Beet/salt mix keeps roads dry, could make a profit

Mix some sugar beet with a bit of ingenuity and you'll find a recipe for suburbs to save on keeping your roads from getting too slick in winter weather, while being kind to Mother Nature and perhaps making some profits down the road.

At least that's the recipe being used by the City of Elgin this season, as it tries to find a way around using its usual 20 million pounds of road salt.

A product the city used to buy, but now makes, has the potential to reduce that amount of salt used by up to 30 percent close to 7 million pounds a year.

But Elgin isn't stopping at savings on salt and the cost of the product. There are plans to go one step further and turn the savings into future revenue. The secret: the sugar beet.

The product, a mix of salt brine, sugar beet juice and calcium chloride, originally came out of McHenry County. The county's maintenance superintendent, Mark DeVries, came up with the mix and the winning ratio in 2001. Now what he calls SuperMix is changing the way municipalities deal with snow all over the country and throughout the world.

DuPage and Lake counties use the mix, as do Arlington Heights, Gurnee and Libertyville. With its genesis in northern Illinois, the beet mixture has especially caught on in the Midwest.

“It's not magic,” DeVries said. “But it has some benefits.”

After buying the mix for four years, Elgin invested this year in equipment to produce it in-house, saving $1.65 per gallon, Public Services Director David Lawry said.

Saving $75,000 per season is a start, but City Manager Sean Stegall said there also are plans to sell the mix to other municipalities or even private entities.

Stegall said he prides himself on finding the down sides of an idea. But he said there are rare times when something comes along that seems good from all angles.

“This is one of them,” Stegall said.

The key to the beet juice is its stickiness and the fact that it doesn't freeze. Mixing the benign liquid with saltwater safely keeps the rock salt on the pavement for longer.

This means less of it bounces off the roads, heading straight for groundwater and plants and car paint, and it also means city plows don't have to run as often. Adding in calcium chloride keeps the whole mixture effective at lower temperatures than regular road salt alone.

The environmental impact, then, amounts to using less salt on the roads overall and providing an alternative to using pure calcium chloride a more corrosive option when it gets really cold.

By investing about $50,000 in production equipment, Elgin found a way to produce in one week the amount of the mix it can use in a year, Lawry said. For now the extra production capacity will be used mostly to barter with Hanover Township on Elgin's east side, which in turn will plow some city roads.

But by next year, Elgin will likely move beyond the bartering to actual profits from producing the mix, Stegall said. And until then, the city is already close to the $50,000 mark in savings from making its own mix and using less road salt.

Other cities or counties in the area make their own solution or are looking into doing so, but they have largely left the extra revenue stream for the private sector.

McHenry and DuPage counties have explicitly rejected the idea of selling the mix.

DuPage County Director of Transportation and Operations John Kos said the county has been purchasing the product for the last few years and though DuPage is considering making it in house, the county will not sell it.

“We're not here to take away from the private sector,” Kos said. “We're just here to take care of our needs.”

DeVries said the view in McHenry County is that marketing the product for a profit would not be legal.

But Elgin is no stranger to finding profits in alternative revenue streams. The city sells its water to Bartlett and Sleepy Hollow, making a profit by selling it for 25 percent more than it charges Elgin residents, according to Elgin Mayor Ed Schock.

The city also owns golf courses that turn profits in good years.

It's a combination of village employees and officials that enables innovations like making and selling SuperMix, the city manager said.

“You've got the encouragement of it by the council, the need for it brought forward by the economic crisis and the ability borne by the employees bringing these things forward,” Stegall said.

Schock said residents shouldn't expect to see future SuperMix sales result in lower taxes at least not during this down economy.

“In the current environment, any additional revenue is really making up for lost revenue,” Schock said.

But he said it's initiatives like this that have allowed the city to freeze its tax rate and cope with an expected $2.1 million annual decrease in tax revenues.

“It's good for the taxpayers; it's good for the city,” Schock said.

What's in it?

SuperMix uses a combination of three products to work in even the coldest Illinois winter.

Salt brine: It is relatively cheap to make and melts ice with pavement temperatures as cold as 15 degrees or so.

Beet juice: Its stickiness keeps salt on the roads longer. It doesn't take away ice, but it doesn't freeze and it lets plow trucks make fewer trips per storm.

Calcium chloride: It melts ice like salt, but works at much lower temperatures, making the mix effective to about –30 degrees.

The mix: 85 percent salt brine, 10 percent beet juice and 5 percent calcium chloride.

Source: David Lawry, Elgin public services director