Imagine the reactions if some ancient civilization where salt was as valuable as gold, were convincingly told that in the future, governments would throw out salt into the streets for free, to make them less slippery 😆

I remember 17 years ago I was in charge of a large snow removal contract at a local smelter. I asked the Transportation Department to order 26 skids of salt so I can place them in the S.O.S. bins. You never place loose salt or sand as it freezes solid when moisture is present. I received a call and the transport arrived and we could start placing salt bags in the bins. Once the driver removed the tarp I immediately noticed they sent 26 skids of restaurant / cooking grade salt. I refused the load of salt and notified the Manager of Transportation. We all had a good laugh, then they ordered the correct salt.

8:49 check out those safety sandals for jackhammering.

Bravo thank you for this report as I always wondered about salt. My neighbor's well got contaminated from Road salt and he had to get a new freshwater well drilled farther away from the road at a cost of about $12,000. This well contamination locally is happening more frequently due to overuse of road salt. And now we have vehicles whose engines can run way past 300,000 miles but will never see that length of travel because the body of the vehicle corrodes from road salt. We are doing this without much consideration for the future. It's extremely hard to clear up fresh water after its been salinated, and salty freshwater has repercussions for our own health as well as for our agriculture and for the environment which sustains us. It seems like the only time we appreciate fresh water as a species is when we lose it. Clean fresh water is so easy to take for granted, until it's too late.

I know up here in the Pacific North West in the temperate area, they rarely use salt if it can be avoided, Its temperate here so it rarely snows but the concern is actually for the Salmon population around here. It was very different than when I lived in the Midwest where that rock salt got layered thick after a storm.

I'm surprised there is no mention of the cost to consumers as their vehicles corrode away and have to be replaced far sooner than they should. The economic & environmental cost is enormous and far outweighs the benefits of salting the roads. Where I currently live, there are record snowfalls and no salt is used at all - it seems be either habit or just the industry pushing salt on roads, esp. in the Northeast.

It is fascinating to see each country and their salt production. Domestic Australian and Indian salt is almost entirely solar salt simply because it has plenty of warm coastline to produce it. Australia has almost zero rock salt production, and rock salt is almost exclusively used as a niche fashionable food product, not as a primary product. Compare this to Europe which lacks large coastlines, thus relies much more on rock salt. In fact the food product compared to Australia is almost entirely reversed, with sea salt being the niche fashionable product.

The word "salary" does not come from a payment in salt to Romans. It comes from an additional monetary allowance given to Roman soldiers to buy salt in addition to their provisions. It then became a general term for all monetary allowances.

This video was educational and informative. Thanks. 👍

This reminds me of the game Triangle Strategy, salt as a resource is in constant demand historically regardless of technology.

Great video. A very complicated topic affecting everyone’s life.

Great balanced report that took into account the point of view of all stakeholders including producers, government and the environment, without holding back on the dangers of overusing this resource! Thank you for this report.

putting salt on roads is INSANE

Nice of Bert giving his input of salt economics

Wow. . that Ohio Valley/Pennsylvania accent really comes shines through. This was a really good overview of the salt issue. A follow up for free chlorine radicals would make it more complete. I've wondered that since my university chemistry professor mentioned it to the class many many years ago.

Super interesting video!

This was wonderful. Salt! Only you and CNBC could pull this off.

The salt market is immense... take that with a grain of salt 🧂 😅

Crazy that there are people worth more than entire vital industries.

Very good report

Wanna Rewind's Salt vid brought me here. Great cover on salt.

Ocean desalination should also produce salt from the "before filter" parts of the desalination process.

You can get all the salt you need from an average Rainbow 6 ranked game.

Very interesting!

You could have picked better imagery for the rusting rebar section 8:26 , the video you showed was road degradation from erosion - not metal corrosion. Also, that appears to be blacktop. Typically, rebar is used as a reinforcement measure in concrete.

BTW that Salt book is fantastic.

Fascinating

So I'm not the only one who thought "gee, I wonder if dumping salt everywhere has consequences".

I definitely enjoyed this.

Common expressions: "salt of the earth", and "that man is worth his salt".

4:00 Truzaic? I can't even find a definition on google for this word.

Here's an idea: how about fewer roads and less car dependency to reduce the use of salt?

what about mag chloride. its what we use in denver for salt on the road. Its also sprayed on not poured on as a rock salt.

I will take this as a grain of salt.

There's a CNBC employee who contributed to this video called Harvey Salt.

Triangle Strategy was real??

@8:50 my boy using a jackhammer in open toe slide flip flops

I would assume the salt being a smaller size, is because in food people are generally leaning towards takeaway and other processed sugars. Which is weird because salt can bring out so much of that flavour with less impact

This did not explain how road salt and food grade salt are processed differently. A vacuum pan does not mean food grade, and Himalayan salt is mined mostly in Pakistan from large chunks, not from artificial brine pools.

After playing Triangle Strategy I've never been able to look at salt the same way.

If you "really wouldn't want to eat" the deicing salt, which I'm not saying you would, but if you wouldn't want to eat it... it's not 100% sodium chloride. Unless you only don't want to eat it because it's large chunks. Which yeah, big salt rocks aren't great to eat... but you could crush them and eat them... but I bet you don't want to eat it because there's something else floating around. Machine oil, diesel fuel, whatever. I'm just saying, y'all aren't doing anyone a favor by being loose with the definition of 100%.

Which salt? Oh, "table salt"! Gotcha. 😏

It’s rare when I see another Bryon. 😊😊

Taking the first step is the hardest, but 7 house later living off passive income since June 6, 2016. You’ve got to start taking steps to achieve your goal.

Now wondering why the brine from desalinization is pumped back into the ocean instead of being packaged for any of the applications in this video.

Just wanted to comment and say every ad that played while watching this was the same ad every time. The kiss musician ad.

What is a bulk unit?

Imagine the world without salt 🙄 heaven 🙄💥 USE potassium 💥 #SoSalty

As always, the base resources are mined, utilized, and re-absorbed back into the environment. But when the BALANCE is all out-of-whack, so are the life forms who are mining and utilizing all of it. 🐲✨🐲✨🐲✨

In Manitoba we don’t use salt on our roads. We use sand.

Salt is the most common mineral on earth and is essential to human survival, because it is one of the substances upon which all of life on Earth evolved to depend on. Salt is involved in regulating the water content (fluid balance) of the body. The sodium ion itself is used for electrical signaling in the nervous system. Human beings need salt right down to an atomic level... YET, until about 150 years ago, in the history of recorded human activity, its procurement was unbelievably difficult. One of the first recorded wars in human history was fought in China over, among other things, salt. Salt was comparable in value to gold, and was also - in China - used as a medium of exchange. The Romans were some of the first to realize that if they controlled the salt of a region, they controlled that region. The modern word salary is derived from the Latin salarium, meaning “stipend,” which is related to the Latin word salarius, meaning “pertaining to salt.” But the connection between the words is lost to us, although there is no concrete evidence that Roman soldiers were ever paid in salt or that the salarium was, as another theory holds, an allowance for salt. But it would lend some background to the phrase "worth your salt".... Amazingly, salt was regarded as so valuable that spilling it was considered a sin - precipitated in popular origin as being caused by the devil shoving you from behind. Which is why if you spilled salt you would throw it over your shoulder to blind the devil and send him back to hell. There were many salt rituals in the ancient world, and casting salt over something as a curse or purification seems to have been a part of several different traditions. It is said that one disciple spilled salt at the Last Supper, and that disciple was Judas. EVEN UP UNTIL OUR REVOLUTIONARY WAR, salt was of such critical importance that the British attempted to cut off our salt supplies to essentially starve the American army by destroying their ability to preserve food. And yet today, with the advent of modern technology after the industrial revolution, we produce and mine salt in such industrial quantities that we can spread it over our roads when it snows. That would have been nothing short of unthinkable to people a mere 200 years ago, to say nothing of ancient peoples.

Now I see salt in a whole different light

Glad it doesn't snow here.

The deicing salt I find the funniest as you are literally paying for salt you are planing to throw away.

The ">13%" figure shown around 3:19 should have been "

“Salt: A World History,” - an excellent book. Who knew salt could be so interesting. A very entertaining read. Much more interesting than this video.

1:38: they're literally not both 100% NaCl. Otherwise you'd have no impurities in the winter melt salt and could eat it.

I can't believe you did a piece on salt without mentioning the sodium-ion battery technology that is going to absolutely revolutionize personal transportation, along with stationary storage of intermittent energy generation.

Makes you wonder how all that salt got concentrated is such quantities in those mines .

Here’s an idea let people stay home when roads are bad sacrifice, and economic production for the better good

"What will happen if the world keeps getting saltier." People in 2020 and beyond. That's an understatement lady.

All desolinasation plants should collect brines on the ground, instead send it back to oceans, for future use in chemical industry and elsewhere

We don’t use salt on our roads in Australia, but we do use it in our swimming pools!

I feel my blood pressure go up just watching this.

Minnesota roads have salt deposits next to the road.

It is difficult to imagine world without Salt, Salt is necessary in Daily food needs, global market for salt was worth over an estimated $13 billion in 2021 great news in 21st century.

I'm pretty sure salt is extremely important in the fishing market still.. ice alone won't cut it.

Imagine countries that salt their own lands

The value of gold and salt was equal at one time... centuries ago...

Paid in salt? Nonsense. They called it salt money just as tips are called tea money in some languages. Noone pays in actual tea or salt.

Those substitute salts are equally corrosive. Why are they even being proposed?

It’s helping my illnesses now

8:10 did the video editor fall asleep at their keyboard?

I'm Salty now

Beet juice is a way to treat roads without salting them

There's only 14000 uses for salt?

I hate that desalination plants produce brine and dump it and then it ruins things. It's one of the most used source of sodium!!!!!

Great video. It is distracting when the narrator doesn’t pronounce the T in “Morton’s” and “Important.”

Salt batteries. To store solar energy. Deice roads with acoustic vibrations to break up the ice layers. You're welcome. Still using salt's power, without polluting streams.

Salt Lake City (UT) has JOINED THE CHAT.

Make more desal plants, get fresh water, waste is brine. Take brine, allow brine to concentrate and evaporate, harvest salt. Two problems, solutions both ways. Done.

this report was too salty for my taste. but I was waiting to hear more about Himalaya salt.

It's not only the physical world that gets saltier, the online world too.

damn cars really are at the root of each problem

Im guessing Florida doesnt buy much deicing salt.

Lot of talk of percentages in terms of modern usage, but no real solid numbers given...and I know for a fact, that since at LEAST 1995, many of your 'heavy salt use' road salt regions of North America have fought tremendous battles to eliminate or greatly-reduce their use of salt on roadways...vying for other materials like sand, crushed rock, beaded glass and more. Why? There is an 'opportunity cost' also with using salt...infrastructure damage, from road signs to bridges...they all suffer and need more-frequent replacements where salt is heavily used. Canada predominantly went away from salt in the 1990's to 'chirt rock', a chipped soft rock that instead of 'melting the snow and ice', it infused it...basically creating a type of 'sand paper surface' to drive on, that is as safe as dry asphalt in most cases. East Coast regions went to a similar idea, when as early as the late 1980's, the EPA stopped many places from piling up huge 'plow piles' of road salt scrapings, often to later be trucked to inlets and bays and dumped into the ocean...in that case, it wasn't originally the salt they didn't want dumped in the ocean...it was the road pollutants, like tire debris and oil spillage they were fighting. Plow scrapings were banned or highly limited from 'ocean dumping', because of this. So...when you say 'we are using 20-million tons a year, and 49% is going to road salt...this MUST be taken into comparison with past years and decades of historic use. In this case, you find we are really cutting back our salt use industrially. When you simply compare it to edible salt, and knowing we have worked vigilantly to reduce salt consumption, you really aren't getting the full picture of what consumption trends really look like. While I don't have the total figures for each year, I do know that we used almost 300-million tons of salt in 1978 alone, for road maintenance, nationwide...that's a HUGE reduction...

To those who played Triangle Strategy on Switch, you know it. Salt is life. 😂

This isn't journalism and it's just hard to watch.

Auto companies love the salt on the roads. Rots out all the car where I live.

We South Asian will not any food without any salt but I was surprised to see that people can eat food without salt

I am just curious if anyone else thinking maybe this salt that we put on the ground, end up in the ocean, and now the ocean water is also getting saltier? which in turn, causing the ice to melt faster in the poler regions? has anyone ever taken that into effect?

We need permaculture in urban design. If we didn't pave half of our cities with asphalt, there wouldn't be as much salt to leech.

Glue yourself to a snowplow! Ban Salt!

Salt is the only drug you can't say NO TO

Nice video (Bismillah Salt Company)

Did someone notify that professor that he was going to be on television?! He’s all slouched over wearing the clothes he woke up in.

Once sprinkled a little salt into a lime lemonade and just like a strong coffee immediatly my vision sharpened. I must of been deficient.

hold on, they highlighted Bangladesh with having saltier fresh water, and then said that the main reason freshwater is getting saltier is because of the de-icing road salts... but it doesn't snow in Bangladesh, does it? Also, i've seen videos showing the hyper salty brine thats created when desalination plants try to make fresh water out of seawater... why isn't this being used to process and produce salt, instead of dumping it back into the ocean causing more problems?

How the f do we not run out of it Oh I see

Nobody seems to care about that salt affect on creeks and rivers. You know it washes off the roads. Where do you think it goes?