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Wisconsin Begins Using Cheese To De-Ice Roads
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The NYT reports that Milwaukee has begun a pilot program to use cheese brine to keep city roads from freezing, mixing the dairy waste with traditional rock salt as a way to trim costs and ease pollution. 'You want to use provolone or mozzarella,' says Jeffrey A. Tews, the fleet operations manager for the public works department, which has spread the cheesy substance in Bay View, a neighborhood on Milwaukee's south side. 'Those have the best salt content. You have to do practically nothing to it.' 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,' says 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. In a state where lawmakers once honored the bacterium in Monterey Jack as the state's official microbe, residents of Bay View say they have noticed little difference, good or bad, in the smell of their streets, and city officials say they have received no complaints. The mayor of Bay View says it's an experiment, but one that makes sense. The brine will come from the Dresser Farm in Polk County, where it is already being used on the roads. The only cost will be for transportation and distribution. 'We thought, 'Well, let's give it a shot.' The investment in this project is $1,474.'"
I'm at a loss for words lmao.
"Are you sure that's not just a rounding error?"
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I have a feeling the roadkill rate might go up a bit, and I'd hate to think about trying to walk my dogs on a sidewalk or street coated with processed dairy...
Log in or piss off.
It's 99% salt and dirt cheap.
Easy, fit better tyres to your car for winter and better training to drive on ice / snow.
We dont salt our roads, we use spiked winter tyres here and snow ploughs.
After all, they say "do what you know"...
Won't this make the road even more slippery?
The content says brine, the salty water left over from cheesemaking.
timothy, if that's the same to you, have some with crackers.
As a professional cheesemaker, (yes, one of the blessed variety), the first question that comes to my mind is:
Why are these people throwing out their brine? This seems an unnecessarily costly exercise.
It is typical practice in many cheese factories (and all of those in which I've worked) to keep and re-use brine (sometimes for decades), with routine and simple maintenance such as topping up salt levels, adjustment of pH, filtration to remove solids and occasional pasteurisation if required.
A "raw" brine of just NaCl and water will, of course, do the job of salting your cheese, but most of the salt is left in solution at the end of the brining process (so it doesn't make sense to throw it away), and the pH will have a tendency to bounce around, adversely affecting the properties of your cheese. The various whey products in a re-used brine help to stabilise the pH, so one usually only needs to top up salt to replace that absorbed by the cheese.
I could imagine this smelling pretty horrible, particularly come summer.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It's actually a waste product that is mostly salt water.. but thanks for the usual Slashdot quality journalism.
Cheese, you say?
Better tyres yes, spiked tyres depends.
They make sense in areas/countries with low population density and snow covered roads.
On mostly ice/snow free streets they wear down any pavement quite fast, resulting in street repair costs magnitudes higher than the initial savings during winter.
That and they are really shitty compared to normal tyres when you brake.
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
Southern Wisconsin gets less snow than previous places I've lived. Outside of one or two large storms every winter, the amount of snow is quite light, and within an hour or two the major streets are plowed. Salt isn't going to help when you have 4 inches of slush on the road, but an easy soluthion when you are just trying to clear up light stuff and a bit of ice when the temperature is bouncing above and below freezing
modded down by pampered Americans who will gleefully watch The Hunger Games but have never been hungry
They are using cheese brine, not the cheese itself. The brine has salt in it but is mostly not cheese.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I would think people living on the street would appreciate food placed in their home. Anyway, it's brine, not cheese. It's got what homeless crave.
They are going to have a problem with mice on the roads. What will the spray to deal with the mice? Fish. The fish will attract cats who will eat the mice. But then there will be a cat problem, so they will have to spray ... anyway, I am sure that the old woman who swallowed a fly is consulting. So all is well.
I bet there's plenty of leftover dry-noodle-dust somewhere that could be thrown into the mix.
Although I suppose it curd work.
Bay View is not a city! It's a neighborhood of Milwaukee! Summary starts by saying this but then just descends into ignorance by talking about the mayor of Bay View. There is no mayor of a neighborhood!
Also I am a native Milwaukee resident and I support this. Cheese that shit up, bitch. As long as it doesn't damage anything or stink or leave a nasty residue.
I guess people can finally drive in the Milky Way without the need for a space craft. Hooray!
Or modded down by people who wouldn't want to be so cruel as to feed cheese brine to the poor. Are you going to complain we mistreat poor people by not giving them seawater when they are thirsty?
Thats a heat wave
When I were a lad in Yorkshire, it used to get down to -25 Kelvin, and our mother would give us a cup of liquid Helium to warm us up...
Why are you driving on the pavement?
Here, have a nice tall glass of cheese brine! That'll make you less hungry, right? You want to solve world hunger? Stop eating you stupid fuck and kill yourself.
Pavement (material), the durable surfacing of roads and walkways;
This article is about Wisconsin roads. Wisconsin is in the US where pavement is a building material. Pedestrians walk on side walks. By the way, cars in the US don't use tyers either, they use tires. And snow is cleared using plows not ploughs.
Depends where you live. Milwaukee gets more snow because it is near the lake. The last few years that I lived in Milwaukee we got over 10 ft of snowfall in a season. That is lower than many places in Canada or the north east US, but still a lot of snow.
CHEESE FOR EVERYONE!!!!
I guess it depends where in Milwaukee you live too, as the average at the airport and where I am just north of the city, not too far from the lake, is less than 5 ft a season. The record set about 5 years ago was closer to maybe 8 ft, and even that year there were only 2 or 3 storms that were more than a couple inches in a day.
I've encountered the use of what I was told was a whey solution being sprayed on roads to keep down the dust in summer. As I recall that did smell a bit.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I suppose cheese brine uses consumergrade salt while a mixture of rock salt and brine has been known as de-icing method for quite a while now.
"as a way to trim costs and ease pollution."
http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/ffarms.asp
etc.etc.
Do you know why you're NOT vegan?
Spiked tires and tire chains are actually illegal to use in Wisconsin, except for emergency vehicles and rural mail carriers.
The best you can use there is regular soft-rubber snow tires
And then that 4 inches of slush gets compressed and frozen into a 1 inch thick slab of ice (covered in a layer of powdered ice)
cheese shortages at local cheese shops leads to widespread cat famine.
"Before humanity, the stars shone throughout the heavens. After humanity [has gone], the stars will continue to shine"
Calcium Magnesium Acetate (CMA) works great. We've been using CMA for three years on our farm. It is non-toxic, doesn't damage concrete, doesn't corrode steel, won't hurt plants, aquatic life or pigs (what we raise on pasture) so it is pretty ideal.
The down side is that CMA is more expensive than road salt. I feel the extra cost is worth it to protect the environment, our livestock, our buildings and our vehicles.
See these articles
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:sugarmtnfarm.com+cma
"That and they are really shitty compared to normal tyres when you brake."
no they are not. I ride on studded snow tires and I can stop far FAR shorter than any other tire on snow, and they already proved that winter tires in general have a higher grip on a 2WD sedan than all seasons do on a 4X4. Jalopnic did several runs on a track and proved it without a doubt.
The studs are easily removed for when the ice is all gone. The simple tool I have will insert or remove the studs. And bans on them are not for the roads, it's that most drivers are far far too stupid to keep the car under 45mph with the studs in. over that speed the risk of throwing the studs increases rapidly.
Granted I actually USE the tires so I know a lot more about them and drive with them during the winter so I know how they add traction and their limitations.
Studded snow tires on a honda civic can out drive any 4X4 truck on all seasons in the snow, it's such a difference you can see the "truck nuts" shrivle up.
Note: my wifes Jeep has standard snow tires on it and she outdrives hard even the county snow plows, no sliding at intersections, etc....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Milwalkee gets nothing compared to what we get across the lake. I have 4 feet in my yard right now, drive 10 miles east and it drops drastically. Unless the prevailing winds do a 180, Milwalkee get's nothing in snow compared to where I am living. Got an additional foot last night, not a big deal, you wipe it off the car and drive away.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You can use the walnut shell "spiked" tires there without a problem.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
to make a slippery surface that we could slide along as if it were ice. Hmm.
to a gritty problem.
"Just remember: use pro-vo-lone-ay on the stone-ay."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
cheese brine is salt water.. what happens to you when you drink salt water?
read the fucking article, or in this case you could have read even the summary and not come of as ignorant
That's inhumane to use cheetahs to remove snow from the roads in Wisconsin. Those cats can easily freeze.
If the next time you wanted cheese, I then sold you brine, would you be satisfied? Stop lying.
What really gets me is the counties in Ohio and towns around here dump gads of salt on the roads and my vehicles are falling apart because of it. I drive with good snow tires and have driven in Alaska for years where salt doesn't do the trick. In Alaska, they would groove the ice and dump a medium to fine gravel on the roadways. Next, its the task of people to drive like the roads might be slick and buy some snow tires.
That would be way to late.
Things like this report say essentially the exact opposite of every point you said: that bans and restrictions are related to pavement damage, that on non-iced surface studs have same or worse stopping distance, that even on some iced and snow conditions they have worse stopping distances, and the difference between studded tires and alternatives are shrinking to near insignificant levels in most cases.
The roads are in such a bad condition, it's almost as if there are snow threads in the asphalt itself...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
"If you put dry salt on a roadway, you typically lose 30 percent to bounce and traffic"
What if you create a brine solution using the salt, and hot water? Apparently you have the ability to spray cheese brine on the road ways, so this should be to difficult, but hey I'm just a caveman, I know nothing about "roads" and "machinery"!!
I get the fact it does help the companies, and saves money for the state/city, also saves resources, but if these companies have to find a way to dispose of it "legally" how safe can it be when your spraying it all over the roads? Is spreading it out really any better, then the company putting it into open "salt or sledge" pond to evaporate?
I get the saving thing, and I like that. But the environmental part, baffles me, is it really "safe" or "friendlier" when your blasting it all over the roads!!
Burger Rd
Foxboro, WI 54836
Dumping the cheese cultures all over town, with the mold-inducing bacteria, what could possibly go wrong?!
Henk-Jan maak de kooien klaar, we hebben nieuwe klanten! ;)
-- 29A the number of the Beast