Keeping the road dust under control at your landfill is not just a matter of safety for your workers. It’s also a matter of keeping the neighbors happy and and avoiding Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) fines.

Full chloride products are the most prominent treatment for dust control and road stabilization in North America, but they are not always environmentally friendly or effective.

Here at EnviroTech we always keep our motto, “People Helping People Improve their Environment,” in mind with everything we do. Recently, we had a huge opportunity to help the people of Denver, Colorado help their environment.

Treating or pre-wetting salt stockpiles has many advantages such as ensuring salt flow for stockpile movement and salt application, as well as reducing material loss due to bounce and scatter during application.  Salt treatment can also improve melting capacity, melting time and melting. However, if a substandard liquid treatment is used to pre-wet a salt stockpile, leaching can prevent these advantages from being realized.

Ensuring the safety of motorists and passability of roadways in the winter months is critical in many regions of the country. Some of the most useful parts of the toolkit many municipalities use to ensure roadway safety are deicing chemicals such as granular rock salt, salt brine, magnesium chloride, or calcium chloride. These chemicals function by effectively lowering the freezing point of water. Deicers can be used before a storm to prevent snow and ice from bonding as solidly to pavement and improve the effectiveness of plowing. Typically, this is called “anti-icing” and brine's are predominantly used in this capacity.

Commercial snow removal customers often ask why not use sand as the preferred deicer.  It comes down to several different factors as to why this may not be the best answer. Below is a mailbag format with many of the most common questions asked about using sand and an alternative that provides many of the benefits without all the negatives.

Tire ballasting is popular with farmers and many OTR vehicles as it allows vehicles to work safely, with heavier loads than normal.  BallastSeal® enhances both the applicability and usability of Bio-Ballast® Liquid Tire Ballast.  BallastSeal® when used in conjunction with Bio-Ballast® offers the market a unique solution.  Today’s newer tubeless tires often can benefit from a sealant in the Agriculture, Industrial and Off-Road liquid tire ballast market. There are many aspects about liquid ballasting with Bio-Ballast®, in conjunction with BallastSeal®, that will help in getting the most out of your equipment investment. Ballasting with liquid in tires, such as Bio-Ballast®, has proven to pay dividends.  When a lower center of gravity is achieved allowing for more confident operation when lifting and pulling. The combination of BallastSeal™ and BioBallast® helps maintain the optimum tire pressure and maximizes fuel savings.  All the while minimizing the risk due to tire failure, loss of ballast, need for service calls, and enhancing the equipment efficiencies and safety. 

As we detailed in our November Blog, EnviroTech and Redmond are working with WTI (Western Transportation Institute) to develop a test that measures the influence a deicer has on surface friction. The existing standard test, SHRP 205 doesn’t provide performance-based results that speak to the true goal of deicing – which is to return a driving surface to a safe friction level as quickly as possible for a sustained period, and at maximum efficiency. Again, this new friction test, and its resulting data, was developed as a test method using a friction analyzer, a cold plate, and simulated track to measure the true effectiveness of deicers - replicating as closely as possible real-life conditions.