What Are The Affects Of Road Salt On Plants?

Every winter road salt is used on sidewalks, roads, and highways to melt snow and ice. These are to prevent human activates from turning into accidents. When the snow melts the road salt gets dissolved into the melted ice and snow and becomes a formula. This formula sinks into the land (soil mostly) and kills vegetation.

The purpose for this exit project experiment is to find out what are the affects of road salt on plants. The reason for doing this lab is to find out what a certain concentration of road salt will have an affect on a specific type of plant. Also to see what changes will occur like the color of the plant will change or the height of the plant. We are doing this to see what happened to vegetation during the winter season, and what affect the chemical compound in road salt will have on it. We will even found out how the chemical is reaching our underground water supply.

I hypothesize that the two plants I use in this project, during a two to three week period my group and I will have of observing, the plants will be health for the first couple of days and the plant that is watered with the road salt water mixture will have an affect later on in the first week. It will have changes in height and maybe color or even the amount of leaves and the soil properties.

In my research to find an answer for my question, there will be various materials my group and I will need. First we will need to get some example of roadside plants that are affected by road salt during the winter seasons. Then find two identical plants that are roadside plants or not and mark one as controlled and the other as experiment.