Despite the environmental pressures on building maintenance teams for the better part of the last two decades, extending that green agenda from the inside of the building to the outside has been difficult during winter months.

Grounds supervisors are often forced to ignore environmental pressures in order to focus on keeping their sidewalks and parking lots safe and ice free. Come spring time, that same supervisor is then faced with the costly task of replacing salt damaged lawns and landscaping after a winter of heavy chloride use.

Ten years ago, Iowa State University’s Department of Horticulture developed with Ossian LLC a vegetation-positive deicer. A patented formulation of pellet urea encapsulated with calcium chloride, WinterGreen was able to do what no ice melter before it (and since) has been able to do.

While its vegetation runoff – the source of that dead border of grass and shrubs around each of your sidewalks – had the unique quality of converting to a slow release nitrogen in the soil, WinterGreen actually benefited plant growth in many of the tests. With further testing by the University of Wisconsin reinforcing Iowa State’s data, we felt we had finally hit it - the ice melter to end all others. In 1998 WinterGreen was released with much fanfare, under an earlier name, and we sat back with the confidence that we had finally solved everyone’s ice melting woes.

Unfortunately, we hadn’t solved all of them. As strong as the demand was for green products in the late 1990s our manufacturing limitations prevented us from addressing the biggest driver of green buying decisions, cost.

WinterGreen Pellet did everything it claimed and sold well then, as it still does today, but ultimately costs prevented it from penetrating the market the way customer demand suggested it would. And that’s the real dilemma. In order to fully solve a customer’s green issues, a product has to fit the green in their budget. It’s very easy for companies and individuals to say they’re going green, but when the costs of green outweigh the costs of doing the same thing they were doing before, the green alternative will lose out. And with cheap bags of rock salt labeled “all-natural,” it’s easy to avoid the issue for another season.

True solutions are found when the environmentally responsible alternative is cheaper than the old way of doing things. That’s when the green movement will truly make an impact.

Customer interest had never been higher for a de-icing product, yet without being able to provide the price point to make it comparable to what a customer was currently doing, it was impractical for many people to make the change. Our new challenge became, make the product economical while preserving the positive environmental features. Only when we could make a significant impact on the winter costs facing the maintenance team, could we make an impact on the green issues facing them.

Enter liquids. Liquid anti-icing has been around since the mid 1980s, practiced by a number of progressive State Transportation Departments. The premise behind it  is amazingly simple. If ice melters need to dissolve from a granular form to a soupy brine in order to melt ice, what if we just started with the brine? And if the most important part of the ice melting process is breaking that bond between the ice and the pavement, what if we could prevent that bond from forming in the first place? Would this significantly impact our ability to keep  roads clear? Would this reduce our cost structure? In a word, yes.

Applied from the backs of large liquid tank trucks down select highways in the U.S., you can see salt brine solutions applied ahead of winter storms. The dissolved salt provides a temporary barrier over the pavement, preventing the bonding of ice to the pavement. This not only requires less labor to remove the snow and ice but also reduces the amount of dry product needed after the storm to melt already formed ice.

As anti-icing practices grew, it was discovered that agricultural by-products, such as beet sugars, added to the brine would help keep it on the road where it was sprayed rather than drifting into runoff areas. In addition, the ag byproduct kept the salt brine from drying out and dusting, vastly increasing its long term performance. Highway maintenance teams were able to apply product further ahead of the storm, reducing overtime hours before and after the event, and cost numbers began to turn up showing that they were reducing their salt use significantly while maintaining clear roads. One pound of salt ahead of the storm was doing the work of four pounds applied after the storm. With hundreds of miles of roads for any one Department of Transportation facility, these numbers added up quickly.

As these highway departments spread the gospel of anti-icing, they were also laying the groundwork that would bring economics back to the green issue. With significantly lower production costs in manufacturing a liquid version of WinterGreen, there was just one final variable to address — Application.

Although various states and counties had used liquids for close to twenty years, the equipment developed for highway anti-icing had never trickled down to the sidewalk. At best, customers were advised to use a hand pump-up sprayer or a backpack with a spray wand. Neither of which were ideal or in some cases, safe for icy winter conditions, especially when faced with thousands of feet of sidewalk. To effectively realize the vision of maintenance teams using liquids for sidewalk and steps at a facility, a specialized sprayer needed to be developed, one that addressed the issues of cost, cold and corrosion.

After an exhaustive search revealed that no existing sprayer would give a maintenance team the tool they needed for the job, we realized that one had to be designed from the ground up with the de-icer user in mind.

After two years of development and testing through harsh winter conditions, the Ossian LS liquid sprayer finally makes all the tools available to solve the maintenance team’s most critical green dilemma, cost.

The Ossian LS and WinterGreen Liquid, used together finally allows maintenance teams to tackle the green challenge in the winter, while keeping the green in your budget. Labor costs are reduced by applying anti-icers ahead of the storm, on regular hours and avoiding costly overtime. Labor is further reduced on after storm cleanup as your anti-icer prevented the bonding of snow to the sidewalks and steps, forming ice. Snow is cleaned up by regular means leaving a clean surface free of ice and packed snow.

Product costs are reduced because less product is needed to do the same job, all while using the only vegetation-positive de-icer on the market.

Ultimately there is no true innovation if it doesn’t fit in the budget, and in the end, this is where the green movement will be won or lost.