Prescription for roads: More beet juice, hold the salt

Anyone who doesn't like eating beets may warm up to this winter recipe quickly.

Take some sugar beets and extract the carbohydrates.

Mix with salt brine and calcium chloride.

Spread evenly on your driveway or sidewalk.

Several counties, townships and municipalities are using the organic de-icer because it works well at lower temperatures.

Now, the Lake County Health Department is testing whether the mixture, which contains less salt than road salt, can keep people from slipping on parking lots and sidewalks, and protect the environment.

Since December, the department has used the mixture on its North Chicago clinic's parking lot and sidewalks and is studying its impact on the water quality of an on-site detention pond.

"It appears not only are we getting salt reduction, but we are also managing the snow and ice rather effectively," said Mark Pfister, an aquatic biologist and Lake County Health Department associate director of environmental health services.

Biologists fear excessive salt draining from roads, parking lots, sidewalks and driveways into inland lakes, streams, rivers and wetlands is causing long-term ecological damage to land and aquatic plant and animal life.

"Eventually, it can get into our groundwater supplies, but we are noticing rapid changes in the surface water because they are the first to receive it," Pfister said.

Lake County health officials hope to persuade private road salt applicators to use the beet juice alternative and reduce the ecological impact.

The health department has monitored levels of sodium chloride, the most common winter de-icer, in county waterways since the late 1980s. In some cases, it found a doubling and tripling of salt concentrations in waterways over the past 10 to 15 years.

Already, some area golf courses and nurseries are showing signs of salt damaging fairways, greens and greenhouses, Pfister said.

"We're hearing from certain golf courses that the salinity or the chloride has gone up so much that they are having problems using that (surface pond) water to irrigate because it's killing the plants," he said. "They have to dilute the water with well water or municipal water from Lake Michigan."

Pfister said roughly 2 to 5 times more salt is applied to parking lots than what the Lake County Transportation Division applies on its 800 lane miles of roadways.

"If we can get everybody to reduce their salt use by 15 percent, like what is happening automatically just by using this one mix, that could be a reduction in thousands of tons of salt applied annually," he said.

He hopes that eventually parking lots and sidewalks at all health department clinics and facilities -- as well as county buildings -- will use the beet juice mix.

Lake County transportation officials say using calibrated trucks to spray the liquid de-icer helps reduce salt consumption -- a major selling point.

The county's blend is 75 percent salt brine, 15 percent beet juice and 10 percent calcium chloride. Its effectiveness lies in how the mixture is applied.

It's spread before a snowfall so it prevents ice from forming. Also, it doesn't bounce and scatter like road salt, eliminating waste.

"It's cheaper when you are using less salt," said Kevin Kerrigan, maintenance engineer for the transportation division.

The beet juice derivative, known as GEOMELT, is trademark-protected so its recipe is not readily available. Yet, private contractors can purchase in bulk the raw materials to make their own liquid de-icer blend.

Soon homeowners may be able to buy the eco-friendly de-icer in specialized retail stores, said Mike Bellovics of SNI Solutions, the Midwest supplier of GEOMELT.

"It was introduced this year on a limited basis," he said. "Next season, it will be available in hardware stores."