Deicing consortiums are not commonplace across the U.S.; instead, the burden of dealing with spent deicing fluid often falls upon an airport’s environmental staff. The easiest path of management often leads to the construction of deicing pads and dedicated pond systems to limit glycol effluent from being mixed with the remaining airport stormwater.
The process largely works, but it comes at a great cost. The impact isn’t just in the capital costs to build deicing pads and ponds or the tower and personnel to control access to the pads. It can impact flight operations, when many aircraft are being funneled into a small set of pads that are quickly overwhelmed when a heavy precipitation event moves in.
Even if glycol-laden stormwater could effectively be captured, how quickly can it be discharged away from the airport? Aging infrastructure is not merely a roads and bridge problem; it also propagates downstream of the airports into the wastewater treatment facilities. At these facilities, bacteria are used to treat the glycol, but due to the unpredictable nature of deicing events treatment facilities have turned to limiting discharge rates as a method to minimize overrun and production of bacteria at facilities. This has resulted in the need for larger holding systems at airports, which generally have space constraints, or the need for some sort of airport pretreatment facility. So not only does the airport have to pay to send winter stormwater to a wastewater treatment plant, but also for costly pretreatment and on-airport storage.
Then there’s the actual cost of the raw deicing fluids the airlines use. Like almost everything related to the U.S. supply chain, the ability of airlines to source and purchase deicing fluids has been impacted by the pandemic. This is due to the lack of truckers available to transport the fluid from manufacturers to the airport and even shutdowns at production facilities. All of this has caused glycol costs to more than double in the last five years.
As you start to add up all these costs, the payback on building out a glycol recycling facility with the ability to treat glycol on-site at an airport starts to become increasingly appealing. The potential for both airports and airlines to recognize significant savings in a short period of time becomes apparent.