Beets beat ice and snow

Kudos to the Columbus Public Service Department for finding a green way to clear the streets of winter’s snowfall. The Columbus Dispatch reports the city paid $4.16 a gallon for 1,080 gallons of beet juice to mix with brine for a de-icing experiment this winter.

The juice, marketed as Geomelt, lowers the freezing point of the brine to about 30 degrees below zero, making it a better ice-melting agent than standard road salt mixed with calcium chloride, according to the report. An unidentified stretch of city streets will be tested this winter to see how it works out. Akron also is participating in this vegetable movement, having tested it last year, that city is buying 12,000 to 16,000 gallons for this season. And the Ohio Department of Transportation has plans to try it out in parts of Summit, Lake and Cuyahoga Counties.

Beet juice is biodegradable and apparently doesn’t have the corrosive properties of calcium chloride mixed with road salt. The juice is left over from sugar beets after the sugar has been processed out. It loses its purple hue as well as its sweetness during the processing, so there won’t be any unsightly mauve staining in the wake of the de-icing trucks. The stuff actually turns the brine brown, so the melting snow should be a nice, natural muddy-looking slush.

Columbus doesn’t want to try it out until they get at least an inch of snow, but with 1-3 inches predicted across the southern half of Ohio on Tuesday night, we may soon learn if the highway crews have found a way to beet the weather.

I wonder if they can come up with something useful to do with cauliflower.