It is the final price (sticker shock) that our competition proposed that led the purchasing manager who is also the Environmental, Health & Safety manager to contact Gullywasher to perform a peer review.
Evans has 5 outfalls on their site with one 5-acre building, two 1/4-acre buildings, a 5-acre employee parking lot (with materials storage), and a large truck route that rings the major building. Since Gullywasher does an extensive review of the site, the operations, and the laboratory results before providing any recommendations. Gullywasher noticed that the laboratory data showed 73% dissolved zinc on an area where there were not any buildings. Dissolved zinc primarily flows from building roofs; whereas, suspended zinc comes from likely tires. So, to see where the dissolved zinc was from a site with no building required further investigation.
Gullywasher did a site walk and discovered that the 530 feet of the major building wall had gutters that were holed, missing, or splitting apart. The resulting leakage flowed into the adjoining drainage area for which the company was exceeding on the zinc benchmarks.
Gullywasher quoted 13K for a new dual set of gutters (top and bottom) with no annual maintenance cost on the gutters. In addition, Gullywasher recommended to add MetalCompliant and Sediment-only catch basin inserts into this drainage for another $7K (they last 2+ years).
Compared to the competitor quote of $630K for a new treatment process for this employee parking lot (along with its estimated 22% annual maintenance costs – $138.6K!). The EHS manager choose the Gullywasher approach.
In addition to this parking lot area, Evan Metals had other drainage areas where they were exceeding the benchmarks. The competitor had quoted $1.6M for the proposed treatment systems, Evans went with Gullywasher and has paid a collective $375K in treatment systems.
We have had our process challenges of this very complexed site. This site has several industrial tenants and an array of operations. Gullywasher investigated the different operations and was able to pin the gross contamination to an industrial paint contractor who was using 2 of the ½ acre inside bays for painting large multi-ton steel structures. Unfortunately, the industrial paint they were using daily had both high copper content (1,900,000 ppm) and high zinc content (7,980,000 ppm). And their operations generated a ton of overspray of which was carried out everywhere on the site.
Unfortunately, the painted steel structures were covered with a thin dust of paint overspray, as well as the personnel, forklift traffic, and delivery truck tracking out this paint overspray outside. Plus, these 2 work bays adjoin the ‘Breezeway’ which is amply coined for the consistent breeze blowing through this open covered truck loading route. So the paint overspray can be broadcasted very easily onto the outgoing truck routes, onto the forklift loading areas, the raw steel storage areas, and the entire 5-acre shop in general.
Evans management finally decided that the site housekeeping required this painting contractor to move their painting operations somewhere else for they were not willing to change for the betterment of the site. The metal levels have dropped like a rock and should be well within benchmark compliance this upcoming rain year. Gullywasher has been working with Evan Metals together for years now. They consider us a valuable partner and they understand that they can out with Gullywasher quality of work and partnership. They have given us a testimonial!