Elizabeth Hendricks from WWF Canada explains how road salt is harming waterways in southern Ontario. Time to reduce the total chlorides we are dumping into the environment. Beet juice is an option for de-icing and dust control.
Just Beet it: Winnipeg to Expand use of alternative….
SOURCE : www.winnipegfreepress.com by Aldo Santin
Winnipeg is moving ahead with initiatives that incorporate natural, local material to deal with winter conditions on its streets and sidewalks.
The public works department is expanding its use of “beet juice” and introducing granite stone chips for use on both streets and sidewalks.
Cheryl Anderson, acting manager of street maintenance, said the City of Winnipeg has been using the beet juice mixture – desugared beet molasses mixed with road salt – exclusively in the east, and plans to expand it citywide next winter.
“They’ve been using it and it’s proven to be very successful,” Anderson said.
A pilot program will launch next winter incorporating granite chips – hard angular stone – mixed with the traditional sand-salt mixture that’s spread onto streets and sidewalks
“It will cut into the ice pack a bit more, and traffic will break it down,” Anderson said of the tiny granite stones. “It’s darker and will absorb heat from light, so we’re hoping it will help break down the ice pack also.”
Unlike sand, the granite chips are reusable, Anderson said. The chips will be collected during the spring street clean-up, siphoned off from the grit, washed, and stored for the following winter.
Anderson said the pilot will determine if the chips are as effective as promoted and if there is cost savings.
Jim Berezowsky, director of public works, said the use of both the beet juice and granite chips was prompted by the snow storms that walloped Winnipeg in December 2016 and January 2017. The public works department was determined to improve its snow-clearing operation, he said, and outlined several initiatives during a presentation Friday to city council’s public works committee.
Anderson said the beet juice is the byproduct from the sugar beet refinement. The juice is sourced from North Dakota processing facilities, which have been selling it to third parties that convert the juice into material suitable for winter use.
Anderson said beet juice is for anti-icing and de-icing. In anti-icing, the liquid is on the surface and stops the ice from forming; for de-icing, it’s used as a pre-wetting liquid with salt-sand mixture and helps keep it sticking to the ground.
Unlike salt brine, which is only effective to about -12 C, Anderson said the beet juice is effective to -35 C.
It will be blended with sodium chloride, reducing the need for that product anywhere from 30 per cent to 70 per cent, she said.
Anderson said one of the big advantage of beet juice over sodium chloride is it’s more environmentally friendly. Sodium chloride is also corrosive to street and sidewalk surfaces, so the switch should create less wear.
The city had been using a calcium-chloride mixture for wetting purposes, but Anderson said it’s corrosive on roads and sidewalks. The beet juice is being mixed with the calcium chloride, she said, reducing the corrosive impact.
Over the last five years on average, the City of Winnipeg distributed approximately:
– 24,000 tonnes of road salt;
– 71,500 tonnes of winter sand;
– 900,000 litres of liquid de-icer.
Other snow-clearing initiatives undertaken by the city public works department:
– Retrofitting sand trucks with aluminum and stainless steel dump boxes, which are significantly lighter and can carry more material.
– Reviewing snow-clearing contracts to incorporate sidewalk and cycle path snow clearing along Pembina Highway, reviewing zone boundaries, and refining penalty provisions.
– Introduction of equipment operator orientation sessions for private contractor drivers (to minimize damage to curbs and sod), instructing driver where to dump snow when clearing lanes, and how to properly clear bus stops and fire hydrant zones.
– Diverting street sand from the landfill for use in soil-fabrication pilot initiative, producing savings in landfill tipping charges.
source: City of Winnipeg
Science of Winter: YOU CAN’T BEET SUGARY BROWN GOO FOR SNOWY ROADS
SOURCE : OTTAWA CITIZEN – by TOM SPEARS
This winter, the Citizen’s Tom Spears looks at what makes our coldest season tick. It’s a series we call The Science of Winter, and today we hear from an expert what to do with a truckload of waste beet juice on a snowy day, in case you have one and were wondering.
Each year, the salt trucks in the Niagara Region are sprinkling sticky brown salt on their roads, melting the snow better than plain salt by mixing it with waste from a refinery that turns beets into sugar.
They use the same “beet juice” mixed with salt in Montreal, in British Columbia’s interior, and in Ontario’s Huron County, where Mike Alcock is the civil engineering technician in a system that has worked on country roads for a decade.
First thing’s first: “It’s not purple.”
“It’s kind of brown,” and looks like thin molasses — not surprising given that molasses also comes from sugar beet juice. Mixed with salt, the juice lowers the freezing point of water, which makes ice less likely to form.
Alcock says it’s even better than salt alone.
In spring and fall, when the danger is frost on bare roads causing black ice, workers spray thin stripes of liquid beet juice and salt-water on the asphalt. It sticks to the asphalt and prevents ice from forming.
“We only do that on problem areas (such as) hills, bridges and sheltered areas. It sticks around” and works for days, he said.
In midwinter, they plow the roads then sprinkle coated salt. The chunks of salt have been given a thin coating of beet juice on their way through the conveyor, making them tacky so they stick to the road.
Anyone who has driven behind a highway salter knows the sight of salt bouncing all over, much of it scattering off the road. Alcock says his county saves enough by coating its salt to cover the cost of juice.
“It also gives (the salt) a little bit of a kickstart. Salt doesn’t do anything until a little brine forms” on the surface of the grains, he said. “So if you spray this liquid, your brine forms instantly, as opposed to the salt having to sit around and wait for a little sun to create enough water on it.”
There’s also a side benefit: Sugar beet juice lowers the effective temperature of road salt to around -25 C from about -10 C. The juice also doesn’t make cars rust.
Huron County, west of Stratford, Ont., has easy access to road salt. The stuff comes from the Sifto salt mine in Goderich, which extends under Lake Huron. But it still doesn’t want to spread more salt than is necessary, as salt is bad for lawns, trees and creatures living in streams and rivers.
Beet juice reduces all that, and helps refiners.
“That’s how you make money: selling your product and your waste,” Alcock says.
Smith Fertilizer and Grain of Iowa, which makes a brand called Beet 55, says beet juice reduces the use of salt by 30 per cent.
More beet juice trivia: You can’t smell it in cold weather, but Alcock warns that you may want to be careful about spraying it near homes when spring comes.
When some drips run out of the truck in summer, “It does smell. Kind of malty. It’s not super-offensive. It’s kind of a concentrated, malty, slightly nauseating smell,” like home-brewed beer before the bottling.
He says he hasn’t ever tasted it, and doesn’t plan to.
In Toronto’s deep freeze, beet juice beats salt for melting ice
SOURCE : thestar.com by Liam Casey
Molasses from sugar beets, refined and sprayed on roads, can help melt ice at temperatures as low as -32 C — with less environmental damage.
Nothing beats a beet in bad weather.
On Tuesday, Toronto’s salt trucks will be rolling out across the city spraying salt covered with beet juice to help roads melt in the frigid temperatures.
The method is only used when the thermometer drops below -20 C, the point at which salt alone becomes useless. The beet concoction is good until -32 C.
“When it starts getting really cold, that’s where the sugar beet really shines,” said Tony Vaccari, a manager at Eco Solutions, which manufactures Fusion Liquid De-Icer, the product the city uses.
The city used it last week when temperatures fell below that critical point, according to Peter Noehammer, head of Toronto’s transportation services. On Monday crews were busy prepping the trucks with the brown liquid.
Toronto has been using a beet solution for years, Noehammer said.
The city’s salt trucks are already equipped with containers that are normally filled with brine — a salt-water solution — that sprays on the rocks of salt as they come out. That brine is replaced with the beet juice.
The city won’t spray every road with the stuff because it’s about four times more expensive than salt. But they’ll hit strategic parts of the city, such as hills and bridges, where ice is most likely to cause problems.
The sugar beet, which looks like an obese, white carrot, has long been one of the workhorses of the sugar industry. When sugar is mined from the beet for the food industry, molasses is left over.
But the molasses is useless, as you might expect in January.
“When it comes to us it’s thick, a little less than syrup,” Vaccari said. “It’s not pumpable and not really usable by anyone.”
Eco Solutions takes the molasses at its Milton facility and runs it through an “alkaline degradation process” that thins it out and gives it a better “melt value.”
The beet business has been booming of late, Vaccari said, with municipalities and other users such as condominiums looking for better alternatives to salt.
It is an organic product that some have called environmentally friendly.
“We don’t like saying it’s better for the environment than salt, but you can drink our product,” Vaccari said. “I’ve drunk a lot of it during presentations. I mean, it doesn’t taste very good — it’s really bitter.”
Vaccari said cities from Hamilton to London to Niagara are using the product on their roads regularly, which has resulted in significantly less use of salt — upwards of 60 per cent less in some cases.
Road salt is a prime enemy to the ecosystem, said Angela Wallace, of the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority. She doesn’t know much about the beet product, but anything that reduces chloride in water and soil is beneficial to the environment.
“Indirectly we see a decline in fish health and communities” from road salt, said Wallace, adding that the density of roads correlates to poor health among the fish, bug and plant populations — one of the big culprits being salt used on those roads.
“Beet juice has gained attention, since there’s been a higher emphasis placed on environmental impact because of road salt,” Noehammer said. “And in this case it has the added benefit of working at very cold temperatures.”
And that’s why nothing beats a beet in bad weather.