A new quality standard for salt, SaltAS, was launched by the Salt Association in September with the aim of guaranteeing consistency for users. Dom Browne reports.
At this year’s Cold Comfort, Surveyor was proud to host the launch of a brand new industry-led salt quality standard heralded as the ‘future of the industry’.
Designed to cover the entire supply chain, the SaltAS standard provides an auditable framework for the nation’s salt supplies covering production, packaging, distribution, storage, health and safety, environment and quality.
Speaking to Surveyor, Peter Sherratt, general secretary of the Salt Association – the UK salt manufacturers’ trade association, which spearheaded the initiative – talks about how and why the standard came about and where it might lead.
‘Sometimes, particularly when salt is imported, it does not necessarily correspond with standards,’ Mr Sherratt conceded.
‘For instance there was an example a couple of years ago when quite a lot of salt was imported into the country which wasn’t properly to size or specification and it didn’t even have an anti-coagulate free flow agent in it. So this is to ensure that whenever purchases are made they do correspond to a standard as requested.
‘We worked with one of the approved audit bodies - PAI (Product Authentication International). They have experience of putting these things together. They started the process of drafting out the type of things we were looking for and our working groups beat the draft into something relevant for the industry.
‘We had a working group representing every single salt manufacturer, contributing to the process, vetting what was going in and ensuring it made sense. There has been quite a long committee process to get to the right point.’
The Salt Association worked on the standard from around the start of the year Mr Sherratt explained, with discussions also involving extensive work with the Department for Transport (DfT), the Highways Agency and the Local Government Association (LGA).
‘We were in talks with the DfT throughout the process. I am very pleased to say they were very helpful as it would have been crazy to put together a standard they did not approve of. Appendix H was very much in the DfT’s mind when we were looking at this and they were able to ensure we didn’t do anything silly in that respect.
‘We also spoke with the LGA and the Highways Agency to make sure that we tailored the scheme to their needs.’ As a result the salt standard looks set to lay a new foundation for the salt industry. Mr Sherratt agreed the standard would really have ‘made it’ when it is included in specifications for tender documents, and the signs look good.
‘We are expecting and have already had indications that Highways Agency and local authority purchasers will want to follow this standard, and one can envisage it will be very probably be incorporated into tender documents. We have had confirmation from individual persons, we are not pushing it too hard until we have got the thing on the march but the indications are quite strong that it will become the de facto standard throughout the industry.’
Of course, costs are an issue with any auditing process even one that is done through industry self-regulation. ‘Wherever standards are used in the industry there is always an annual audit cost. But it should be pretty minimal once the thing is set up. It’s not going to be a prohibitive cost. Standards have to be audited on a regular basis.
‘Manufacturers have to go through the audit process themselves. That is currently taking place. I am hoping that each company will not be spending no more than £1,000 in the process. The process will be completed by the end of this year, certainly for the de-icing salt manufacturers and early spring for the edible salt.
‘Once all the manufacturers go through the audit process, they will then require their contractors to go through it. We will be looking by the spring to have all our contractors certified as well, so we can say that the whole of the supply chain end to end has been through the process and meets the standard. For a small transport company, the audit will have a small cost, around a couple of hundred pounds.’
The salt standard looks set to be another step forward for the salt industry and winter services in general after the troubled winters of a few years ago. Just as residents now have the confidence that councils are stocking much more salt in advance of winter to be as prepared as possible, councils themselves can have the confidence they are stocking exactly what they should be.
