Beets may help keep roads in Butler County safer this winter.

State Department of Transportation crews in the county are experimenting with sugar beet juice as a way to help melt ice on roads at low temperatures.

Bob Skrak, the county maintenance manager for PennDOT, said his crews began testing the beet product Friday.

“We just started testing it in areas to get an evaluation of it,” he said.

The beet juice, which is a byproduct of the sugar beets used to make commercial sugars, is added to the salt brine that PennDOT uses to treat roads in temperatures below 20 degrees.

“The colder it gets, the more salt it takes to melt ice,” Skrak said. “So it’s not cost effective to use just salt when temperatures get into the teens.”

But the juice helps solve salt’s melting limitations as the sugar in the juice enables the salt to work when temperatures are below zero degrees.

Skrak said PennDOT has traditionally used water to dampen the salt, which keeps it from bouncing off the roads and allows it to be a little more effective in colder weather than just dry salt.

But Skrak said adding beet juice to the brine could yield much better results than its current mixture.

While his crews have just begun to test the product on some roads, Skrak said he is pleased with the initial results.

“It looks like it definitely makes salt more effective,” Skrak said. “It’s showing some promise.”

Skrak said the juice can be particularly valuable on bridges.

“Bridge decks are always a headache for us,” he said.

While the beet juice is one of the more readily available sugar-filled products, it still comes with a cost.

Skrak said the major focus of the pilot program is to see how cost-effective the juice can be.

“We’re certainly cautious not to use it at higher temperatures,” he said. “We’re hoping to find something that can help treat roads in cold weather while not blowing our budget.”

Skrak said the juice has only a slight odor and its brownish color won’t stain vehicles.

“It’s actually anticorrosive,” he said. “I don’t know how much normal vehicles will notice it, but our trucks are expected to see better results with rusting over time.”

This is not the first time PennDOT has attempted to use beet juice on roads in the county.

“We did a pilot program like this a couple years ago, but the product wasn’t refined enough, and it ended up plugging the nozzles on our trucks,” Skrak said. “This is a more polished product.”

While beet juice may seem like an unusual product to treat roads with, transportation departments are constantly working to find creative ways to treat roads, Skrak said.

“I know Wisconsin uses a byproduct of cheese manufacturing,” he said.

Skrak said his crews will test the product the rest of the winter, and he will send reports to PennDOT officials.

Regardless of the ingredients, Skrak hopes to finally find a product that can effectively melt ice on the coldest of days.

“It would be very nice to have something work in these temperatures,” he said.