Assuming that you have accessed one or more of the educational outreach emails from Stabilization Products LLC sent earlier this year, we thought it would be timely to share some of the fundamentals with you of a lowcost stabilization technology that accelerates a natural process converting soils and gravels into more rock-like materials. The previous emails presented case studies of projects constructed with these revolutionary stabilizer products and the related test results and reports from public agencies and independent third-party materials engineering and highway research firms. The availability of a more cost-effective and more broad-spectrum alternative to asphalt emulsion binders, cement, fly ash and lime products may be of interest, but you may be wondering how these highly concentrated liquid products can so effectively improve the performance of aggregates, soils, and recycled pavement materials in comparison to the bulk application of the conventional binder and stabilizer products.

The EMC SQUARED System is a family of liquid stabilizer products applied as compaction water additives. With more than thirty years of use with a wide variety of soil types, aggregates, and recycled materials, in climatic conditions ranging from arctic to temperate, and desert to tropical, this unique stabilizer product technology has proven effective in increasing density, cementation, moisture resistance, frost heave resistance, bearing strength, resiliency, shear strength, tensile strength and stability of natural earth materials and recycled pavement mixtures. Unlike brittle and crack-prone cement and lime treated materials, EMC SQUARED System treatments are noted for their resiliency and more elastic behavior, along with their greatly reduced susceptibility to moisture infiltration. EMC SQUARED System stabilizer applications precondition aggregate materials to behave more like conglomerate rock, clays like claystone, sands like sandstone, and silts like siltstone, catalyzing processes of consolidation and lithification that take millions of years in the natural world. Key to the effectiveness of this advanced technology is the use of rigorous engineering controls during construction and utilization of powerful modern compaction equipment.

A single truckload of this advanced liquid chemistry, in combination with significant quantities of locally available water, can replace a requirement for hundreds of truckloads of cement or lime products. These conventional calcium-based stabilizer products are applied in bulk amounts in attempts to cement or radically alter the pH and chemical composition of aggregate and soil materials. The EMC SQUARED System product technology instead activates water chemistry to reorganize and reconfigure the internal structure of the treated materials during the moisturization, mixing and compaction processes. As with the earlier examples of clays becoming claystone and sands becoming sandstone in a natural process during long periods of geological time, these soil materials obviously have the potentiality to change into a different physical form with greatly increased stability, strength, and resistance to water. EMC is the acronym for Earth Materials Catalyst. Catalysts are known to cause chemical reactions to happen at astronomically faster rates. A natural reaction that otherwise would take many millions of years can be accelerated into just a few hours when this state-of-the-art chemistry is used in combination with modern engineering controls and construction equipment. Given this highly concentrated stabilizing power, the similarity with Albert Einstein’s famous energy equation (E=mc2) is no accident. Stabilization is now an affordable option to consider whenever natural or recycled materials are being compacted for load bearing or erosion resistant surfaces.

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SUSTAINABILITY — DOING MORE WITH LESS

Just replacing hundreds of truckloads of calcium-based stabilizers such as cement and lime with a single truckload of concentrated liquid soil stabilizer is a big advance in sustainable construction. Those hundreds of trucks on the highways are generating unnecessary carbon emissions, traffic congestion and highway deterioration. A truck load of cold-manufactured and environmentally-friendly EMC SQUARED System stabilizer product is replacing the use of cement and lime, products whose fossil-fuel intensive heated manufacturing processes in rotary kilns reach temperatures of 1832°F (1000°C) and higher and are known to generate over 5% of global carbon emissions. Even more exciting, applications of EMC SQUARED System stabilizers to locally available soils during road construction projects have replaced the need for importing crushed aggregate materials to the job site, with a single truckload of the concentrated liquid stabilizer eliminating the high costs and carbon emissions associated with the manufacturing, transportation and placement of thousands of truckloads of aggregate materials. The U.S. Department of Transportation now has a stated goal to greatly reduce the carbon emissions associated with the construction of transportation infrastructure. Public road-owning agencies throughout North America should be encouraging USDOT to actively engage with them in the implementation of more costeffective sustainable product technology that can help counteract climate change.

Full Depth Reclamation (FDR) - Stabilization of Recycled Asphalt and Concrete Pavement Materials

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Stabilization of Aggregate Surface Course and Soil Base Course Materials

EMC SQUARED System products are used in combination with natural earth materials such as soil and rock and with recycled pavement mixtures that are predominantly composed of crushed rock and sand materials. The EMC SQUARED products are components in the construction of a final product. Engineering and construction controls are vital to the selection of all the ingredients and construction processes that will deliver the final product. The excellence of that end result is, to a large degree, dependent upon engineering judgements and construction quality control measures.