The alternatives to salt for battling ice: cheese, beets and ash | Guardian sustainable business
Circular economyGuardian sustainable business This article is more than 10 years oldThe alternatives to salt for battling ice: cheese, beets and ash
This article is more than 10 years oldAs some cities face shortages for fighting off cold weather companies are creating innovative deicers made from quirky alternativesAs snow, ice and frigid temperatures continue to pound large portions of the US this winter, salt shortages and strained local budgets have sent states and municipalities scrambling for deicing alternatives.
The US uses millions of tons of rock salt each winter to keep roads and walkways safe, resulting in salty run-offs that pollute local groundwater, lakes, streams and rivers. Beyond sand and gravel, other deicing alternatives keep popping up, including potato juice and swine urea (yes, pig urine). So where are businesses innovating? Many of the alternative deicers highlighted below are sourced from waste products or byproducts of manufacturing processes.
Cheese brine
In Wisconsin, Polk County officials and a local company, F&A Dairy Products, came up with a mutually beneficial solution for cheese brine, a byproduct of making mozzarella and provolone. Local governments save on salt costs by using the brine to deice their roads, and the cheese company saves on disposal costs. Right now local counties use all of the brine that F&A produces, said Chuck Engdahl, F&A's wastewater manager. Salt soaked in cheese brine has a lower freezing point (-21F) than regular salt brine (-6F). Whether or not there's a unique odor, which a few have likened to whey, is disputable.
Beet molasses
Across the Great Lakes States, Beet Heet, a product derived from molasses from sugar beet processing, is deicing roads. Salt treated with Beet Heet, a creation of K-Tech Specialty Coatings in Indiana, is effective at colder temperatures and lowers the freezing point of rock salt. Increased performance reduces the amount of salt needed. It also can be used to pre-treat roads before a storm.
"Beet Heet builds a layer of protection that breaks the ice bond, like spraying Pam on your skillet", said David Tribolet, K-Tech's product specialist. Product sales have nearly doubled every winter for the last three years, and surpassed 1.7m gallons delivered this season, said Denver Preston, sales manager.
Fracking wastewater
In New York State, wastewater from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of natural gas production has been approved to be spread on the roads of 23 municipalities in seven western counties, according to a recent report by New York's clean water watchdog, Riverkeeper. Fracking brine has a high chloride content and can contain a mix of dangerous contaminants like benzene, toluene and naturally occurring radioactive materials.
"Repeated applications of fracking brine over the course of a winter can accumulate these contaminants, which can then be carried off by storm water and snow melt to contaminate rivers, streams and underground aquifers that feed local drinking water supplies," said William Wegner, Riverkeeper's staff scientist. Fracking wastewaters are regulated at the state level and exempt from the federal hazardous waste clean-up regulations of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
Grass and kitchen waste
Scientists at Wageningen University and Research Center in the Netherlands are working with regional partners and technology firms to create a deicing salt made from biomass sources – roadside grasses or kitchen waste.
The biomass produces an organic salt called calcium magnesium acetate (CMA). CMA also can be produced from fossil fuels, but Dutch scientists developed a way to take biomass and use certain bacteria to convert sugars into acetate, the basis for CMA deicers, and hydrogen. Pieternel Claassen, lead researcher, food and bio-based research at the university, hopes to produce green salt on a larger scale by 2020, pending more research funding.
Fireplace ashes
Burning logs to keep warm produces a lot of ashes. Today's EPA-certified wood stoves and fireplace inserts are cleaner and more energy efficient than traditional wood-burning fireplaces, which use more wood, produce dust and emit harmful toxins. Ashes from wood stoves or fireplaces can be strewn across sidewalks and driveways to increase traction on slippery ice. The best part is that ashes are environmentally friendly and will blow onto or dissolve into local soil, acting as a fertilizer. Ashes also can be composted or saved as fertilizer for spring planting in the garden.
Rachael Post is a writer, digital strategist and professor of social media in Los Angeles.
Explore more on these topicsShareReuse this contentncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKulqMGitc2amaWdXZfCtLXNnqqsZ5Ghwaa%2BzZqroq6VqHq0rcutZJuZpKm5qrrGZqCcnV2Ytaax0p5km52VqcBurdKh