Originally Posted by
Winemaker
I've wondered about that; we use glycol in our cooling system at the winery and it's very expensive, about $1000/50 gallons or so. I looked at airport de-icing systems and it seems that glycol is not separated and reused but is eventually flushed down the drain. Are there systems to recycle glycol? That must be a huge bill at someplace like ORD.
Oh, ORD doesn't know the half of it. They still have road access and all the modern infrastructure. Imagine a place like Barrow or Deadhorse, as just two examples, where everything, including the de-icying fluid, has to be flown in. So add shipment costs to the price of the fluid itself. And they have freezing temperatures 9-10 months a year.
As for recycling, I'm not sure I understand the question. Isn't the de-icying fluid supposed to stay on the surface of the wings?
