The beet goes on (the road, that is)

Alex T. Paschal/Gazette The Dixon Park District has been using beet juice to clear away snow and ice from the roadways at Lowell Park this winter.

E-mail this story

Print this story

Share

DIXON - If you didn't know any better, the reddish-brown liquid covering the roads at Lowell Park this winter could be a bit shocking. No, it's not blood - it's beet juice.

The Dixon Park District is experimenting with a beet juice cocktail that is used as a snow-removal method before ice and snow storms hit. The wonder root has been discovered as a non-toxic, biodegradable source for melting snow and ice, often at lower temperatures than salt.

Don't believe it?

Duane Long, the park district's maintenance director, and Deb Carey, executive director, swear by the sticky stuff.

"You just press a button, sit in your warm truck and drive 10 minutes down the road," Long said.

When crews spread limestone chips, the process takes an hour or more.

Carey says it not only melts the snow in about 15 minutes after application, but it also is friendly to the environment.

"It helps maintain the ecological integrity and safety for the people who use the parks," Carey said. "People are becoming more cognizant of those factors nowadays."

Here's how it works: Juice extracted from beets is mixed with a salt brine (think salt water) and calcium chloride. The beet juice, which is the byproduct of making sugar from sugar beets, causes the substance to stick together and freeze at a lower temperature than brine alone.

Crews spray the liquid before a storm so the substance forms a layer between the snow and pavement. It's able to melt snow and ice at temperatures as low as 25 degrees below zero, where salt stops working at about 10 degrees.

Most of the park district's snow-removal efforts center around the 3.3-mile road at Lowell Park leading to Woodcote, which the park district began renting out three years ago.

The curvy, narrow lane is bordered by a steep ravine, "so it's doubly important in the winter to make sure it's safe," Carey said.

As far as Carey was concerned, salt was not an option at Lowell Park, especially after about one quarter of the park's land was designated a nature preserve.

The park district first tried limestone chips to de-ice the roads.

"It solved the problem of slipping, but in the spring, piles of chips were smothering the wildflowers on the side of the road," Long said. They had to come up with an alternative.

That's when Carey found Harvey Williams, a consultant for Davenport-based Ossian Inc., the company that manufactures the beet mixture used by the park district.

Williams, who retired from the Illinois Department of Transportation in Dixon five years ago, has worked a lot with snow removal issues. He and a few others throughout the country have been working on finding an alternative snow-melting method since the late '80s.

"People told us we were nuts," Williams said. "They told us liquid on highways would cause accidents."

Now, working at Ossian, which has a patent on its beet juice blend, Williams is trying to spread the word about the powerful veggie-and-salt mixture.

One advantage it has over traditional methods is that road salt is corrosive and can cause harm to bridges, roads and cars, Williams said. Sodium chloride spread on roads oxidizes the reinforcing steel in the road bed, which causes it to expand and eventually explode the asphalt. Not to mention, salt kills plants and runs off into the watershed, effectively polluting it.

Williams said while about 30 percent of salt bounces off the road, liquids don't have that problem. In fact, it reduces the amount of salt runoff because the beet juice helps the sodium chloride stick to the road.

What also sets this eco-friendly mixture apart, besides reducing corrosion, is that simply adding 10 percent beet juice to a liquid salt solution purifies the de-icing process.

"It's basically a molasses," Williams said.

Carey said the beet juice mix - which smells a little like horse feed - cuts down on clean-up efforts in the spring.

Her initial fear was the mix would change the chemical analysis of the soil. Though she's still not sure how it will affect flowers, research from Iowa State University has shown the substance can have a fertilizing effect on turf grass.

"You go to a store with products that advertise as being green, but most are not that good for the environment," Carey said. "We really looked into this."

An important drawback, however, is cost. Limestone chips cost $7 a ton and salt usually runs $40 a ton; one gallon of the beet juice can start around $2 a gallon.

Most cities use a blend of salt substance and beet juice. Using a 10 percent beet juice blend with other liquids puts it at 14 or 15 cents extra a gallon.

So far, the park district has used about 120 gallons from mid-December until now, or more than $3,000 worth, Carey said.

"We're using the Cadillac of this stuff at Lowell because we don't want to hurt the landscape," Carey said.

Fortunately for the park district, Ossian has provided the liquid to the park district for free this year; it only needs to pay for the spray materials, which cost $800.

Next year, if the park district continues to use the liquid, it will have to pay.

"We certainly want to do it next year," Carey said.

For bigger operations, such as transportation departments, Williams said about 40 gallons would be used per lane mile for highway pretreating and a second clean-up layer would be 70 gallons.

Cities such as Barrington, Crystal Lake and Gurney are considering the substance for next year, Williams said.

For the concoction to work best, exposure to sunlight and traffic help speed up the melting process.

"We've got everything working against us," Long said, yet, it still works well for the park district's lonely, shady roads.

Reach Malinda Osborne at (815) 284-2222 or (800) 798-4085, ext. 526.