You can't beet this for enterprise

It may sound like a poultice your great grandmother mixed up to treat whatever ailed you, this concoction of beet juice, salt brine and calcium chloride.

Truth is, it could go a little way toward curing a number of ailments we face in the suburbs.

On Sunday, staff writer Tara Garcia Mathewson explored the growing use of SuperMix — so named by its inventor, an enterprising problem solver who heads the McHenry County maintenance department.

As well as its potential for profit for the towns that make it.

Mark DeVries came up with the mix nine years ago, and it's now a phenomenon in the Midwest. A number of towns and counties in the Chicago suburbs either buy or make their own.

Here's how it works: Sugar beet juice is sticky. Mix it with saltwater and, when applied by sprayers, it sticks to the roadway longer than rock salt, which bounces off the road and onto your lawn or onto your car's expensive paint job or simply gets plowed away later into the snowbanks. The beet juice, a fairly benign substance ecologically speaking, remains tacky at low temperatures. Add a little calcium chloride, and it continues to work on snow and ice to 30 degrees below zero.

That means less waste, fewer applications, less gas consumed by trucks, less road salt used, less harm to plants and cars. What could be better than that? The potential to make a profit.

The city of Elgin tried buying the mix from a vendor. But it thought with a modest investment it could make its own — a lot cheaper.

So it spent $50,000 on tanks and pipes and such and now can make all the SuperMix it needs for a season in just one week.

What a waste it would be if the city didn't make the best and highest use of that equipment. It already trades some of the goo to Hanover Township, which takes in Elgin's east side, in exchange for the township plowing some of Elgin's roads.

And next year it plans to sell the mix to other towns in the area.

Elgin has long been committed to do things in a greener way. And if this process will save the city from dumping 7 million pounds of salt on its roads in the average winter and save it $75,000 a season in expense, then bravo.

Some of the government officials who talked with Garcia Mathewson said that, by law, they can't engage in selling SuperMix to other entities. Some simply said it's bad form to sell something that a private vendor might want to sell.

Elgin already sells water to Bartlett and Sleepy Hollow. And Geneva and St. Charles have their own electric utilities.

If it's legal, then why not? In Elgin's case, it's filling some holes in the budget that the economic downturn has created.

Think about that the next time you turn your nose up at a plate of beets.