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Solution appears to ‘beet’ plain salt
Road salt seems to work better with beet juice in the mix.
SHARON, Pa. — The beet juice goes on.
With the juice, snow and ice are easier to deal with on treacherous wintertime roads without the need for as much rock salt.
The city of Sharon began using a product from a company called Road Solutions, based in Indianapolis, this year. Called Ice Bite 55, its magical ingredient that makes roads more passable and saves the city money on salt is beet juice.
But don’t expect to drive through Sharon after an ice storm and find pink slush everywhere. The beet juice used in Ice Bite, said Jay Walerstein, vice president of Road Solutions, is not from the red beet people eat in their salads.
“This is a sugar beet,” he said. “It’s a big old ugly root about the size of a football.”
Road Solutions buys a leftover carbohydrate product from a company in northern Michigan that makes sugar from the beets, which are grown in cooler climates such as Michigan’s, Walerstein said.
The result is a solution that is mixed with road salt to make it more effective, said Walerstein.
“Rock salt does nothing to help until it starts to melt,” he said. “It stops working or becomes slow from 18 to 15 degrees. When beet juice is put on, it works down to minus 25,” he said.
Ice Bite is used two ways — either mixed with rock salt or mixed with salt water.
“When it’s put on salt in crystal form, the salt sticks to the road 40 percent more, because it’s wet, and it burns into the ice much quicker,” he said.
That burn, he said, is a lot less corrosive to roads and bridges than calcium chloride, which road crews have used like they would Ice Bite.“It’s a safe, organic chemistry reaction that is 70 percent less corrosive,” he said. A snowplow can easily scrape an ice pack away because the beet juice has bonded to the road, he said. The carbohydrates are, he said, a “tenacious” anti-icing agent. “They want to stay on the road.”
Not only does a road crew have to use less salt because the Ice Bite is more effective, said Walerstein, but because the mixture stays on a road, that road doesn’t need to be retreated several times. Treating a road once instead of two or three times a night, he said, will result in a tremendous savings, especially since the cost of road salt has skyrocketed.
The savings for Sharon this year, said Mayor Bob Lucas, has been between $50,000 and $60,000.
The city paid $2,520, or $4.50 a gallon for 560 gallons of Ice Bite, Lucas said. If the city wants to continue using the product, it can buy in bulk starting at 6,000 gallons for $3 a gallon, Lucas said.
Lucas added that he was out last weekend following a salt truck at 4 a.m. to see the results.
“We had the auger [a large screw that turns the salt spreader] turned all the way down, he said. “We did the east hills, and it worked good.”
The road crews seem to like the product, he said.
“It cuts the snow faster, melts it quicker and is longer on the ground,” he said. Road crews only applied one treatment, he said.
Lucas said he wants to use Ice Bite at least one more time before he commits to it.
He said he became familiar with the beet juice solution after reading about it last year on the Internet. Then one day, an Ice Bite salesman from Road Solutions showed up at the city building.
“I said, ‘Wow, I’ve been looking for you,’” Lucas said.
Though the product has been available for several years, not too many areas are using it yet, Walerstein said.
Chicago and Cincinnati are moving toward using Ice Bite and salt water, he said.
The Ohio Department of Transportation has been using Ice Bite for three years in a statewide contract, he said. Pennsylvania has been experimenting as well, he said, with the product being used in King of Prussia in the eastern part of the state and at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s station in Butler County.
Butler County is one of five counties in PennDOT’s district 10. Harold Swan, District 10’s community relations coordinator, said the Butler station tried Ice Bite last year.
“They were testing it, trying it on certain roads and conditions, with significant improvement,” Swan said. He said that this year, Butler County is going to use it much more. Swan said District 10 is preparing a purchase order for Ice Bite, with two other counties, Armstrong and Jefferson, interested in testing it. Indiana and Clarion, the remaining counties, don’t have the necessary containment and mixing systems need for the product, he said.
Sharon put containers of Ice Bite on a forklift, made a dam out of salt and mixed it, Lucas said.
Lucas said that if the city decides to buy more Ice Bite, it will buy “saddle tanks” for its trucks that would spray the beet juice onto the salt.
starmack@vindy.com