Enzyme could transform dirt paths into solid roads

ATLANTA – Thomas Settles grew up on a dirt road in Edgefield, S.C., a road so crummy it washed out completely after a heavy rain and he sometimes couldn’t get to school. Summers were spent choking at the road’s dust.

Now 53, Settles owns a paving company in Atlanta and is on a mission to save poor Southerners from the indignities he grew up with. He’s out to make dirt roads as good as paved ones.

“Look at this,” he says, holding up a plastic jug of molasses-looking brown stuff. “This is all it takes.”

The brown stuff is an enzyme called PZ-22X that can toughen dirt roads and help them stand up better to rain. He says it will be a blessing for rural communities that can’t afford to pave all their roads.

Settles didn’t invent the enzyme, but he bought the rights to it, christened it a better sounding “Pave-Zyme” and is getting permission across the Southeast to test it on dirt roads.

Mixed with water and sprayed on dirt, the Pave-Zyme acts as a sealing agent, making the dirt more impermeable to water.

“It seals, it acts as a dust suppressor and it compresses,” says Settles, whose claims about the enzyme would seem ridiculous if he didn’t appear to believe them. He very genuinely says Pave-Zyme can improve health (by reducing dust in the air around dirt roads), narrow the education achievement gap between rich and poor (because kids living off dirt roads wouldn’t have trouble getting to school) and otherwise revolutionize life in rural America.

And he’s spreading the dream.

Atlanta – which still has some dirt and gravel roads – will test Pave-Zyme on three roads starting in August. The enzyme recently was put down on a dirt road in Aberdeen, Miss., and is also being tested in Macon County, Ala.

Settles says Pave-Zyme can harden a dirt road for $60,000 to $100,000 a mile – versus $180,000 and up to put down a mile of asphalt.

He isn’t charging for the tests, where Pave-Zyme is mixed with water and sprayed on dirt or used under asphalt to make regular roads hold up longer. But Settles thinks that once local officials see how well it works, they’ll come back to buy.

Settles says Pave-Zyme makes a road good for five to seven years, shorter than asphalt paving but still an improvement from plain dirt, although road officials were skeptical.

Experts warn the Pave-Zyme idea probably isn’t a low-cost cure-all. Other hardeners have been tried before, and products such as calcium chloride are already regularly added to dirt roads to help them last and reduce dust.

Nothing, so far, has completely solved the problem, said Dennis Rice, who puts together a quarterly newsletter on road technology for the Georgia Department of Transportation.

“If you want a road to be like it’s paved, you’ve got to pave it,” Rice said. Dirt road improvements are especially troublesome in the South, where heavy rains and hot summers work against road hardeners, he said.