winter. Spikes allow you to drive on very icy roads when it is too cold for salt to work. Driving from Sweden into Denmark, they'd actually check your tires at the border in the winter sometimes because they do not want people damaging their roads with their spikes. Kind of sensible to require cars have proper tires; also from an insurance point of view.
- Karto 6y agoMany mountainous regions across Europe too, like the French region where I live. Tyres are potentially part of any routine police check. The region is a rather poor one, and many roads are simply not salted at all. With proper winter tyres (and AWD helps too, but it's not as important as tyres), you get through, albeit sometimes with poor elegance. The amount of snow we get is never anywhere close to those American phenomena I see sometimes in the news, where snow gets half way up your front doors nearly overnight. Seeing that, I'm surprised to read that most people don't use snow tyres in such places : it feels like going against common sense even on an purely individual level.
- jfindley 6y ago"Its [salt] main use is deicing our roads ..." I thought this sounded surprising, salt is used for lots of things, and it'd be surprising if road use was the main one. So I went to look, found a bunch of sources, including [1] and indeed this does not look to be correct. Further down the article acknowledges that indeed only about 40% of salt is used for deicing roads, but it really annoys me when writers knowingly write misleading statements at the top of their piece for "impact". The article also fails to mention that there are a number of alternatives available if it's infeasible to acquire salt in sufficient quantities, such as CMA[2]. Currently CMA is about 13x more expensive, but that would seem to put some sort of constraint on just how much price gouging is possible, especially as CMA and similar alternatives have a lot of significant upsides, such as much less vehicle damage and environmental impact. 1: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/industrial-salts-market https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/industri... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_magnesium_acetate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_magnesium_acetate
- BurningFrog 6y agoTo me "main use" only says it's bigger than any other single use, not that it's > 50%. I agree that just writing "40%" would be more informative, but that's not how journalistic writing works, for reasons I don't fully understand.
- ghaff 6y agoI won't argue this specific case but, in general, terms like "most," "about half," a "significant majority," and so forth can be more readable for a general audience than spouting off a bunch of precise numbers (which may not really be that accurate anyway).
- Retric 6y agoThey actually gave the number lower down. “Roughly 40% of domestic salt, produced largely from mining, is used not for food or chemicals, but for deicing.” So, I don’t know what the issue here as the term main use is as you say accurate.
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- lotsofpulp 6y ago> Jeld-Wen makes what are called door skins, which make up the back and front of a door, and are expensive and difficult to produce. Jeld-Wen sold door skins to door makers, but Jen-Weld also made and sold doors as well. So it both sold to its door skin customers, and competed with them as the final buyer of doors. Is there a typo here? It makes no sense to that Jeld-Wen would be a buyer of doors.
- 0xffff2 6y agoYeah, that should clearly read "... and competed with them as the final seller of doors".
- Spooky23 6y agoMinnesota pays 30-40% more per ton for salt than NY or Ohio. Midwest governments should be using their buying power and ability to control political subdivisions to make these mergers less profitable. For commodities, this is an area where government procurement shines. In the absence of sane Federal regulatory action, consolidation of suppliers is best addressed by consolidating demand. A state like Minnesota should be forcing cities/counties to use a single state contract and leverage that demand to pull salt in from Canada, Western NY, wherever. Then use multi-state alliances to drive more demand and concessions from suppliers. The downside is that winner take all procurement will put incumbents out of business, but that will happen anyway.
- dr-detroit 6y agoIn Michigan everything is corrupted by 100 years of letting elites run the government which here means the auto concerns. The car barons own the salt mine and they heap it out generously to the roadways because they know it destroys the autos forcing the slave class to buy more autos.
- sandworm101 6y ago>> winner take all procurement will put incumbents out of business The worst part isn't that companies go out of business, they probably won't, but that after a few rounds of one big state contract only one company will have the capacity to even bid for the contact. That one big company will then subcontract lots of little local delivery contracts. The one big company will have then effectively replaced the government in that it will manage salt delivery across the state.
- bradfa 6y agoIt'd be interesting to see a comparison between the various ways roads can be made safer for driving in wintry conditions. Plowing is clearly important, but putting down salt vs sand and gravel vs beat juice vs other solutions. I want to see the performance of various types of vehicles on a test course when using different types of tires (all season vs winter tires at least) and the different salt-alternatives. For the cost of the alternatives, do any of them get close to the performance of salt? Obviously salt is the cheapest, otherwise it wouldn't be in such high use. Maybe the price of salt going up will create a viable market for other solutions? Maybe some environmental concerns about salt use plus the cost going up will spurn development or cost reductions of competing solutions? Markets being manipulated isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes people realize they don't need the thing whose market is being manipulated any longer as there's viable alternatives.
- duxup 6y agoI'd be wary of say expending a lot more money on an alternative / more expensive solution... just because someone cornered the market.
- wongarsu 6y agoYou can use it as a scorched earth tactic. If the market disappears as soon as it's cornered, in the long term people will stop cornering markets. But more importantly if you use a solution with a lot of known downsides for the sole reason that it's the cheapest, reevaluating that decision when costs rise is the prudent thing to do.
- duxup 6y ago> in the long term people will stop cornering markets I'm not at all convinced that is the case. > if you use a solution with a lot of known downsides for the sole reason that it's the cheapest I don't think your scenario means people will somehow consider something they didn't consider before. More likely in a disruptive event folks do whatever they can to fill the gap at the lowest price again ... I think you're expecting efficiencies / consideration here that simply doesn't happen... or maybe already have.
- francisofascii 6y agoCan the state governments start to charge the domestic mines extraction fees like they sometimes do for natural gas?
- ChoGGi 6y agoI went from Ontario where salt is used to Alberta where grit (gravel) is used and I'd say grit is better. The downside is more windshield repairs, the upside is car underbodies last a lot longer and you don't have the slippery time after salt is first spread.
- nerdponx 6y agoIn the northeast US I think they typically use a mix of both sand and salt.
- freshpots 6y agoAlberta gets too cold for road salt to be used which is why they use gravel. Though, I agree and would like to see gravel used in Ontario as it is much better for the environment. We are seeing a significant rise in the salinity of our rivers and, more concerning, groundwater drinking wells.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoIn Ontario, sand is typically used outside of cities, at least in Simcoe County. It's remarkably effective at melting ice and snow.
- peeters 6y agoSand does nothing to melt ice and snow. It's used for traction.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoYes, it's used for traction, but sand will absolutely melt snow and ice. I know from experience. On my low-traffic street, the ploughs only spread sand on intersections and hills (to conserve it, I'm assuming), and when the rest of the street is hard-packed snow and ice, those spots are bare asphalt. It melts it by making it darker, thus absorbing more sunlight. This effect is less pronounced at extremely cold temperatures, and only works during the day.
- whalesalad 6y agoI would be fine if they stopped salting. Here in Michigan we are on top of one of the worlds largest reserves of salt and I believe it has led to over-use. It completely obliterates the metal on your vehicle. It’s definitely time for an alternative solution, no pun intended.
- lupire 6y agoDoes salt stay around and damage your car if you don't drive in the snow? Or can you limit the risk by opting out on snow days?
- whalesalad 6y agoThe salt becomes a liquid and then splashes all over the undercarriage of your vehicle, into crevices and between surfaces. It is definitely better to avoid driving if you can. Undercoatings can help, too, but they generally need to be applied annually.
- collsni 6y agoI'd rather have no salt vs rust.
- thieving_magpie 6y agoWhere I used to live used crushed glass as part of a traction mix. They claimed there were no adverse effects on tires but there were many complaints from cyclists that their tires were popping regularly.
- TuringNYC 6y agoSeems if it sprays into the air and gets into people's eyes, that would be an even bigger problem.
- volkk 6y agothis sounds horrible. what if you walk on it and track it home? then you get to walk on crushed glass with your bare feet? yikes
- cbsmith 6y agoIt's really not that different from walking on sand.
- sjg007 6y agoCrushed glass is silica which is a component of sand.
- ISL 6y agoNaturally-weathered sand and recently-crushed glass can have very different surface properties (i.e. glass can be sharp!).
- megiddo 6y agoInvestment opportunity: Find a hole in the ground, buy salt in the off-years, sell at peak.
- newjunkcity 6y agoI take issue with this view at the beginning of the article: > They need salt. And not the kind of salt that flavors our food, but the kind that melts snow and ice. If we don’t have salt, no one can drive, because salt is what keeps our roads manageable. Driving in snow/ice without salt is absolutely possible, but requires better driver education. I may be wrong, but I heard that in certain Scandinavian countries (e.g. Norway) being able to control a skid is part of the driving test. Driving in snow/ice, even snow/ice that is at the melting point and therefore extremely slippery due to the water, is absolutely possible without salt, but it requires your 'average Joe' to understand that they need to slow down, to leave 10* the space from the car in front, etc. As many have noted, salt negatively impacts aquatic ecosystems, and also decomposes your shiny new car into a pile of rust. Any situation that can be permanently resolved by education and intelligence, rather than by brute-forcing a constant 'workaround', would seem to me to be the best way forwards; but as is often the case, stupidity, laziness, resistance to change, and those who provide the salt being scared of the loss of revenue, win out... /rant
- gambiting 6y agoAlso in some places it's completely futile to keep adding salt(or it's simply too cold for salt to be effective) and grit is used instead. It's not an insurmountable problem. But yes, driver education is a huge part of it.
- danaliv 6y ago> Driving in snow/ice without salt is absolutely possible, but requires better driver education. Good luck with this. If the past year has taught us anything, it's that Americans will fight tooth and nail against even the slightest hint of being told what to do.
- dvtrn 6y agoDriving in snow/ice without salt is absolutely possible, but requires better driver education. Can you elaborate on what the education would cover? My experience driving in the midwest for 30 years has been that if at any given moment, physics decides you, even as an abundantly cautious driver are going for a slip and slide, you're going for a slip and slide.
- CivBase 6y agoMany places in the midwest have actually switched away from using salt to melt snow because it does a lot of damage to concrete and vehicles. Sand is a popular alternative, but frequent ploughing is often enough to keep main roads clear. Raised vehicles like trucks and SUVs are also much more common in the midwest to avoid getting stuck in the snow. > America tends to operate in just-in-time style inventory models instead of managing risk by storing surpluses of critical commodities I don't think this a particularly fair criticism. Deicing salt works by absorbing moisture as it lands, before it can form a sheet of ice. It's useless if it gets wet before you use it. It's pretty dry in the midwest during the winter, but humidity spikes in the summer making deicing salt difficult to store in the off-season. Climate-controlled storage is expensive and deicing salt is quite heavy and bulky.
- sandworm101 6y ago>> salt to melt snow Who does that? Salt is used to melt ice, not snow. >>Raised vehicles like trucks and SUVs ... to avoid getting stuck in the snow. "Raised" vehicles are not tall because of snow. That clearance is for off-road driving, not snow on a road. Any public road would be closed long before snow became so deep as to actually require a car to have greater ground clearance. If anything, a taller vehicle is more of a liability on a slippery road. The ideal vehicle for winter on road driving is any 4WD/AWD car with some good snow tires and a modern traction control system.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bluGill 6y agoThe ideal vehicle for slippery conditions is actually rear wheel drive, with ABS brakes. RWD means that everything you do reminds you that it is slippery and so you never get going fast. 4wd/awd means that you get going fast enough that you end up well into the ditch instead of just stopped on the side of the road where you can push yourself out without a tow truck. The above is partially tongue in cheek, but there is a point worth thinking about.
- nraynaud 6y agoI am a big curious, would the communities buying shares in the salt companies be an equivalent of storing salt for the winter?
- BooneJS 6y agoI would argue that states and municipalities would continue to pay whatever was necessary to keep the roads passable for families and commerce. They’ll have to pass it on with tax increases or service cuts elsewhere. To allow the roads to get worse in the face of monopolistic pricing isn’t an option.
- williesleg 6y agoSalt is so hard to find.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoAs a small fleet owner I would gladly deal with increased car accidents if it meant they didn't salt the roads. I would gladly buy studded tires and chain up if they didn't salt the roads. I would gladly deal with worse traffic in the winter if they didn't salt the roads. I would gladly incur a greater risk of harm or death if they didn't salt the roads. I would voluntarily pay more fuel taxes if they didn't salt the roads. I would put up with all sorts of shit to get the state to stop chemically destroying my property. And pretty much everyone I know feels the same way. When people complain about public policy written by people in ivory towers who are unaffected by their own policy this is the kind of crap they're talking about. To see such policy presented as though there are no tradeoffs what so ever just drives the point home. Edit: Since apparently I didn't leave enough space between the lines for people to read, let me make this clear. I'm doing ok. I my fleet is N=6. I can play musical panel vans and station wagons as needed in order to keep costs down and put the wear and tear where I want it. That insulates me pretty well from vehicle maintenance issues. I can phase a vehicle out by neglecting it and then buy a replacement. Someone driving one old car to their job does not have this luxury. You're caught between several rocks and hard places with regard to transportation options. The state is raising the cost of you dragging your butt to your job and telling you its for your benefit. What's an annoyance for me is a serious financial problem for others.
- jvanderbot 6y agoAs a small fleet owner, you are effectively the landed elite. Ivory tower nothing, this is money-before lives of others. As a previously poor owner of a previously junky car that was previously leased by someone who appreciated salt on the roads ... I also appreciated salt on the roads. In fact, I was recently back in MN, and my outright-owned, otherwise nice vehicle which did stand to take some damage from salt, but I appreciated when they salted the roads.
- asdff 6y agoSalting the roads aren't doing junky car owners any favors. I've had to replace suspension components, fuel lines, entire frames for rust. These things need to be replaced to keep the vehicle going and are not cheap. Suddenly that $3k honda civic is looking at $3k worth of repairs unless you want to risk your life when you approach highway speeds. I'm always shocked how in California there are absolutely beat up cars from the 70s all over the roads still.
- eternauta3k 6y agoWhy are cities buying salt in spot markets, when they have a mostly predictable consumption?
- Thetawaves 6y agoThe midwest should not be salting roads at all anyway. Its terrible for the environment, your car, and everything else. Salt use has been prohibited in northern climates such as Alaska for decades because of its damaging effects.
- imwillofficial 6y agoThe spice must flow
- zz865 6y agoUSA uses too much salt anyway, it ends up in the soil and poisoning the groundwater. In much of Europe salt is banned. Get proper tires and shoes.
- Glawen 6y agoSalt is not banned in Europe, it is used extensively
- rmason 6y agoMorton Salt from it's beginning led a charmed life. The company was so well managed that it was a Wall Street favorite. Then they got a young CEO in his thirties. He thought the company could be even more profitable if they got rid of everyone in the company over 55 years of age. Their replacements could be hired for much less money than they were making. This was before laws prohibiting it so he went ahead and did it. My father who had spent a thirty year career at Morton Salt was suddenly out of a job after having the best year in his career. What the young CEO didn't realize is that in one swoop he got rid of some of the top performers while at the same time wiping out the people most responsible for maintaining the company's winning culture. Within six months the stock collapsed, the young CEO had no answers and was fired. Morton Salt never recovered. They were merged with Thiokol and after the space shuttle disaster that merger was unwound. The once proud Morton Salt was passed around between different chemical companies until becoming part of Milliken's empire. All because of a single action by a young CEO.
- dredmorbius 6y agoAny recommended readings on this?
- rmason 6y agoMorton Salt has whitewashed that part of their history. I know it because I lived it. If there wasn't a Harvard case study there should be. Some of the employees sued though my father chose not to be part of the lawsuit because he had moved on. The company lost the lawsuit but I can't find any record of it on Google. I don't think that was a coincidence ;<).
- dredmorbius 6y agoWhat, roughly, was the timeframe for this? I'm presuming within the past 50 years or so? Morton-Thiokol (I remember the name from the Challenger disaster, I didn't realise it was that Morton until, well, about 20 seconds ago) formed in 1982. So that'd be 1970s / early 1980s?
- r-w 6y ago> America tends to operate in just-in-time style inventory models instead of managing risk by storing surpluses of critical commodities Does anyone know of some good readings about this? Seems intuitively true to me, but I haven't seen it discussed in-depth as a standalone topic.
- marshmallow_12 6y agoIf you are wondering what its like running out of salt, look at the UK winter of 2010. I don't know exactly what went wrong, i think it was a combination of unusually cold/snowy weather for a prolonged period. I think the governments, both central and local didn't bother buying enough salt. But even more crucially, my local government didn't seem to have any grit spreaders. At all. For about a full week, the roads were lethal. Only people with 4-wheel drive contemplated doing more than the bare minimum of driving. But now my local council has learnt it's lesson. At the most remote forecast of snow, the grit spreaders are out and about, spraying salt everywhere. and then they wonder why there are so many potholes...
- 14 6y agoWas there not some concern about what to do with the salt from desalination plants? Could the brine from that become economical to recover?
- destitude 6y agoI remember when people used to use snow tires and it wasn't an issue. All-season tires provide relatively poor traction in snow and ice compared to snow tires. The compounds in all-season tires start getting hard below 40F whereas snow tires stay soft/rubbery.
- destitude 6y agoThe problem is is that all the marketing for tire companies and their all season tires has convinced people that snow tires are not necessary. Every all season tire on the market starts to lose performance characteristics when the temperatures drops below 40F. You can not have both "long tread life" and good performance below 40F in the same tire. Even if you don't have snow the performance is worse below 40F for all season tires compared to "snow" tires.
- perl4ever 6y ago>One of the best ways of winning market share is to bid low, and then if demand is high, to simply not deliver to Commercial customers Is there a contradiction between talking about the problem of an impending monopoly or duopoly and the problems currently caused by competition? Could the consolidation be nature's way of solving the race to the bottom? Why not?
- pasttense01 6y ago"Salt is a regional business, it’s just not economical to move extremely bulky road salt over land more than 150 miles" This is wrong. Here is a map of salt deposits and production in the U.S. https://panethos.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/4mhrldi.jpg https://panethos.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/4mhrldi.jpg As you can see there are vast areas of the country more than 150 miles away from where salt is mined.
- ineedasername 6y agoThat's a map of "major" deposits. I'm going to guess that there are either 1) smaller local operations outside of those areas or 2) the economics of transport raise the cost of sale significantly in those areas. (or most likely, some combination of 1 & 2)