Pouring Cheese on Icy Roads in (Where Else?) Wisconsin
This month, Milwaukee began a pilot program to repurpose cheese brine for use in keeping city roads from freezing, mixing the dairy waste with traditional rock salt as a way to trim costs and ease pollution.
Local governments across the country have been experimenting with cheaper and environmentally friendly ways of thawing icy thoroughfares, trying everything from sugar beet juice to discarded brewery grain in an attempt to limit the use of road salt, which can spread too thin, wash away and pollute waterways.
If you put dry salt on a roadway, you typically lose 30 percent to bounce and traffic, said Emil Norby, who works for Polk County and was the first in Wisconsin to come up with the cheese brine idea to help the salt stick. The county has expanded its use of the material every year since, spreading more than 40,000 gallons on its highways last year. Chehalis, in Washington State, also uses an anti-icing mixture that includes cheese brine.
It is, perhaps, too soon to tell how much cheese brine would alter that outlay. The pilot program will cost Milwaukee about $6,500 mostly for transporting and storing a small batch of brine. A full report is expected in the spring.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/12/24/us/wisconsin-finds-another-role-for-cheese-de-icing-roads.html?h=xAQHAqjNs&s=1&enc=AZPkRnw-rdMkl6VNvcgLfPjLnDubU4c6KY4vhTE6bc9kR3-8avm-svQwKFEFd8LVk14