The amendments prohibiting the use of de-icers containing heavy metals on pedestrian roads are to be introduced to the Law on Environmental Protection. Greenpeace proposes to take a more radical approach and to ban the use of heavy metals in all de-icing agents.
Chemical agents has lately been extensively used, even though their use was not really necessary. They posed significant risks to human health, domestic animals and the green belt. The residue of road chemicals containing toxic substances end up in the city dust, leading to the secondary air pollution throughout the whole year.
The latest research has demonstrated that the use of de-icers leads to the exceedance of the concentration of polluting toxic substances of all four hazard classes in soil. Besides salt, the polluted soil contains fluorine, zinc, lead, mercury, copper, molybdenum, chromium, arsenic, cadmium, selenium, cobalt, sulfur, and other substances. The concentration of some of them exceeds the maximum allowable concentration by ten or more times.