....can be a problem. Like that one town where they used garlic salt, a bunch of people were concerned that the cats and dogs might lick it up and get sick (do cats and dogs dig garlic?).

But, that town where they're using leftover Rum byproducts better be on the lookout for the local "bar hounds" out there licking the streets....especially if the snow gets to high for the Bud trucks to make deliveries.

Its brilliant really. Sell us back the toxic waste product of our energy over consumption. They have to do something with it right?

I have it from reliable sources that waste from coal fired power plants can actually be more radioactive than nuclear waste from some nuclear power plants. Apparently, nasty things like uranium and such occur naturally in coal deposits. Burning the coal distills these radioactive deposits into concentrations like 10 times or so above the levels naturally found in coal deposits. The consequence is that, other than all the nasty heavy metals and what not,large stores of coal ash could actually end up containing a disturbingly high amount of radioactive material.

Wasn't the original Superfund site in Times Beach, Missouri?

There, the town contracted a guy to spray unknown stuff on the roads (to keep dust down). It turned out to have PCBs and dioxin, and the EPA spent $100 million to buy up and evacuate the whole town. Not a good investment. Penny wise and pound foolish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Mis...

You can always use sand. It's really cheap.

I grew up in rural PA, where the DOT used a mixture of coal ash and salt.

1. The combination does NUKE ice. It also does really nasty things to the road, any runoff to streams, etc.
2. The combination of salt and coal ash makes a black tarry sludge, which is gruesome to clean. The white snow becomes BLACK snow.
3. The combination will destroy metal fairly fast. So, if it gets on your car, off to the car wash you MUST go. Otherwise, you're car will quickly rust out.
4. Once dry, it goes airborne pretty fast. I remember sweeping the dried stuff off of my dad's business's sidewalk. Then, I blew my nose. Black stuff for days.YUUUCK.

This should NOT be used. It's toxic beyond belief, and will greatly add to environmental, road, and health costs.

I don't know what's worse, road salt or coal ash. I don't like either one. Road salt, a variable mix of sodium, potassium and calcium chlorides is extremely water soluble; most of it ends up in streams in sufficient quantities to alter conductivity and salinity during snow melt season. It's corrosive as hell. It corrodes not only our cars, but is probably the single agent most responsible for premature wear and aging of the highway infrastructure, corroding the structural steel and rebar in bridges and concrete pavement. Coal ash, on the other hand has it's hazards, too. It's biggest problem by far, however, is not due to acute or chronic toxic effects, but rather - as some posters above have mentioned - respirable dusts. Nobody, and no plant or animal, is going to be poisoned, even a little, by using ash as an anti-icing agent. It's principal impact is derived from the transitory effects known as "fugitive dust": windblown, finely divided particles that can be inhaled. Repirable dusts can aggravate pre-existing conditions like asthma, emphasema, black lung, silicosis, lung cancer and the like, and the most vulnerable are the old and the very young. For everyone else, it's a short term runny nose and a cough - if the exposure is acute. And, that is the crux: is presence in the environment chronic (always present as a pollutant or toxic material in a form capable of interacting with the biosphere) or is its presence acute (present, but only for a short term)? The EPA, and toxicologists make that distinction for legitimate reasons.

There are a few things that need to be said about coal ash, because there is a bit of mis-information and outright superstition floating around on the topic, about the very nature of coal ash:

Coal ash is nothing more than a mineral matrix of dirt, containing a residual of unburned carbon. If you burn 100% of the carbon away, it is indistinguishable from the dirt in your back yard. That makes sense, if you consider that coal is the aged carbon remains of fossil forests, and the ash is just bits bits of dirt that was associated with the forest, which has been incorporated into the aged carbon - it was present either as the soil the forest grew in, or the sediments transported into the forest by the rainfall of the time. It is just like any other dirt for a particular geological region: composed of silicates, oxides, carbonates, aluminates and phosphates of different metals like iron, calcium, magnesium, manganese, titanium and such, and is, for all intents and purposes, biologically and chemically inert. The inhalation hazards present from ash are not from some special property unique to coal ash, but are, rather, identical to that of inhaling any respirable dust, whether it is farming soil, sand or any other natural mineral material (asbestos excluded and being in its own special hazard class). We don't want any of these present in any respirable form in our environment, even if our respiration systems are miracles of evolution that have evolved to deal with the constant assault of ever-present dusts.

The mineral characteristics of a particular coal never change. This is because the mineral composition is determined by the regional geology of the forests in which the coal was formed. This means that for any given seam of coal, it is going to have - from one end of the seam to the other - the same chemical and physical properties. It's essentially homogenous. If any bit of that particular coal has been chemically and physically characterized by chemical analyses, the entire body of it will be identical, within very narrow bands of variation for each parameter measured. The the chemical and physical differences in various coals are due to the geological region of their origin and to the state of their progess in the coal aging process.

The point of mentioning this is that all use of coal and management of the ash by-products is dependent upon permission and premits granted by both by the EPA and its surrogates who are charged by law with enforcing environmental regulations: the individual state environmental agencies. Coal ash is one of those "cradle-to grave" substances controlled by among other things TSCA (Toxic Substances Control Act) and RRCRA (Resource Recalmation and Control Act), TRI (Toxics Release Inentory) and SARA Title II Teir III Reporting. One of the direct consequences of these regulations is that if one is supplying coal ash as a raw material of commerce or is seeking to dispose of the ash as a solid waste, the supplier must prove, based on representaive and current test results, the benign chemical nature of the ash, through chemical analyses that adhere to all protocols for legal evidence in court and which are conducted in strict adherance to chain of custody practices. If definitive and exhaustive proof cannot be given, then that particular material cannot be used for such such purposes as a de-icing agent, under penlty of criminal law. Instead, it must be managed or disposed of as a hazardous waste.

That testing is conducted through a protocol known as "TCLP", a test method conducted per regimens known as EPA Standard Methods. It simulates 20 years of leaching and measures 8 principal toxic metals including arsenic, mercury, barium, chromium, silver and also a very long list of substances known as "priority pollutants". If only one substance is present at or above EPA approved levels (and the detection limits for all are set at sub-trace levels that constitutes a fraction of demonstrated toxic concentrations), the coal ash cannot be used in or released to the environment. And before anybody asks, any laboratory performing these types of analyses, whether it is an in-house or a contract laboratory, must be approved by the EPA and the state environmental regulating agencies. These laboratories are all, without exception, subject to exhaustive oversight and auditing. I have worked as a laboratory inspector for my state's Deparetment of Environmental Quality inspecting contract and power company labs, and I can tell you that I'd rather be audited by the IRS. It's no picnic. Each lab is inspected at least annually and is subject to non-scheduled inspections at any time. In an inspection/audit, all methods, techniques, analysts, and records are subjected to microscopic scrutiny. Failures to meet any established standard can result in fines and or imprisonment (the inspectors and the agencies they work for are part of the state's law enforcement arms). Additonally each lab, without exception, is compelled to participate in annual EPA-mandated federal QC testing that tests every parameter that a laboratory reports. It is an exhaustive protocol that goes from March through August of every year, and includes a reporting regimen that goes from October through December. Failure to accurately detect and quantify any parameter can ultimately result in the loss of the EPA lab number, which puts that lab out of buisiness - it's doors shut. The point of all this is that if a city manager says that the ash that the city is using is "non-toxic", it's because the city has in its possession a certificate of analyses supplied, as required by law, from the supplier. That certificate of analyses, given all the regulatory oversight backing it up, is a legal document submissable as authoritative evidence in any administrative or criminal court. And from a practical health and safety perspective, because the acceptable levels for all parameters are conservatively set - as mentioned above - at a fraction

If you have to describe your product as "non-toxic" (as in, please have a helping of my freshly baked non-toxic apple pie) chances are it's toxic.

Even if this variety of coal ash is somehow nontoxic it will probably be ground up into very fine particulates and generate high PM10 levels (i.e., particulates); these carry all sorts of crap into the lungs and are an EPA monitored form of air pollution.