Future of The Environmental Services Industry

"But if we win, on our budget, with this team,  we'll change the game."   - Billy Beane, Oakland A's General Manager I saw the movie "MoneyBall" for the second time the other day. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. You can view the movie trailer below. MoneyBall Trailer The movie is based on a true story. In the movie the General Manager of the Oakland A's baseball team, Billy Beane, attempts to devise a strategy for assembling a team for 2002, but struggles to overcome Oakland's "limited" player payroll. You see, they have the smallest payroll in baseball and can't afford to compete head to head with the big payroll teams like the New York Yankees.  In the movie, and in real life, he teams up with an economist named Peter Brand, and together they look at players and player statistics from a completely different angle than was traditional throughout the history of baseball. Th...

July 24, 2019 "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations  which we can perform without thinking of them."  - Alfred North Whitehead I may be dating myself, but when I started working in the environmental industry, the fax machine was just becoming standard office equipment. They were slow, used thermal paper that came on a roll, and you had to cut the paper into the right size yourself. The Fax Machine - Circa 1990 paper was difficult to work with as it wanted to roll back up on itself. When we needed results from a laboratory in a hurry, we would ask them to "fax it over." We would have to re-type the data ourselves into whatever format we wanted it in. Tables I worked on back then were mostly rudimentary tables constructed in a software called "WordPerfect". I spent hours and hours re-typing data from paper to a computer only to print it back out on paper again. It was a good thing both I ...

Groundwater Elevation and Contaminant Levels, cause and effect? Over the years I've heard a lot of explanations regarding groundwater elevations and subsequent increases and/or decreases in contaminant levels and the presence and disappearance of free product. I've heard people argue that increasing water levels increases contamination, and I've also heard the opposite. The question or debate is does groundwater elevation influence contaminant levels? Furthermore, does groundwater elevation influence the presence or absence of free product? I've been doing this kind of work for about 31 years now, and I've learned enough to know that it all depends on the specific site and even the specific well. These are a question of correlation or causation. Webster's Dictionary defines correlation as: "a relation existing between phenomena or things or between mathematical or statistical variables which tend to vary, be associated, or occur together in ...

Selecting a remedial approach can be a complicated task. The process is based on identifying desired clean-up goals, sensitive issues that could affect a remediation strategy (e.g. proximity to drinking water wells, surface waters, other sensitive receptors or public perception/relations), and costs. Each site presents different decisions and uncertainties regarding remediation options. The four main steps are 1) delineation, 2) risk evaluation, 3) feasibility, and 4) cost. The companies that understand the process and also work to keep it simple, end up selecting the more effective and least costly solutions. When estimating remedial action, estimates should provide for a relative comparison of costs between all the feasible alternatives. Alternatives that are not feasible should not be included. These estimated costs should be detailed and accurate. Costs that will be incurred in the future should be identified and noted for the year in which they will occur. The dist...

The Case for Using a Third-Party Sampling Company Part of any sampling strategy is the evaluation of the scientific benefit of each potential sample to be collected. The scientific benefit should be evaluated against the cost to collect that sample. A "cost/benefit analysis" is performed (or should be) for each sample collected and for every parameter proposed. What makes the most sense and provides the most useful data, without sampling everywhere for everything as if cost wasn't an issue. Financial issues are almost always a point of consideration when it comes to evaluating the sampling plan. However, the question is, whose finances are being considered? Bias and conflicts of interests in science are rarely discussed. Scientists all like to believe that they can draw a distinct line between a scientific decision and financial decision. However, Scientists are human and humans have bias. When a person benefits, whether financially or otherwise, the person has ...

Is Next Year a Copy and Paste Year? The Internet produces new business  models  and also reinvents traditional business models. - Marc Ostrofsky If you're a Manager of anything, it's the time of the where you start thinking about what you're going to do next year. You more than likely have  to put together a budget for next year. You'll have to come up with strategy and then justify that strategy. For many, it's mandated by corporate policy or by your boss. Many people, will simply copy and paste from what they did last year and adjust the numbers slightly for this year. If you're one of the people that simply copies and pastes from last year's budget and strategy to next year's budget and strategy, you may be doing yourself a disservice. It could be that continuing with the "status quo" means you are missi ng out on opportunities that may have developed since last year. We live in innovative times, with the advent o...

Price Quote Automation   "As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of  every situation again and again. The age of automation is going  to be the age of 'do it yourself.'" -Marshall McLuhan   It's common for companies to develop taglines or slogans to convey a message or an image to potential clients. A tagline that our company uses to convey the message we want our potential clients to receive about our services is the term "data automation" .  We use the term data automation because it best describes our services. With just a few clicks, users are able to upload and convert that data into infographics used to convey the location, severity, and trends of contamination at their site. We do this by creating graphs, tables, maps, charts, contour maps, and other images in a matter of seconds. A while back a client called me and asked for a sampling cost proposal he needed for a competitive bid he was preparing...