Cleanup Firms Booming : Ecology: Entrepreneurs are launching efforts to repair the problems caused by earlier generations. Old businesses are retooling to keep pace.
Seven years ago, geologists Judy and Dana LeTourneau left jobs at their respective environmental engineering companies, packed their scientific instruments into a pickup truck and turned themselves into private eyes--with a difference. People weren’t the quarry. The couple were hunting for abandoned underground gasoline storage tanks, lost utility lines and other detritus of past industrial operations.
Government at all levels was showing increased concern for the environment, and fear of lawsuits had corporate executives trying to predict every possible disaster and prevent it. So the LeTourneaus, armed with a sophisticated set of instruments and an ability to determine the locations of potentially dangerous underground objects, opened Spectrum Environmental Services Inc. in San Fernando.
Today, the company employs 13 people and does business from Sylmar to the Mexican border. Sales are growing, the LeTourneaus say, even though the company has done little marketing since its inception. The LeTourneaus often find themselves sending out five analytical crews per day.
Fixing the environment is providing a growth opportunity for scores of companies in the San Fernando Valley. Laboratories are busy analyzing soil and water samples. Entrepreneurs are launching companies with patented processes to clean up the carelessness of earlier generations. Consultants are working on recycling products, landfill designs and new machinery that cuts down on pollution emissions.
“It is one of the few industries that is expanding,” says John Rooney, director of the Valley Economic Development Center Inc.
Real estate purchasers demand properties free of pollution as cleanup costs can run into millions of dollars. At the same time, local and state governments are issuing new laws governing ground and air pollution.
“Whoever follows the laws, understands them and gets in quickly makes money,” Rooney says. His organization just started a loan program using money advanced by the state to help small businesses meet the increasingly stringent environmental requirements.
For those earning a living by cleaning up the environment, the governmental rules could not have arrived at a better time.
“If it weren’t for environmental regulations, the spray-equipment industry would be out of business,” says Earl Sullivan, chief executive at Superior Sprayquip Inc. in Canoga Park, which sells paint-spraying machines that minimize the release of pollutants.
His clients are companies that need to spray protective coatings--from paints, stains, sealers to oil finishers--on their products. But to stay in business in the Los Angeles area, those businesses also need to cut their emissions. This means that they need to use new materials and buy new equipment. And that’s where Sullivan comes in.
Sullivan started the company 20 years ago as a supplier of standard spray booths to manufacturers that spray coatings on their products. Today, he modifies or redesigns the painting systems to meet Southern California’s strict emission standards. The wood-finishing industry, for example, was hit hard by new rules restricting the use of petroleum-based sealers, paints and glazes. The distillates from these volatile organic compounds form smog when emitted into the sunlight. Suppliers devised new water-based coatings, but the finishes would separate when applied with the traditional high-pressure hoses and pumps.
So Sullivan devised a low-pressure system that kept the color particles suspended properly in the water. These new water-based painting machines cost anywhere from $5,000 to $300,000, and Sullivan claims that they cut emissions by up to 85%. He says he has sold spray machines to defense contractors such as Hughes Aircraft Co., Northrop Corp. and Raytheon Co., and to kitchen cabinet manufacturers.
Some metal finishers are even shifting to powder-coating, in which colors are baked on to the product instead of being sprayed. Sullivan designs powder-coating paint booths that stand the higher temperatures of curing. Although the process takes longer than a spray-based one, the benefits to the environment are considerable. Powder-coating produces negligible amounts of volatile organic compounds.
Sullivan is looking nationwide to keep the company’s dozen employees busy. He recently received a call from a potential client in Des Moines, Iowa. “As other parts of the country start to enforce tighter regulations, corporations will look for experienced people,” he says.
Another growth area centers on the removal and replacement of underground petroleum storage tanks from abandoned gas stations, farms with their own tanks or former businesses that had installed gas storage sites. Companies such as Spectrum Environmental Services locate the tanks. Other companies take the tanks away, and still others have invented systems to rid the ground water of years of runaway petroleum contaminants.
“Five years ago, we were not in this business,” says Rick Ireland, director of marketing at Emcon Southwest. The Burbank subsidiary of a San Mateo-based corporation started business as a consultant and designer of landfills. But most of its business has shifted into finding, removing or cleaning up underground storage tanks, Ireland says.
The Burbank operation, with 125 employees, grossed $15 million in 1991, Ireland says, and “our business is growing 20% per annum.”
It costs about $100,000 to pull a metal tank at a working gas station and replace it with a plastic one. But serious contamination of the ground water can lift that figure to $1 million.
It was just that cost burden that prompted Remediation Services International of Ventura to develop its sophisticated vacuum cleaner technology, which sucks hydrocarbons out of ground water, then recycles the fuel as power for the cleanup system.
RSI rents or sells its cleanup system, with purchase prices ranging from $40,000 to $60,000. And business is up ninefold in three years, says Michael Joy, director of business development. It is enough to keep 14 people busy assembling and maintaining the patented equipment.
A few years ago, Joy was a contractor, making a living building gasoline stations. Then many pumps shut down during the last decade, leaving leaking tanks and ground water contaminated with gasoline, motor oil and other petroleum byproducts.
Joy shifted from a dying sector into a booming one. “We are in the beginning years of a massive cleanup,” he predicts.
