There is a century-old assumption in the civil engineering field that the only reason to even consider chemical stabilization of soils is if you have a “problem soil”, such as a highly expansive clay soil, or a problem with a mudhole that needs to be dried out before road construction can begin. No problem soil, no mudhole, then no reason to even consider soil stabilization, right? That may have been the state-of-the-practice 100 years ago, but now that line of thinking is potentially a multi-million-dollar mistake.

With the availability of advanced chemical stabilization technology in recent decades, road, street and highway construction costs can be reduced by hundreds of thousands of dollars per mile by substituting chemically stabilized layers of locally available soils in place of layers of imported manufactured crushed aggregate materials. In many cases, chemically stabilized soils can provide stiffer and more resilient layers than the crushed aggregate materials they are replacing. The net result being more durable and more resilient pavement structural sections that can be verified post construction with field testing using modern non-destructive testing (NDT) equipment.

Rather than automatically associating the words chemical stabilization with the words problem soil, it’s time for a new realization in the highway and civil construction industries. The proper word to associate with the word STABILIZATION is not problem, but rather OPPORTUNITY. BIG OPPORTUNITY. So what is the root of this mistaken assumption, this blind spot in the industry? Go back for the past 100 years, a period of time when cement and lime products were considered to be the only options for chemical soil stabilization. These two calcium-based chemicals are both costly to produce and to the environment, because of their fossil-fuel intensive manufacturing processes that require extremely high temperatures. They are also expensive to transport to project locations in bulk truckloads as they are applied as powder products at rates that can require hundreds or even thousands of truckloads for large highway projects. For engineers and contractors schooled in regard to chemical soil stabilization that limit their thinking to only cement and lime products, there is a historical basis to associate the use of cement and lime with problem soils and high costs. Cement and lime, however, generate problems of their own, such as shrinkage, brittle and reflective cracking. So unless you have a serious soil problem to solve, there are good reasons not to consider use of these products. That’s the history.

Move the clock forward. You now have available the EMC SQUARED® System stabilization technology, a family of concentrated liquid stabilizers that are simply added to the compaction water as part of the standard earthwork and road building construction procedures. With public agencies paying anywhere from a dollar to two dollars per cubic foot of crushed aggregate delivered to their project locations,* the EMC SQUARED® System products are replacing the need for aggregate materials for as little as 15¢ worth of stabilizer product per cubic foot of locally available soil. Calculate those cost savings over a mile of road, twenty miles of road or a hundred miles of road. That is a big opportunity for project owners and others interested in lowering road construction costs, which makes a strong economic reason to budget time today to learn more about this quantum leap forward in stabilization product technology.

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*based upon delivered costs of $15.00 to $30.00 USD per ton of aggregate at average density of 133.33 per cubic foot (pcf)