How much salt is used each year in the United States?
According to the Salt Institute the United States applied roughly 17,000,000 tons of road salt during the winter of 2013-2014. Other reports say that more than 20,000,000 tons of salt are applied on our roadways every winter.
To put that into perspective, that equates to:
- 124lbs of salt per person in the United States (there are 322 million)
- 158lbs of salt for every car or truck on the road in the US (there are 253 million)
- ~15x more salt than is used each year by the entire US food processing industry (source)