Education Center

The Salt Institute is dedicated to assisting salt producers create and maintain safe and environmentally-protective working environments and assisting our customers to unlock the benefits of sodium chloride and use it as responsible environmental stewards. With that objective, the Institute has developed:

Salt industry guidelines . These are designed for salt producers, to help them improve the quality and efficiency of their production processes, protect the environment and promote safe working conditions for their employees.

Road salt management training materials . Snowfighters are professionals called upon to work in extreme conditions, for extended periods, performing life-saving public safety emergency response in keeping roadways open and safe. Managers, technical support personnel and the operators responsible for plowing and salting winter roads all require training. The Salt Institute developed customer training in the early 1970s, "Sensible Salting," to provide training materials to road salt users, teaching them how to use the minimum amount of salt to preserve roadway safety and public mobilility. Those materials have evolved and expanded into a full set of materials to enable those charged with applying salt to winter roads to understand how to organize their efforts, select their equipment and materials, store salt to safeguard the environment and, "where, when and how much" to apply salt. Some materials are for direct use by snowfighters while others are designed to support and educate trainers who conduct snow and ice workshops.

Multi-disciplinary secondary school curriculum (for high school teachers) . Not only does salt have 14,000 different uses and a rich historical and cultural heritage, the fascinating facts about this unique crystal can be used to instill principles of economics, biology, earth sciences, history, chemistry, nutrition and agriculture. With guidance from a panel of well-regarded high school teachers, the Salt Institute has developed materials that can be used singly or combined into a robust curriculum using salt as a teaching medium.