"Too much road salt can pollute urban waterways and damage vehicles. To de-ice roads, some cities are looking for greener alternatives, of a vegetable nature."
"When Washington, D.C., announced it was busy preparing for a wintry mix by making a cocktail of road-coating beet extract last week, some people were understandably confused. Beets and streets do not compute. Salt and streets, on the other hand, has a nice ring to it — if only because that particular food-infrastructure pairing had a head start in the popular imagination as an effective way to stop cars from skidding during icy nights.
But D.C., like many cities, has long relied on a potion of beet-enhanced brine to coat its roads. The extract of sugar beets, when combined with traditional ice-melting chlorides, can be more effective at lowering the freezing point of water than salt alone (here’s how the chemistry works). It’s also more biodegradable and less corrosive to vehicles. Discovered by a Hungarian scientist in the 1990s, the just-add-beets method has spread across North America, joining a host of other agricultural byproducts — including pickle juice, cheese brine and leftover beer — sprayed on streets in a quest to cut the dangerous salt habit that highway departments have picked up.
About 15 to 17 million tons of road salt are poured onto U.S. roadways each winter — salt that invades waterways, contaminates ecosystems and eats through steel on snowplows and buildings. Environmental concerns around the overuse of road salt and chemical de-icers are driving some recent policy changes. In Michigan, a snowy state that grows thousands of acres of sugar beets, the legislature voted in 2020 to start a pilot program to introduce “agricultural additives” to winter road treatments to study their impacts. Winnipeg, Manitoba, expanded a 2015 beet juice pilot into a permanent city-wide fixture."
Sarah Holder reports for Bloomberg CityLab December 15, 2021.
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