Nate Clemmer is the CEO of SynaTek LP, which designs, manufactures and distributes products that de-ice sidewalks and parking spaces in the winter months.
While his company sells to both&#;customers who maintain the outside of a building as well as those who maintain the inside&#;there was one visual that he could not get out of his head.
&#;It&#;s like there&#;s one person outside the building with a bucket, throwing granular products down,&#; said Clemmer in an interview with BASF. &#;And then there&#;s another person inside the building, literally 10 feet away&#;60 degrees difference in temperature&#;who&#;s got a bucket picking up the same product.&#;
Clemmer decided it might be time to come up with a better solution that prevents granular tracking onto the carpets inside lobbies, which then damages metals, kills plants and poses risks for pet safety.
He started researching other alternatives online and found BASF&#;s promotional video on formic acid for deicing airport runways. (Formic acid is a natural product that could also be used for animal feed preservatives, household and industrial cleaning, as well as pharmaceutical intermediates). The organic acid is also used to make potassium formate&#;a better alternative to chloride-based salts, which is what most businesses use for ice melts. Formate salts are less corrosive, and have a lesser impact on the surrounding flora. Potassium formate is also sprayed in liquid form instead of granular salt, so tracking into buildings is not a concern.
&#;Because potassium acetate is made with acetic acid, it has two-carbon atoms. It actually takes more oxygen to biodegrade than formic acid, which only has one carbon,&#; said Ben Glowacki, Market Development Manager, Chemicals, BASF in an interview. &#;The lower the Chemical Oxygen Demand, the better, and potassium formate has about one third the COD of potassium acetate. We can do everything that potassium acetate does and be better for the environment.&#;
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Since BASF is the sole manufacturer of formic acid in North America, Clemmer got in touch with the chemical company in August of last year about utilizing its technology, and by November he started beta testing his potassium formate product called Entry and selling it, while still continuously tweaking the formulation throughout winter.
&#;We&#;ve been hearing more and more from our customers that they were looking for a non-salt, environmentally friendly alternative to chloride salt-based deicers,&#; Clemmer added, &#;so I&#;ve been exploring various products in that category for several years. It made sense to start thinking about designing a product that would incorporate BASF&#;s formic acid technology.&#;
By end of February, Clemmer felt confident that his business had dialed in the right mix of ingredients to achieve the final formulation. He was impressed with the speed that the product got the desired results. SynaTek started picking up customers quickly, especially when the company could show them how the product worked.
&#;We needed to design a product that would work really fast, because once someone shovels snow, what&#;s left is more slippery than what was there before shoveled,&#; he said, &#;so we needed to get that surface back to safe as quickly as possible.&#;
We present here an aquifer scale study on the fate of potassium formate, an alternative, weakly corrosive deicing agent in soil and subsurfaces. Potassium formate was used to deice a stretch of a highway in Finland. The fate of the formate was examined by monitoring the groundwater chemistry in the underlying aquifer of which a conceptual model was constructed. In addition, we determined aerobic and anaerobic biodegradation rates of formate at low temperatures (-2 to +6 degrees C) in soil microcosms. Our results show that the formate did not enter the saturated zone through the thin vadose zone; thus, no undesirable changes in the groundwater chemistry were observed. Furthermore, the conceptual model explained the distribution of chloride in the aquifer used in deicing for the past 30 years. We recorded mineralization potential up to 97% and up to 17% within 24 h under aerobic and anaerobic conditions, respectively, in the soil and subsurface samples obtained from the site. This demonstrates that biodegradation in the topsoil layers was responsible for the removal of the formate. We conclude that the use of potassium formate can potentially help diminish the negative impacts of road winter deicing on groundwater without jeopardizing traffic safety.
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