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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.'"
Are your dogs lactose intolerant? Hipster freaking dogs with their allergy-of-the-month syndromes...
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.
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.
Well, yes, it would probably smell pretty bad if they were to spread this on the roads in the summertime. However, as an Anonymous Coward pointed out, they don't have much of a problem with ice on the roads in the summer in Milwaukee. In addition, it is unlikely that the brine they spread on the roads during the winter will still be there by the time the weather gets warm enough to cause a smell problem.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.
Although I suppose it curd work.
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...