Halite is the common name of rock salt. It becomes

Generally, Halite develops in the vast beds of sedimentary evaporate minerals that result from the drying up of enclosed lakes, playas, and seas. These salt beds may have the thickness of hundreds of meters and lie under broad areas. In the United States and Canada immense underground beds stretched from the Appalachian basin of western New York through parts of Ontario and under much of the Michigan Basin. Other sediments are in Ohio, Kansas, New Mexico, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan. The Khewra salt time is considered as the huge deposit of halite near Islamabad, Pakistan. There are primarily three mines in the United Kingdom with the largest of these is at Winsford in Cheshire producing half a million tones on average in six months.

Salt domes are generally pipe-like masses of salt that have been basically compressed from underlying salt beds by movement due to the weight of overlying rock. These salt domes contain anhydrite, gypsum, and native sulfur, along with halite and sylvite. They are general along with the Gulf coasts of Texas and Louisiana and are commonly associated with petroleum deposits.

Halite is generally used both residentially and municipally for handling ice. As brine (a solution of water and salt) has a lower freezing point as compared to pure water, placing salt on ice will cause it to melt. Another advantage of placing rock salt to any icy surface is that it disrupts the interface in which water molecules are regularly replacing each other from liquid to solid. When NaCl form a solution with water, part of the interface is blocked, and the crystalline structure of ice leaves more water molecules than the liquid water is able to replace.

In colder areas, home owners place rock through the sideways and driveways after a snow storm to melt the ice. The most important benefit of using rock salt is that you don't need to use much amount of salt as a small amount of salt is enough to loose the ice so that it can be easily removed by other means.

The Hanson family has been involved with the supply and delivery of animal feeds and agricultural products for over 100 years. Over the years the company has progressed and diversified and now is one the largest rock salt suppliers in the UK.