Just one teaspoon of salt permanently pollutes five gallons of water. Eyeball the image above and it’s easy to conclude what a season’s worth of cumulative municipal road salting does to add to the contamination of our waterways. Residential salting adds up, too. Used over the course of a winter, the contents of a 50-pound bag of salt will permanently pollute 10,000 gallons of water. You can help keep salt out of our waters. Sweeping up both residential and municipal salt from curbsides and stormdrains helps keep this pollutant out of our groundwater, lakes, wetlands, and streams.