Road salt for Long Island: the trip north starts deep inside a Chilean mine

From Chile's northern coast, where a month ago the bulk carrier vessel Equinox Melida loaded 55,000 tons of rock salt mined from the Atacama Desert, to the Atlantic Salt company terminal on Staten Island's northern coast is about 4,500 nautical miles.

Staten Island to Melville, where early this week Massapequa trucker Vinny Avanti dumped his 25-ton salt load at a New York State Department of Transportation yard off the Long Island Expressway, is 49 miles more. It took 2½ hours because of a backup at the Kosciuszko Bridge. The forecast looked like rain, snow and freezing temperatures, so probably he'd do the run the next day and the day after that, if not to that same yard, then another municipal yard on Long Island.

"No matter what the budget is, what the political view is, if it snows, the salt's got to go down," Avanti said. 

A winter product

Road salt — low-tech, abundant, cheap — is as much a part of Long Island's winter landscape as snow. Residents want roads cleared and almost every municipal government with lane miles to manage depends on the stuff. Because of concerns over salt's adverse impacts on water and wildlife, highway professionals try to limit its use. But Brookhaven Highway Superintendent Dan Losquadro, who runs the third-largest road system in New York, after New York City's and the state highways, said with proper management "salt is still, by far, the best option we have to keep the roads safe and passable."

Since the early 1980s, privately held, Lowell, Massachusetts-based Atlantic has supplied much of the road salt used by Long Island municipalities, which they buy under a state contract. Atlantic ships about 300,000 tons to Long Island and 200,000 to New York City annually. By Tuesday, the state DOT, one of Atlantic's major local customers, had used 38,133 tons on its Long Island roads this winter, up from 26,218 in 2024 and 15,569 in 2023. 

Atlantic’s Richmond Terrace Staten Island terminal is a transshipment point for all the salt the company sells on Long Island and New York City. When sales representative Michael McNamee and sales manager Jason Archambault greeted a Newsday reporter in the yard Tuesday, the Melida was unloading, tall and wide as a skyscraper floating on its side. 

Salt fines hung in the air. A shipboard crane with a clamshell bucket took 20-ton salt gulps from one of five holds and dropped them into huge hoppers on a docked barge. Hoppers funneled salt onto a conveyor belt that angled 50 feet off the barge to a huger hopper that sat on Staten Island's solid ground.

Tractor trailers don't load efficiently from the hopper, so dump trucks fed from the stream and carted it a short distance away to a storage pile. The pile was the size of a city block. Wheel loaders ate at it, loading tractor trailers like Avanti's, two scoops per trailer.

Unloading by crane is not technically difficult — after a practice period of "15 minutes, you got it," said terminal manager Brian DeForest — but it needs planning. Unload unevenly and you point one end of a 650-foot vessel into the air, putting massive stress on its hull.

Salt has de-iced Long Island roads since at least the 1960s. It works by lowering the freezing point of water. Scattered on a road before or after a storm, it impedes ice formation and makes plowing more efficient. 

Atlantic pulls 2 to 3 million tons of salt annually from its Chilean mine, selling to municipal and private customers along the I-95 corridor from Maine to Maryland. The company is midsize in the road salt industry, with competitors including Morton, of table salt fame, and agricultural giant Cargill, which reported $154 billion fiscal 2025 revenue. 

In 2025, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, 39 million tons of salt were sold or used across the United States. More than one-third went toward deicing.

The supply of salt in oceans is "virtually inexhaustible," and salt can be economically mined in dozens of countries, including the United States.

The average price per ton at port of loading last year for rock salt, the type used for deicing, was $54. Domestic customers generally pay something in the range of $75, more in the metropolitan area because traffic increases delivery cost, Archambault said. Outside of yearly fluctuation due to the number of snow and icing events, demand is virtually guaranteed. "For most applications, no economic substitutes or alternatives exist," according to a February survey report. 

By mid-February, Brookhaven had spent $3.2 million on salt, East Hampton and Southold about $200,000, Riverhead $136,000, and officials for several towns said they were using reserve funds to pay for snow-clearing supplies and labor.

The drier the better

Road salt bought under the New York State contract must contain no more than 2.5% moisture and be composed of at least 95% sodium chloride, with a mix of five particle sizes ranging from 600 microns to a half-inch.

Atlantic’s product, said McNamee, is 99% pure, and because it comes from one of the driest places on earth — the Atacama receives less than .2 inches of rain annually — very dry. Wet salt "can clump up and clog up the spreader" on a truck tailgate, Archambault said.

McNamee, grandson of one of Atlantic’s founders and son of its current president, said the company’s mine — Compañía Minera Cordillera, which opened in 2007 and is now "a big, vast, open pit" — seemed to be yielding even purer salt than when digging started. It is thought to hold an 80-year salt supply. 

Atlantic doesn't treat its Staten Island salt. "It’s just salt, high-quality salt," Archambault said. From afar, it appears light brown or pink. Up close, the pieces look white or translucent . Some are as smooth and sharp as if they’d been milled.

Environmental impact

Salt use does, however, have adverse impacts. In 2020, the federal Environmental Protection Agency warned salt corrosion caused $5 billion in damage yearly to bridges, roads and vehicles. It can contaminate wells, harm roadside plants and wildlife and attract deer, "increasing the probability of accidents and roadkill."
Reducing those impacts and improving salt's efficacy is challenging, Losquadro said. He puts little faith in sugar-based substances like beet juice and molasses, which he said "gum up" distribution systems and are hard to supply. He's had more success with brine, which, sprayed onto salt as it is dispensed from a truck’s spreader, reduces what professionals call "bounce and scatter," yielding better targeting and less salt use. 
Road crews with the DOT employ a mix of techniques aimed at reducing use, including pre-brining and pre-wetting before storms, deploying two-edge and segmented plows to mechanically remove more snow and ice, and using treated salt, which performs better in colder temperatures, said Stephen Canzoneri, a department spokesperson, in an email. "We understand that there is a delicate balance between protecting the environment and maintaining safe highways for motorists."

Scooping and loading

After the tractor trailers were loaded, Diana Banjany, Atlantic’s operations manager, weighed and logged them. On a busy day she might dispatch 500 trucks. She tends to dispatch more now because recent weight restrictions on the aging Brooklyn-Queens Expressway limit her loads to 25 tons, down from 30 to 40.
Around 11 a.m., Avanti’s maroon 2019 Kenworth W900L left the terminal, crossed the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and got onto the BQE. Per regulations, he exited the highway in Brooklyn at Cadman Plaza, got back on at Tillary Street, then crawled along for miles until he passed a city road crew that had closed two lanes of traffic to fix potholes west of the Kosciuszko.
Avanti, 59, is a second-generation trucker on the job since he was 18, one of about 100 drivers on Long Island who make regular salt runs to Staten Island. He has done about 200 runs this year.
Avanti's an owner-operator, not an Atlantic employee, but the company has been an important client of his since 1985. When his children were young, they got a kick out of knowing their dad brought Long Island its salt and now, grown, they still do, he said.
 
At 1:30 p.m., Avanti backed into the DOT dome in Melville and hit the hydraulics to raise his trailer and dump. When he heard the tailgate slam, he knew he was done.