OnAire Episode 3 Transcript:

Hey everybody, welcome back to the OnAire podcast where we talk about all things dust, particularly fugitive dust, the fine stuff that gets away from your product, away from your process and goes wherever it wants to go. So, today we’ve got a pretty exciting guest. Mr. Jerry Peters is joining us here in just a few minutes. He is an industry expert in health and safety, and he comes from the recycling industry. And so, he’s got a lot of experience with dust and combustible dust in the recycling industry, and the impact of it on operations and production, and just the problems that it can create. So, we’re going to unpack some of that with him. He did implement SonicAire fans and so we’re going to talk to him about his experience with those and how they worked out for him.

Hopefully I can also figure out finally what the right thing to do with my pizza boxes is because I never know, they’re greasy, are they supposed to go in the trash or are they supposed to go in the recycling? I don’t know. Maybe Jerry will answer that question for us today. But when we talked to Jerry recently, he spent most of his time talking about his wife and how amazing she was. So, maybe he’ll give us some insight on that as well. How he got so lucky to find somebody so great. Stick around, we’ll be right back with Jerry.

Jerry, thanks for joining us today. It’s great to have you on the podcast.

Thank you very much, I appreciate it. Glad to do it.

All right, so Jerry is an expert. He has recently retired from the recycling industry and specifically did a lot of work in glass and glass recycling. And so, Jerry, tell us about your career in that industry and what you’ve been doing.

Well, I’ve been in safety for a little over 30 years and spent 22 years in the waste and recycling industry as you said, and retired January 3rd and really not knowing what the next phase of life is going to look like. Hopefully get to do more podcasts.

There you go.

Hey, Jerry, real quick. So, I know you’re coming out of safety right now, but I did hear a quick fun little story that you may or may not be in the professional reffing arena.

I worked pro arena ball for six years, and I’ve been a sports official for 41 years, and I’ve done football for 30. I did baseball and softball for 32, and I’m actually also a swimming official, swimming and diving official. I’ve done that for about eight years. So started officiating when I was 14 years old.

Oh, wow. Have you thrown any flags on any super famous football players?

Oh boy. I won’t mention them by name, but there’s a couple of them. Couple of them, yes. There was one that ended up beating Ohio State. So therefore, he and I joked around on the field during an arena game one time about that. But no, there’s a lot of former NFL guys or guys that didn’t make it into the camps and everything that ended up playing arena ball and seeing a lot of those guys, XD1 college guys in there. Try not to throw flags.

That’s exciting. Yeah, flags don’t make friends, do they, Jerry?

Flags don’t make friends, exactly. But you throw them when you have to, that’s it. You can throw them when you have to.

So, if we put you back to your more in line work passion in safety: how did you get into workplace safety?

That’s a great question. When I was in the Air Force, I served four years in the Air Force. I was in civil engineering and one day they come to me and said, hey, we need somebody to do some safety audits. And at that point, they sent me some training and I’ve always said I wasn’t the traditional kid. I didn’t find my career. I think my career path found me, and I fell in love with safety and health and pretty much have been doing it since. So probably since I was 22.

I think that happens to a lot of us. I know that happened to me. I wasn’t looking for a job at a fan factory and that kind of found me.

Didn’t know anything about dust or fans or safety or anything.

It’s the last thing I wanted to do. All right, so tell us about the business you were in. It was recycling, but just all the ins and outs, the start to finish, what came in the front door, what left as a final product in the back door and just what’s involved in all that?

In the recycling end, again, it was the waste and recycling industry and the company I worked for did both. And on the recycling line of business, basically it was a material recovery facility. So basically it was post-consumer recyclables that come in through trucking. You may have recycling programs in your neighborhood where they pick up recycling and it goes to a material recovery facility. And then there’s either a manual or an automated process that sorts that into commodity levels. So, it sorts it into the plastics and the paper and the cardboard and the cans and still food cans. And unfortunately, there’s a little bit of residue in there that people thinks recycling usually isn’t.

But, and then once it’s sorted into commodity levels, again, either by automation or by manual, then it’s bailed and then it’s sent out to mills that actually use it and turn it into another product of some kind. A lot of times it could be shoelaces; it could be other things that’s around. And then we did have a glass entity where we basically recycled a post-consumer bottle glass. And basically that post-consumer bottle glass was then sorted into a collet and or ground to a fine grind and then resold to different installation manufacturers and things like that for reuse.

So, I’ve got a serious question. So, what am I supposed to do with my pizza boxes? Because they’re cardboard, but they’re greasy. So, I’ve been told to throw them in the trash.

Yeah, I’m definitely guilty of the same thing of like, he was saying there’s waste in it. And I was just thinking about me rolling the recycling bin to the road today. And I was like, I made Jerry’s past life more difficult than it needed to be.

I can tell you, put your cardboard in the recycling.

Even the pizza boxes, even the greasy pizza boxes.

Even the greasy pizza boxes. Nice.

All right. Changing the planet right here on OnAire.

Amen, amen. And reducing that footprint in the landfills, too.

That’s true. That is true. So, in that realm, in kind of the recycling world, what were some of the biggest safety concerns that you had at your facility or even in any general industry on the recycling end of things?

Well, as you can imagine, you know, I mean, the material coming in, there’s trucks and you know, most of them, most MRFs are broken down into phases. Phase one is basically where the material comes in or dumped onto a tipping floor. And then there’s heavy equipment that usually pushes that onto a conveyor. And then phase two of the plant usually is where everything is sorted or what we call, you know, the sorting/processing system. And phase three is really the logistics area.

So, phase two is where a lot of the big risk is as far as machinery goes. In my experience, you know, anytime a machine is turning and churning, it’s creating fugitive dust, you know. And as everybody puts their recycling bins out on the side, out at the curb as, you know, as cars drive by, they stir up dust that goes in the air. So, it’s not just the material that actually is generating the dust by way turning and churning and shredding or, you know, in the facilities I worked in, we didn’t have shredders, but some do, where they do size reduction. But it was mostly the turning and churning of materials that created the fugitive dust and the generated dust. And because of paper and things like that and newspaper, of course, there was some fibrous dust that actually was created also.

Sounds nasty. Yeah, it makes me kind of appreciate us here building the fans, because we have to have a clean facility because of our equipment. Like, it would look bad if we didn’t.

But yeah, and even visiting other places, it really does make you appreciate, like, a nice, clean workplace.

And in the first phase one, I mean, of course, heavy equipment, there’s wheel loaders and things like that that are in there, large wheel loaders. And then in phase two, it’s the machine guarding, the lockout tag out, maintenance personnel having to do work, of course, is creating risk. And a lot of that’s mitigated by, again, proper planning, job hazard assessments, and things like that. But unfortunately, just not a whole lot you can do about that housekeeping other than manual labor to take care of it.

On the other end, in phase three, a lot of forklifts, some skid steers and things like that that are loading. So, you know, phase one and phase three, the risk is really based on the equipment that’s being moving around. Phase two is really that machinery, that manufacturing process, if you want to call it, where it’s sorting all the machinery. So, a lot of risk there, ergonomic risk and things like that. But the dust has been a battle for years that’s created in that phase two level.

So, what is the impact of that dust? So, you’re creating all that dust in phase two, where does it go, then how do you deal with it? And who’s raising the issue when it does become a problem? Who’s the biggest person to throw a flag on the dust there?

Well, in the late 2000s, you know, OSHA had a national emphasis program on combustible dust. And the industry itself was put into one of the focus groups for that. I’m an OSHA outreach trainer and I’ve trained some for University of Cincinnati, Mid-America OSHA. And I was actually teaching a class and got a phone call, and they said OSHA was at the site and they were there to do a combustible dust evaluation as part of the OSHA National Emphasis Program.

And so, they came in, they did some measurements and they decided that it met their requirements and they were going to open up an inspection. And when that National Emphasis Program was out, I don’t know if you guys were in the industry at that point, but you know, they wanted basically the dust to be kept on surfaces less than a paperclip, the thickness.

So, that was a tough thing because, when you’re looking at the amount of housekeeping you have to do on machinery, on conveyors, on the floor, on equipment, it really builds up. And then the lighter fraction dust will stay airborne more and it allows it to rest up on the columns and the interior of the roof and things like that. And anything flat, I-beams, things like that, anything that was flat that didn’t have a pitch to it had dust sitting on it. And depending on the turning and churning and the dropping process and the turning 45-degree angles where those things happened, you could see plumes of dust. And of course, the more plumes, the more accumulation. So, you know, the less movement of the material, the less dust accumulation. The more movement of the material or the deeper the drop of the material, the more plume, the more accumulation occurs.

Is glass dust combustible?

It’s a great question. So basically, the only way to really know if it’s combustible or not is to do some testing on it. And then basically it comes back with a KST value. The KST value. I haven’t looked at it for years, for the last two years, I should say. But it was a zero through three rating. Three was the worst. Two was a little bit better. Zero is supposed to be very minimal. But realistically they all had a level of combustibility.

If you remember when you were younger and you were seeing those biology tests where they would start a Bunsen burner and sprinkle dust over it. And all of a sudden, you’d see that little deflagration, that little burst. And that just basically was a perfect storm. You had basically the fire there or the ignition source and you had the air to support the deflagration, and you just had to have the right accumulation of dust for that deflagration to happen.

So, you’re talking about getting the phone call basically from OSHA saying, hey, we’re at your facility. We’re going to check these things out. Was that the moment that the dust safety risk clicked for you or was it the announcement of the National Emphasis Program? Because I know we’re in one of those right now. Specifically with the grain industry. And that’s one of the things that we talk to our customers about a lot is: once you get to that point, it’s kind of too late, and just really getting them aware. So, was that the moment that you became aware of the dust risk?

Well, I think we all knew there was dust. I think people don’t think of dust as being a fire hazard. I mean, most of us in safety for over 20 years now remember the Imperial explosion down in Georgia. I think it was Georgia.

Yeah, Port Wentworth, Georgia. And that’s actually what triggered the National Emphasis Program. That was the tipping point for that.

And I don’t think anybody really thought of workplace dust being being a problem. I mean, before the National Emphasis Program (2009), I’d been safety 15, 16 years at that point. And I didn’t even know what NFPA 654 was. I didn’t know what NFPA 44 was, or 652, any of those.

And I think after that, and going through that process with OSHA, and receiving a citation, and then mitigating that process through the citation, through the OSHA process, I remember going to a conference out in DC with my boss and learning what NFPA was. I mean, I knew what NFPA was. I knew what ANSI standards were, but I didn’t know there was one specifically for, you know, combustible dust. I didn’t know that there was one for agricultural dust. I didn’t know there was one for metal dust. And that was a good education process for me.

And of course, a lot of people don’t — you know, safety people know this, but OSHA 1910.6, the incorporation of reference, even though OSHA doesn’t have something in their general industry standard, basically that 1910.6 allows them to incorporate all those mandatory languages of all those conformity standards in for the process of citations. So, they can issue a general duty clause, and then use NFPA 654 as a backup to help support why that should be issued. So, I think that opened up the eyes of a lot of safety professionals. I know that the safety peeps I run with basically were really surprised and started getting educated on combustible dust at that point. If that answers your question.

Yeah, absolutely, thank you for sharing. Listening to you ramble off the standards, it really does just give me an appreciation because we do a lot of work with UL and getting our product certified. You have to bounce from what UL says to what the National Electric Code says to what is acceptable for these different classifications of dust and especially leading into this year before they did the 660 joining of the standards so that it’s kind of one umbrella for everything.

But yeah, when you had 652, 654, and then you had to bounce back to 90, yeah. I can kind of commiserate with a little bit of that from the manufacturer side of things. And so yeah, it’s great to hear that that’s how OSHA is having to work through it and use those types of things with NFPA as well.

And you were talking about that general duty clause, and that’s just a broad sweeping statement that says something to the effect of: you just have to provide a safe place to work.

I can recite it: the employer must provide a workplace free of recognized hazards.

Now, the trigger word there we all know is what? Recognized. So, at that point, I don’t think a lot of people recognize dust as big of a hazard as it was. And we all sat back and watched the Imperial Sugar results, and we went, wow, this is a real thing.

In safety, in my 30 years plus in safety, I really believe that unfortunately, we’re still at that phase, not all companies, some companies have a world-class safety program, but I think some of them are still at the phase of, you know, if nothing’s ever happened, so we’re safe.

And that was true. I remember when we went and talked to OSHA, we said, hey, you know, in the industry, we’ve never seen this before, and of course we were looking at the absence of accident being safe, but probably Imperial Sugar could have looked at that too.

And so, it’s amazing where it’s went. Yeah, the numbers just roll. I’m sorry, that’s the way it is. If people call me and say, hey, where do I find catching interference in the rule book? I say rule 656.

That’s just a man of many rules.

Well, my wife always says I’m the gatekeeper of useless information that 99% of the world doesn’t need to know. Of course, I always remind her that 1% pays pretty good though.

There you go. That’s awesome. So how are you guys managing this fugitive dust that was getting out, is escaping, is going where you didn’t want it to go and going to these overhead surfaces? How are you dealing with it in that environment?

Well, let’s do before and after on that, if I can answer that that way. Before, it was a lot of labor. I used to say in meetings, after we knew we had this issue, and it was an issue, that cleaning a recycling facility was like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. As soon as you were done, you just started over. And, you know, I think one of the things we did, me and my boss and I, and I’ll give him all the credit at that point, he was an attorney, and we sat down and we talked and we said, “Hey, should we look at the whole plant or should we look at where the big generation areas are?” So, we know we have to clean from A to Z, but where are the generation points? Where do we have the drop points? Where do we have things turning and churning and generating dust because paper was going across it and cardboard was going across it? And where do we have things where they’re hitting a 45-degree or hitting a wall and going someplace and creating dust?

So, we started really focusing in on the priority levels and saying, these are the areas where we’ve really got to clean. We really have to clean almost every day, if not maybe sometimes twice a shift. The other areas basically are every three days. So, we kind of put a numerical value to that and say, you know, this is a level one area. This is a level two area. This is a level three area. And it helped the housekeepers. But you at the end of the day, it’s still the human element, and the human element is going to fail. The human element is not going to do as good a job as some automation will. I mean, robotics. We keep finding that as we more automate things in manufacturing processes, they never call off, they don’t get hurt. They work more than 40 hours a week. I mean, it is what it is.

So, we did everything we could from a manual process to try to clean it. And I think then we had to start looking around at other options.

So, were you having to shut down your processes in order to clean those areas?

It’s a great question. Sometimes it was cleaning while the machines were running and then sometimes it was a housekeeping afterwards, and then there was even sometimes they were having to do an off-shift housekeeping session.

And then in some facilities in the industry where I worked, I know others was talking about how they had weekend cleanings. They were third-partying, bringing in third party cleaners in to clean, and it was very inefficient because they did a great job. And on Monday morning, the place looked great. By Thursday, it’s back again.

Back to where you started.

Yeah.

Did you guys ever put a number on that? What it was costing you to keep those overhead spaces clean, and we’ll use that term clean loosely, but just to maintain it.

From a simple standpoint, when you hire a full-time housekeeper, just do the math, they’re working 2080 hours a year. I mean, you guys are in business, you know you have to place a dollar figure and what it is to keep that employee. So, let’s say it was 40 bucks an hour to keep that guy there, 20 bucks an hour, whatever it was. Multiply that times 2080, that’s your labor cost, trying to keep up with it. So, if you have two full-time housekeepers, or you have one that’s working 20 hours a week, you can do the basic math and figure out the labor dollars. That doesn’t include the times they have to go up the stairs, so are they really cleaning 40 hours a week? Probably not. They’re probably cleaning 70% of the time, 80% of the time.

Yeah, and that’s really one of the things that we try to work with our customers on is understanding this hierarchy of controls as far as keeping your dust-free facility. And like you’re talking about with labor, there’s even the cost of them getting sick because of the environment that they’re working in. They’re having to move this dust around, and it kicks up in their sinuses and makes them sick. And so, there’s even a cost associated with doing that manual cleaning. Were there any kind of automated solutions? I know people use dust collectors or, you know, we’ve seen all kinds of crazy things, but were there other things outside of manual cleaning that you were doing?

Yeah, they did try. And first of all, Taylor, we’re going to make you a safety professional if you understand what the hierarchy of controls is. You’ve already passed safety 101, you’re on 202 now. But I will tell you this, that yeah, there were hoods that were tried. And again, I can speak across the industry. I know a lot of the safety pros across the industry, and they were bringing in different type of dust collection systems, hoods and things like that. And with mixed reviews, because the problem was — think about, you guys obviously know what a plastic bag is, you carry your groceries in out of the grocery store. Those things are so light. If the hoods were turned up too high, you’re sucking the paper and plastic off the lines. If the hoods are turned down too low, then they’re ineffective in getting the dust.

So, I know some had said that they had spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on dust collection system with outside bag houses. And after a couple of months, I mean, there wasn’t even enough to fill up a trash bag in there because they just couldn’t get the hoods close enough without affecting the material that was being processed. Cause it just wasn’t weighted enough. Had it been steel food cans and glass and things like that only, then there probably could have been that. But when you’re talking about pulling light fraction across there, it’s just not going to work. So yeah, there were other processes.

You get that entrainment velocity just right so you’re getting the particles, but not the bags and the films.

Yes, sir.

All right. So, somehow magically along the way, you stumbled along a little company called SonicAire. Tell us about that. And what was your experience with that?

Well, it was funny because we were out at that conference in DC and somebody had mentioned SonicAire. In fact, it was a little teeny tiny company called Cintas that was making a presentation. And Cintas was making a presentation and they had talked about some of the things they were doing and they basically said they were never going to get away from labor. I mean, you’re still going to have some housekeeping, but they said that they had run across a dust mitigation system.

And they kept talking about these fans that work together. And as they come down, they create an air barrier. So, when they’re cleaning, it’s pushing the dust down. And I got to talk to the guy. And finally he said the word SonicAire. And I said I think I need to see this in action. And he said, “Well, where are you?” And I said, “Well, I live just south of Columbus, Ohio, but my office is in Cincinnati.” And he goes, “Well, I’ve got a secure document shredding facility right there in Dayton. Would you like to go over and see it?” And I said, “Sure.” So, my boss and I got to go over and see this and see it in action. And it’s pretty impressive.

And then I talked to one of the SonicAire employees and I’d said, do you have anything specifically in what we do? And he told me about a county-owned MRF Allegheny County, Wisconsin. And I got to make a trip out there. And no offense to the ops managers, but I really didn’t want to hear what the ops managers had to tell me. I wanted to hear what the employees said. I wanted to hear what the maintenance guys said, man. I mean, you want to know the truth about whether something works or not? Talk to the maintenance guys. They’re going to tell you whether it sucks, whether it’s great, whatever. And so, I got to talk to this maintenance guy and, I could tell he was kind of a little grumbly, but he said, “I’ll tell you what, best thing we’ve done here.” He says, “When they were putting them in, I kept thinking to myself, this is not going to work. And then when we got them, I realized, man, it’s really working.” So, we were kind of sold on it. And that’s when we decided that we needed to do some more investigation on this.

Yeah, that’s really cool. Cintas has been a great partner to us as far as being open to potential customers like you, but then also giving us real feedback on what’s good, what’s not good, and how we can get better.

Yeah, it really helped us out on some of our development on some of our earlier equipment as well.

Yeah. So, once you had heard about us, what did it look like for you doing the compare and contrast? Because we were talking about the hierarchy of controls and we’re not really apples to apples with dust collection. How did you go through that process of saying, okay, we have a process for doing our dust and maintaining it and keeping the area clean enough for now. How did you go about doing that comparison between what you were doing and then working in with the SonicAire fans?

That’s a great question. I asked the Cintas people, I asked the Allegheny County people, what were you doing before? And they were doing what we were doing. They had actually had some intrinsically safe vacuums and trying to do it that way, and they had spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on different attachments and things they could reach up in the ceiling for. But at the end of the day, still had labor in dumping those. And they were still not picking up everything.

And what I did was — again, I’ll give more credit to my boss, but we really sit down and said we need to get some letters from these people we can take back, just kind of proof of concept, and take it back to our people and say, this is what we think we need to do. Because at the end of the day, there’s going to be cost involved to buy these things. So, it’s not just going to be, Hey, the safety guy says this’ll work.

So, we addressed it as a business plan also, because one thing I had asked the Allegheny County people was, how many hours were you spending in labor dollars cleaning? And they told me. I said, okay, post-SonicAire, how many hours? And the lady told me, well, we went from three full-time housekeepers down to one part-time housekeeper. And then we have a little bit of a maintenance blitz in the morning to clean up some of the stuff that the fans have blown down. And they were using a floor scrubber and things like that to get some of that stuff and trying to figure out what the best way to do it was. But they said, really, if you look at the direct labor dollars, it really helped them out a lot on saving. Because, of course, they were government entities. So, they weren’t really for profit. They were doing it as an extension to the community.

So, you know, they were working off of a budget, and they had to save cost of goods, and they had to save labor dollars. So, getting those helped us kind of prove that we thought that this could work and shorten the payback time. We knew this was going to be a maintenance expense. It wasn’t going to be a CapEx expense, it was going to be a maintenance expense. And so, we knew we were going to get the cash flow benefits because of the way we could actually carry that out. And both entities told me the payback ended up being very much shorter than they thought it was going to be because of the savings on the labor dollars.

And that was your experience too?

That was our experience, yeah.

So, one of the things that we struggle with is that, we’re putting a fan in the ceiling with dust and we get a lot of pushback sometimes. So, were there hurdles internally, kind of trying to explain this skepticism, whatever it may be? We just talked about the financial side of it, but what about just handling a natural skepticism about putting in the equipment? It’s a new technology.

Oh yeah, I mean, your technology was — I compare technology like this to Zoom meetings before COVID. It was something that was nice to have, but not a lot of people used it. Then we realized, oh, well, this really works. And I think it’s a great question because I think basically everybody heard the word fan, they’re thinking walking over to Walmart and buying an oscillating fan, and how’s a fan going to work? Because if you turn it on, all it’s going to do is blow the dust across the place and it’s going to be back over there. And I kept talking about the technology of the air barrier. These things, the way they’re engineered and the way they’re installed, they really work against each other. So basically, it creates that constant barrier, pushing it down.

And there was a lot of conversations and our director of recycling finally read a lot of the proof of concepts, and I think as a management team and an executive leadership team the decision was made, let’s try it.

And I remember one of the push backs was hey, you’re putting electrical here. As you’re pushing dust, is this going to be intrinsically safe? And I said, well, there’s certain ratings they have on their equipment and stuff like that that’s going to help out. It’s not like we’re putting a wall outlet box up there with holes in it and they’re wiring the thing. I said, they’ve thought this out. So, I think one of the challenges was, they know it’s dust, so there’s a class and division rating on this stuff. NEMA ratings that they are going to meet because they’re trying to meet UL requirements and things like that across the board. So, it’s a great question and that’s what we did. And finally, there was a point to where they said, let’s try it. We tried half the facility and then we realized, wait a minute, now it’s just blowing all the dust over there. So, when we put the other side in, then it worked together and we could see a lot more improvements.

What was startup like? When you turned them on for the first time?

The manager. He was a little skeptical about it and how it worked. As we were installing it, I was over there a lot during that time. The installer kept saying, hey, remember, you guys have never cleaned the ceiling of this place. Make sure that when you turn this thing on, go ahead and set it to turn on after everybody leaves, let it do a good clean down, maybe over the weekend a couple of times, let it do that first blow down. And they got it installed, I think it was on a Tuesday, and I think it was on Wednesday morning, about 9:30, the manager called me and said, if you were here right now, I’d punch you in the nose.

(Both Laughing)

And I said, why? And he says, Jerry, we have turned this thing on, and we can’t see five feet in front of us. And my answer to him was, so you’re saying it’s working. And he said, yeah. He and I were pretty cool with each other. We liked to joke around, and he was just joking with me.

But two weeks later, he called me and he said, if you were here right now, I’d kiss you. He said, “You would not believe how clean this place is.” And I said, well, I’m going to be there tomorrow, I want to see it.

And you know, of course, that once it pushes the dust down to a management level, then you do still have to clean that up. But at the same point, you’re not having somebody in a scissor lift and an air work platform and trying to manage it ergonomically and trying to reach up and everything, trying to clean. And so it became to where we could use tooling to do that and things like that. So, for that facility, it worked well.

That’s great to hear and a really common story that we hear in installations, especially as we’re involved in those and are doing those ourselves. But man, like we tell our customers, clean, clean, clean. And when you think you’re clean, clean again before you turn these things on, because it’s going to find every bit of dust that you have had that’s been sitting there. And I think your story is not any different than a lot of customers, just because, when you tell somebody that we’re going to take care of your dust problem, we’ve talked about the skepticism behind it, but it works. And that’s what you’ve seen in just the difference of a week or two and getting to that point. But we tell all of our customers, hey, do a pre-cleaning before you turn them on. Just check all those blind spots because it’s going to find the dust.

Well, and you mentioned the hierarchy of controls. That’s what safety work people work off of. When we’re trying to find solutions, you know, can we eliminate the hazard? Well, we can if we shut down the plant and don’t operate. And then that eliminates the dust, it eliminates everything, no risk at all. But if you’re going to assume that risk of operating the plant, then can you engineer it out? And if you can’t engineer it out, you’re going to have to do something along that hierarchy of controls, which at the end of it might even end up with PPE, putting people in respirators.

And who wants to work in a respirator eight hours a day, whether it’s an N95, whether it’s a half mask with an assigned protection value of 10, nobody wants to work like that. So, from an engineering standpoint, it didn’t remove the dust, but at least it put it in a manageable process.

Did you notice an impact on air quality, speaking of respirators and things like that before and after the fans?

I will say that, if in a building, of course, when you have a wheel loader enter or you have something in the building vibrate, of course, any dust that’s there is going to become loose. So, from an operational standpoint, not running the fans during the shift, there’s dust still being generated. That site now has a new air system in there, a new pickup system that has really helped that process out and helped clean the dust for the employees in there.

That’s great. We always recommend capture what you can, filter what you can. There’s always going to be that fugitive dust and that’s where we got your back, when it comes to the fugitive stuff.

And yeah, so you mentioned earlier, go to the people and figure out what their thoughts are. Did they have any input after they went in? I know a lot of times, just the kind of either, whether it’s the feeling, okay, there’s not all of this combustible stuff above my head is just a feeling of safety or like Jordan was talking about, air quality or anything, what about the employees? How did it impact them?

The maintenance guy there, I asked him, because he’s a guy that will tell you everything, and I got to know him real well, and I’d say, what do you think? And he’s like, well, when I do have to go up with an air work platform, I’m not taking something and knocking down all the dust off of it every day before I’ve got to go to work. So, I’m not spending that time in housekeeping and things like that, and then creating the plumes while I’m actually trying to use my tooling up there. So, he said that was a good thing for him, that getting rid of that dust helped him out in his maintenance time. Because again, maintenance time is shutdown time. So, it does affect production numbers and things like that.

Yeah, it’s hard to keep the machines running when you’re worried about cleaning everything.

Did you get the numbers? Do you have any kind of direct feedback on any financial impact or downtime impact or?

Well, the manager of the site, he had told me at that point that they had went from almost two full-time housekeepers down to a guy that wasn’t even working full-time housekeeping. They were able to allocate them to other things. Which is more production-based versus actually cleaning-based. So, again, the payback was a lot shorter than what everybody thought it was going to be due to the direct labor cost.

Do you have any ballpark guesstimates on that, what it was for you guys?

I can only tell you that — let’s just say those guys were making 20 bucks an hour. So, you figure two guys, it’s $43,000 when you reduce one guy down to part-time cleaning. If you do the math, that’s $30,000 a year you probably saved if he’s cleaning 50% of the time.

My math’s wrong there, it’d be $80,000, sorry. So, you reduced down to $60,000.

I don’t do math in public. And I’m an engineer, I do math with letters anyway, so it sounded good to me.

They have software for that, right?

That’s right, we’ve got AI now, do all the math and spreadsheets and all that good stuff. What about any other entities? Did anybody else take notice, any insurance companies? Did OSHA ever notice the fans and come back?

It’s a great point. I remember talking to the insurance guy when he was in, and of course, he didn’t know what they were, and I said here’s a dust mitigation system. Because we used to walk around with the insurance inspectors and we had talked to them about it. And he said, hey, I’ll make a note on that, on my inspection of what you’ve done to further mitigate the dust that built up in here. Because again, that’s fire load. The more dust you have, the bigger the fire load you have set in the building.

Now if we go back to the Imperial Sugar, and we look at that, it was that first initial deflagration that happened, and then it jarred everything loose, and then that second deflagration, and then boom, boom, boom, it kept going because of all the dust that was present. So, you know, the less dust you have in there, even if you do have a small deflagration, chances of that bigger deflagration are diminished.

It’s never the primary event that causes the devastation when we’re talking about combustible dust. It’s never the primary event. It’s always the secondary and the ones that happened downstream that are so devastating when the dust starts to come down.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, Jerry, if we turn our focus from the things that you’ve done to the things that you’re going to do. Looking back — I’m not going to quote your wife directly, but you are the gatekeeper of knowledge. That’s what I’ll say. That’s not necessarily what you told us that she said, but you are the gatekeeper of knowledge. And if you could look out and tell safety professionals in the recycling industry one thing about dust safety, what would you tell them?

Well, let me clarify. I’m the gatekeeper of safety knowledge. She’s still the boss, and I’m not going to try to rob that from her.

Is she the gatekeeper of total knowledge?

She’s the gatekeeper of total knowledge, exactly. If I have an opinion, she’ll give it to me. But from a safety perspective, I mean, yeah, I’ll take that.

I have said it a thousand times. I have told other companies, I’ve bragged about the system. I’ve told them, if you’re looking for a mitigation system, I think you’ll be happy with it. Even invited a couple people over to see it, and they came over to see it when they were in town, and they were very interested. And you start throwing out names like Cintas and things like that, that they’re using in their areas where they’re creating dust, that helps out. When you have those kind of people who believe in the technology also. So, I mean, anybody that ever says that they have fugitive dust or have dust or, you know, whatever dust it is, I would tell them, hey, take a look at this. I think the concept has been proven now to mitigate the dust in places where you can’t clean.

That’s great to hear. And I mean, of course we appreciate the vote of confidence. So, where do you see dust control going? We’re in the middle of developing and changing our product and trying to be a pioneer in this space, but where do you see dust control evolving in the next 5, 10, 50 years?

I would love to see products developed that don’t create dust. I mean, look what drywall’s done. The drywall mud, they finally changed the technology. If you’ve ever sanded drywall, you’re going to find that dust three bedrooms over. They’ve basically taken it to where they’ve weighted that dust now. They’ve increased the weight. So now you can buy the products where when you sand it, the dust hits the ground right away. You don’t have all those smaller little tiny particles floating around. So, it would be interesting to see if we could weight that. I know with asbestos and things like that, a lot of those asbestos products that are still used today out there, they’ve done the same thing. They’ve tried to, with gaskets and things like that, they’ve tried to weight that. So now, when that mechanic is hitting on that, that dust goes straight down. It doesn’t stay airborne, so it’s not so much a breathing hazard. I mean, again, I’m always fighting for elimination. I wouldn’t be a safety pro if I didn’t. So, the more we can eliminate dust, the more we have to control it. But as long as there’s technology like yours that’s out there, it does provide an opportunity for the control until that happens.

I think that the big companies that are trying to develop the dust collection systems, finding that balance of flow and volume and everything else, that’s always a challenge, especially when the material in there is, again, like plastics and newspapers and stuff like that. That’s always going to be a challenge of trying to get that in to their systems. So I mean, anything we do in that industry is going to be good. I mean, anything we can do to try to make it better for the employees. Because that’s what we’re trying to do. When the place is running, we don’t want people exposed to dust.

When I was in the Air Force, I was exposed to silica asbestos, and I know it had an effect on me. I mean, at this age, I’m a service-connected veteran, and I know it’s got some effects on my lungs and some other things. My sinuses and stuff like that. So, I don’t want to see people have to face those things.

Jerry, it’s been great hanging out with you today. I thank you so much for taking time to talk to us about your experience, your industry experience, sharing with us some of your professional insights on safety, your SonicAire experience, and thank you for your service to our country as a veteran. It’s something we’re very much in support of and very appreciative of that as well. And thank you for your service on the field too. Let’s not let that go unnoticed. Where would we be without the great referees?

(Laughing)

Well, like I told you, you know, if I have to throw a flag on the dust, I’ll throw the flag on the dust.

That’s it, that’s it. I love it.

Jerry, thanks so much for hanging out with us. We really appreciate it.

Thank you guys. Thanks for letting me do this. Appreciate it.

All right, folks, that’s all we’ve got for you today. We appreciate you hanging out and listening to us talk to Jerry. We’re grateful for his expertise and also the insight that he gave us. So, if you can look around here on the screen, we have all of these fun things where you can follow us. You can find us wherever you find your podcasts at. We’re also on LinkedIn, YouTube, and then also moreinfo@sonicaire.com. Thanks.