Posted by Paul McCauley on Fri, Mar 18, 2011 @ 05:05 PM
It is a busy time here at National Land Management and ecodustcontrol.com and we are getting some great questions about dust control and soil stabilization. Below is list of questions with some answers that may be help to you.
In order to answer some of the questions, it may require more questions asked. We try to be as thorough as possible to know the complete situation. That being said, here the answers to the questions.
1) Does the product you offer react in concrete? Asphalt?
A. Our dust control and soil stabilization products are binders made from recycled tall oil which comes from the paper making industry. They are 100% environmentally benign and have been tested with sensitive fish and plants. With that information, we would need a clarification to the word "react".
Our dust control and soil stabilization products are fantastic binders for recycled asphalt ( see http://www.ecodustcontrol.com/products/eco-asphalt_recycled_asphalt/ ) and our ability to work with concrete depends on the size of the aggregate and amount of fine materials. It also depends on what your intended uses are on the treated areas. I know, a lot of "depends" answers. We bind with materials that have fine particles - decomposed granite, natural soil, recycled asphalt, ABC mixes and others. We like to have a soil gradation sample completed to know what material we are working with.
2) Does the product breakdown when flooded, i.e. rainy season puddles?
A. As mentioned, our products are made from tall oil. Tall oil is a pine tree derivative and it has the same resin based properties as pine sap except there is no stickiness upon cure. One of our distinctive differences from other products on the market is the fact that we do not breakdown when flooded. We see many products completely fall apart when it rains or when they are driven upon. We outperform in both these areas.
3) How much does it cost to cover 4 acres? How is it shipped and handled logistically?
A. This answer is another "depends". We need to know what your uses are on the 4 acres. Our answer will vary based upon if the area will be driven upon with rubber tired or tracked vehicles. If there is no driving on the treated area, what is the desired term of the dust control and containment?
As far as shipping, the volume dictates the method. We can ship by ISO Tanker, rail car, 275 gallon totes, 55 gallon drums, or 5 gallon buckets.
4) Does it create crust?
A. We apply our dust control and stabilization products mainly two ways. Topically and blended. Usually for large dust controlled areas, we would apply topically and create a crust. Again our crust will be a little different because it has the ability to build upon itself. Our product layers on itself and creates a longer lasting solution. Again this is different from other products.
The second way we apply our product, is using a blended or mixed approach. This is used on parking lots, roadways, and heavy erosion areas. When blending we use a few different mixing methods - again depending on the size of the job and thickness of the blended end result. We bucket blend using a front loader tracker. We windrow using a motor grader or blade. We use a pug mill for large natural granite solutions and recycled asphalt work.
If you have questions or specific needs, we would be happy to discuss those with you. National Land Management and ecodustcontrol.com have years of experience in construction, land development, and soil stabilization and dust control. We have some great solutions to save, money, water, and control dust and erosion.
Have you ever thought about a dust control review? What if National Land Management and ecodustcontrol could you show you ways to save money from you existing budgets right now?
Take action now and call 1.877.300.DUST(3878) or click our logo below to call us right now ( yeah its really cool - click it! :-)
Posted by Paul McCauley on Mon, Mar 07, 2011 @ 04:11 PM
Kicking up dust
By BILL COATES
Valley Life Editor
Published: Monday, March 7, 2011 2:18 PM MST
Living in the desert, some believe poor air quality and the health risks associated with it are a necessary evil and the Environmental Protection Agency is unfairly targeting Pinal County for violating the federal agency’s tough standards.
Not so, says the EPA, adding it has proof that undisturbed, natural desert areas are in compliance with its regulations and that Pinal’s problem is that far too many businesses and individuals are ... Kicking up dust.
Two officials from the Pinal County Air Quality Control District pulled up to a small fenced site. It was in a fallow field off Maricopa-Casa Grande Highway. A feedlot with some 60,000 head of cattle sat just south of the road, some four miles southeast of downtown Maricopa. Not surprisingly, the area is known as Cowtown.
Behind the fence stood a collection of monitors. They continuously drew in air, measuring the concentration of small particles that can bury themselves deep in the lungs. Atop a shed housing the monitors was a wind gauge.
“We know which way the wind blows,” said Mike Sundblom, the county’s monitoring supervisor.
Sometimes it blows in from the feedlot, which is owned by Pinal Feeding Co. It can pick up the dust and other fine particles ground up under the movement of nearly a quarter-million hooves. That’s a lot of dust, and the Cowtown monitors once made headlines for their off-the-chart readings for dust-generated pollution, said Kale Walch, the county’s air quality deputy director.
“They drew national attention,” Walch said. “They were that high.”
But the cattle can’t take the blame for all the bad air in western Pinal County. A ring of more than half-dozen monitors from Casa Grande to Maricopa have recorded high levels of bad air for several years, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And now the federal agency is on the cusp of designating nearly all of western Pinal County in violation of the Clean Air Act. The word used is “nonattainment.”
Polluted area disputedWhile Cowtown has been seen as something of a ground zero — or perhaps a whipping boy — for the area’s pollution problems, the EPA has made it clear that the dust has many sources. And they stretch well beyond Cowtown. Among them are dust kicked up by farming, dairy lots, traffic — particularly on dirt roads — development and empty lots.
That is, wherever dirt is disturbed and pushed into the air.
The designation will mean people and businesses working outdoors might have to do things differently — in an effort to cut down on dust. Or in the parlance of pollution control, emissions.
For farmers, that would mean adhering to farming practices designed by the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to reduce dust, said Philip Bashaw, lobbyist for the Arizona Farm Bureau.
“Basically any farm in the area that’s over 10 acres will be impacted by air-quality rules,” Bashaw said. “It’s not the entire county. It’s within the nonattainment area.”
The state asked the EPA to shrink the nonattainment area from its original proposal. An EPA map posted on Pinal County’s website shows the federal agency’s “proposed nonattainment area boundary.” The state department wanted nonattainment designation hugging a cluster of monitors that reported high levels of bad air and including Casa Grande and Coolidge. The EPA proposal more than doubles that area. It would extend nonattainment to west of Maricopa, east to Florence and north to south from Maricopa County to Pima County.
“You have to include the violating monitors, but you also have to include the sources that are impacting those monitors, and more often that’s a bigger area,” said Colleen McKaughan, EPA associate director for Region 9, which includes Arizona.
Pollution comes in many forms. And the federal Clean Air Act spells out the types of pollution the EPA regulates. The nonattaintment designation — expected by the end of March — is for a type of pollution known as PM10, or particulate matter that is 10 microns in diameter or smaller. A micron is a millionth of a meter, and 10 microns is often described as one-seventh of the width of a human hair.
Dust: What’s the harm?Airborne, the particles can be taken in with every breath.
“You can imagine the respiratory harm,” said Bill Pfeifer, president and CEO of the Arizona chapter of the American Lung Association.
It can irritate the upper respiratory tract as well as the lungs. The elderly and children with asthma are particularly vulnerable. But there are finer particles that lead to even bigger health problems. They’re a quarter of the diameter of PM10, and smaller.
Breathed in, they can reach deep inside the lungs, affecting small tubes known as alveoli.
“They become swollen and that’s when people can’t breathe. They become plugged up,” said Casa Grande pulmonary physician Rajeesh Punnakkattu.
For people with breathing or heart conditions, the finer particles can lead to advanced lung disease, stroke or heart attacks, according to EPA studies. These finer particles, it happens, are highly concentrated around Cowtown. That didn’t escape the EPA’s notice either. In late January, the agency designated the Cowtown area in violation of PM2.5 standards. But if growth in western Pinal County picks up again — build-out calls for 700,000 more houses — reducing fine particulates could mean more than regulating cattle and farms.
The answer could be no-burn days for fireplaces, restrictions already in place in Maricopa County, said Don Gabrielson, director of the Pinal Air Quality District. Or it could be not to allow fireplaces in the first place.
“There is a possibility that Pinal County could grow into that situation,” Gabrielson said. “The appropriate government response could be, ‘We’re not going to let you build a fireplace, or we’ll let you build a fireplace but you can’t use it.’ In Maricopa County, they’ve done both.”
For now, the finer particulates seem to be the lesser problem. Even as Cowtown lies at the heart of the PM2.5 nonattainment area, the latest data tell a different story.
“With the most recent reading out of Cowtown, we’re actually meeting that standard,” Walch said.
With fewer fine particles, the Cowtown monitor also shows improved PM10 readings — where the underlying fine particles can push up these levels. The violations are calculated daily, taking a 24-hour average. In 2002, Cowtown recorded more than 200 days where the monitor showed violations. In 2010, that dropped to 23, according to the county.
“As you can see, that’s a pretty drastic improvement,” said Bas Aja, lobbyist and executive vice president of Arizona Cattle Feeders Association.
Part of the reduction can be pinned on the fact that two of Cowtown’s three feedlots have since shut down. Only Pinal Feeding remains. Its president, Earl Petznick, credits the feedlot’s own efforts to reduce dust. Like the surrounding farms and dairies, the feedlot follows clean-air practices outlined by the state.
“It’s pretty simple,” Petznick said. “You add more water to the pens, and we’re able to reduce dust.”
Politics or population?He can track his efforts online. The county’s Air Quality District reports readings on its website.
“Now we use the monitor as a tool,” he said.
He says “now” because he first saw the monitor as an intrusion. He has no proof, but suspects its placement was politically motivated — that some county officials wanted to clear out the feedlots as development made its way down through Maricopa.
“It was all behind closed doors,” Petznick said. “We weren’t privy to the conversations.”
But county air quality officials said placement of monitors is driven by rules laid down by EPA.
“The EPA has this whole list for monitoring sites,” Walch said.
They’re placed in or near populated areas, where there’s a lot of traffic and where officials have reason to suspect high levels of particulates. Motorists driving through have long complained about the dust near Cowtown, Walch said.
In any case, the Cowtown monitor isn’t moving anytime soon. And while the numbers for the larger particulates — PM10 — have come down by several factors, there’s still a ways to go. The EPA allows only three 24-hour violations in any rolling three-year period. That averages out to one a year. But people in the cattle industry say it’s not just Cowtown.
“The feedlots in the county are about 3 to 4 percent of the problem,” Aja said.
Other monitors have, at times, outdone Cowtown in declaring bad air. A monitor at Eleven Mile Corner once reported particulates at more than six times the allowed level for one day.
As an environmentalist, Sandy Bahr is often at odds with Aja. But she agreed with him on one matter.
“This is a bigger issue than Cowtown,” said Bahr, lobbyist for the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter. Along with agriculture, growth has contributed to the problem. More cars and more building have disturbed the desert.
“One day the town of Maricopa is a sleepy little place and the next day it’s a mass of subdivisions,” she said.
When that growth resumes, builders — like farmers — will have to follow new rules to control PM10 particulates. They’ve had plenty of practice in Maricopa County, said Spencer Kamps, lobbyist for the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona, a trade group.
Unlike farms and feedlots, homebuilders answer to the county — not the state — when it comes to clean-air enforcement. Kamps, however, does not want Pinal County to follow Maricopa County’s lead.
In the state’s hands“The Maricopa County rules, to be quite honest, are a disaster and have been extremely problematic for the industry,” Kamps said. “And the kicker is, we’re in nonattainment still, which shows they don’t work.”
Maricopa County has been in nonattainment for PM10 since 1990. At bottom, it’s the state’s job to bring the counties into compliance. And Maricopa County has long been the problem child. The state withdrew its last set of plans to clean up Maricopa County’s air after the EPA strongly suggested they fell short.
As for Pinal County, the state has 18 months to come up with an implementation plan. The clock starts ticking when EPA formally announces nonattainment. The plan must include an inventory of pollution sources — in this case, dust. It also has to outline a strategy, said air quality director Gabrielson.
“Once the EPA has identified a boundary, it’s the state’s obligation to come up with a cure,” Gabrielson said.
Listing pollution sources is something of a matter of picking winners and losers. Fingers are already pointing. Petznick of Pinal Feeding said more than feedlots contribute to bad air. He points to nearby farms. And commuter traffic on an unpaved road kicks up — to put it in the vernacular — a ton of dirt. As people drive to and from work, he said, haze fills the morning and evening skies.
The county, it happens, has already requested more than $120 million from the federal government to pave some 600 miles of dirt roads, The Arizona Republic reported.
But Farm Bureau lobbyist Bashaw goes even further. He said traffic can kick up dust even on paved roads. That might mean more street sweeping.
Overall, more regulation and dust control could drive up the cost of doing business for the government and private sectors. But bad air has its economic cost as well. During the boom years, Dr. Punnakkattu said, he would see a lot of construction workers. Many of them, it happened, had valley fever. It spreads from spores kicked up in the soil. It’s an infection endemic to Southwest deserts.
But so is dust, say critics of plans to control particulates.
“This is a desert,” Petznick said. “The background noise is pretty high.”
EPA won’t budgeEPA’s McKaughan, however, isn’t moved by that argument. For one, the Clean Air Act doesn’t discriminate.
“The levels we’re seeing at the monitors show we’re breathing unhealthy air,” she said. “The reason we’re seeing dust in the desert is primarily because people are ripping it up.”
In short, the natural desert is not a big pollution source, at least given the readings of a monitor near the boundary with Pima County. It’s set in undisturbed desert.
“If you go out to the native desert, the numbers are pretty low,” said Walch, the deputy air quality director.
And not all desert communities have dwelled in EPA purgatory like Maricopa County. Pima County has one small area in nonattainment, and it’s centered around a Portland cement plant. Clark County, Nev. — which includes Las Vegas — has cleaned up its desert air, McKaughan said.
If nothing’s done, however, the federal government has a big hammer. It could freeze federal highway funds for the nonattainment area. That could add up to hundreds of millions of dollars. The money would still be there, McKaughan said. It just couldn’t be spent.
But doing nothing is not in the cards. Arizona’s DEQ is gearing up for the implementation plan, said agency spokesman Mark Shaffer. The first step is to get input.
In an e-mail, Shaffer said: “There will be a lot of public meetings.”
So, who’s complaining?Staff Reports
Pinal County received more than two dozen complaints about high dust levels in 2010. They range from complaints about construction trucks on dirt roads to farmers tilling their fields. Dust contains, among other things, the small particulates the Clean Air Act seeks to reduce. Toward that end, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected to designate most of western Pinal County in nonattainment for air quality. The state and county will have to come up with a plan to clean up the air.
The county, however, already has rules for dust control, and responds to complaints.
Here are a few of the 2010 complaints, and the county’s response. They were gleaned from public records. Only first names have been used.
-- Margaret of Casa Grande complained: “Farmer is working his fields with the wind blowing and is making large amounts of dust that is affecting my health.” The dust was coming from a field east of Palm Creek Golf and RV Resort.
A county inspector reported he could find neither the offending farmer nor Margaret.
-- Frank of Casa Grande complained: “Neighbor is dragging his yard and it is making a dust issue.”
The inspector said the neighbor was scraping his property with a tractor but had failed to water it enough to control the dust.
-- Martha of Casa Grande
complained: “Manure trucks are running up and down Peters Road without covers to prevent spillage and blown material from getting into the air.” She said it was coming from a nearby dairy.
The inspector said the dairy owner moistened the manure before loading it on the trucks, “which constitutes a reasonable precaution.”
-- The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality forwarded a complaint about dust from a sand-and-gravel plant. The inspector wrote: “At least one piece of equipment had emissions exceeding the 20 percent opacity rule but only in brief time intervals and not long enough to cite under the fugitive dust rule.” The inspector noted “no deficiencies.”
-- Kazi of Maricopa complained: “There’s an inordinate amount of traffic causing dust on Cowtown Road.” The inspector told a Pinal Feeding Company manager about the dust complaint, adding “that as we moved forward it may become more of an issue.”
-- Bill of Maricopa complained a neighbor had brought in about 200 tires to bury under a foam pit for motocross bike riding. “The property owner is using a front-end loader to move dirt today and may have done work on a neighboring lot that does not belong to him.”
An inspector found two dirt piles created to make the landing pits. The piles were 45 feet “on all sides and almost as tall as the house.” The property owner was told he needed a dust permit.
Posted by Paul McCauley on Mon, Mar 07, 2011 @ 03:49 PM
Take a deep breath: After years of argument and litigation, the Environmental Protection Agency is poised to regulate farm dust.
Yes, farm dust. That is, ordinary dust produced through ordinary farming operations.
Ever heard that old saying, "Plant in the dust and your bins will bust?" Pretty soon anyone who plants in the dust could be busted for it.
The EPA's farm-dust initiative has roots stretching back to 1987, when the agency cracked down on soot and other small particles in the air.
As the agency revised those rules in 2006, farmers recognized that farm dust might be swept up under the same standards applied to the traffic and industry of dense urban areas. Their advocates sued, saying the EPA should distinguish between particles concentrated in crowded cities, where protection is needed, and "nonurban" particles that pose no proven threat. But clean-air advocates prevailed, in a ruling that cleared the way for the EPA to step in even if the impact on human health is "inconclusive."
Although the agency hasn't issued a new proposal yet, farm-state lawmakers from both parties have been bracing for something disruptive and impractical. Even if it were possible to pave all the dirt roads in all the rural byways coast to coast, how are corn-and-soybean farmers supposed to harvest their crop dust-free? And are ranchers supposed to walk their feedlots with pooper scoopers to dispose of manure before their cattle kick it up?
Banning farm dust because it might cause a respiratory hazard is like asking farmers to mop up the morning dew because the droplets might be contaminated.
Unfortunately, few expect the EPA to deal with this matter in a reasonable manner — and that's too bad, because agriculture needs sensible regulation to reduce bona-fide threats to public health.
Farming lacks the federal safety rules and inspection regimens that have reduced the death toll in mining, construction and other dangerous industries over the years. Fatalism, self-reliance and economic pressure make farmers especially resistant to even the most practical life-saving measures, such as requiring rollover protection on older tractors still in use. The prospect of government control threatens deeply held values, so farmers take their chances with machinery entanglements, livestock assaults and other rural risks that safety advocates have struggled for decades to systematically reduce.
What a shame if the EPA, as many lawmakers expect, unveils the sort of regulation that gives regulation a bad name.
Dust is a fact of life on farms, and the agency must distinguish between legitimate, controllable hazards and the inevitable byproduct of working with dirt.