Locus and Symbol team up to help the environment

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 20 February 2002 — Locus Technologies (Locus), a global leader in environmental information management, announced today that the company has entered into a joint application development and marketing partnership with Symbol Technologies, Inc. (Symbol). Locus and Symbol plan to develop and provide application software and business solutions focusing on data and information gathering and management in the environmental and waste management industries.

Data acquisition, storage, and management have been the Achilles Heel of the environmental industry for years. The investigations and cleanups of contaminated waste sites produce enormous amounts of data on the nature and extent of contamination at a site. At larger, more complex sites, it is not uncommon to drill several thousand boreholes and wells, collect tens of thousands of samples, and then analyze each of these for several hundred contaminants. Long-term monitoring of conditions at such sites, even after the initial cleanup is complete, can last for decades and cost thousands to several million dollars per year per site. Given that there are an estimated 300,000-400,000 contaminated sites in the United States alone, it is clear that both industry and government face significant “stewardship” costs for decades to come, and that much of these costs will be charges related to data collection and information management.

The data overload is not just limited to contaminated waste sites. The operation of water/wastewater treatment plants and various emission and process monitoring systems at industrial plants also generate enormous quantities of data.

The Locus and Symbol partnership will enable the collection of environmental data which can be facilitated using Symbol Technologies hand-held devices equipped with bar code readers feeding information directly into LocusFocus (SM), Locus’s award winning environmental web-portal and environmental information management (EIM) system. Locus’s existing Palm Pilot and PocketPC applications for Environmental, Health and Safety audits (eSurvey) and water level readings (eWell) will be ported to Symbol devices. Possibilities for expansion of these applications into other areas are limitless.

“A substantial reward awaits those companies with the vision and the will to take advantage of new technologies. Those companies that adopt hand-held wireless applications and web-based systems for data acquisition and storage, that bring greater automation to their environmental information management processes, and that otherwise eliminate inefficiencies stand to gain a substantial return on their investment, “ said Mr. Neno Duplancic, President and CEO of Locus.

“We are very pleased to join forces with Locus to bring the next generation of wireless and mobile computing products and solutions from Symbol to the growing environmental market.

Locus is in a leading role to improve field data collection. By automating field data acquisition, companies dealing with environmental problems stand to lower their operating cost, while helping to improve the environment at the same time,” said Mr. Stanley P. Jaworski, Vice President of Worldwide Channels and Alliances.

 

ABOUT SYMBOL TECHNOLOGIES
Symbol Technologies, Inc., winner of the National Medal of Technology, is a global leader in mobile data transaction systems, providing innovative customer solutions based on wireless local area networking for data and voice, application-specific mobile computing and bar code data capture. Symbol’s wireless information appliances connect the physical world of people on the move, packages, paper and shipping pallets, to information systems and the Internet. Today, some 10 million Symbol bar code scanners, mobile computers and wireless LANs are utilized worldwide in markets ranging from retailing to transportation and distribution logistics, manufacturing, parcel and postal delivery, government, healthcare and education. Symbol’s systems and products are used to increase productivity from the factory floor to the retail store, to the enterprise and out to the home. Information about
Symbol is available at www.symbol.com, or by telephone at (631) 738-2400 or (800) 722-6234.

Alstom and Locus announce strategic alliance agreement

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, AND STUTTGART, GERMANY, 31 January 2002 — Locus Technologies (Locus) and ALSTOM Power Environmental Consult, GmbH (ALSTOM Consult) announced today that the two companies will enter into a Strategic Alliance Agreement (SAA). Locus provides comprehensive consulting, engineering, Internet-based remote control, automation, and information management services for the environmental market. ALSTOM Consult is a leading provider of services in the areas of compliance audits; permitting; storage tank management; environmental, health, and safety (EH&S) management; and all aspects of the investigation, assessment, and cleanup of contaminated sites.

The SAA primarily covers the area of advanced information technology in the environmental industry and will provide increased value to Locus’s and ALSTOM Consult’s industrial clients by formalizing and expanding the companies’ collaborative efforts on numerous environmental projects in Europe. Under the agreement, ALSTOM Consult will become a distributor and an operator of Locus’s award-winning, web-based suite of applications, LocusFocus(SM). This suite includes modules for: (1) automating, operating, and controlling process and treatment systems for water, groundwater, wastewater, air, and soil; (2) managing environmental data; (3) conducting site audits; (4) storing and retrieving documents; and (5) collaborating on-line. In addition to innovations in technology, Locus and ALSTOM Consult will also benefit from teaming on professional and technical environmental projects in Europe and North America.

“We are very pleased to formalize our existing and long-standing relationship with ALSTOM Consult. This agreement will help Locus better serve our European-based clients and will facilitate deployment of our web-based technologies in Europe. With ALSTOM Consult’s distributed network of offices throughout Europe, we can now extend our services to an important market for our company,” said Dr. Neno Duplancic, President and CEO of Locus.

“ALSTOM Consult is very happy to start using and bringing Locus’s web technologies to the European market. We are also excited to expand our current relationship to provide value added technologies to existing and new markets in Europe and North America,” said Dr. Peter Rissing, Managing Director of ALSTOM’s environmental consulting business.

The European market for environmental goods and services is currently $149 billion and is expanding at the rate of approximately $4 billion dollars per year (California Technology, Trade and Commerce Agency, 2001). With Locus’s strong presence in North America and ALSTOM Consult’s high profile in Europe, the SAA is expected to bring significant benefits to both companies and their respective clients.
ABOUT ALSTOM
ALSTOM Power Environmental Consult is a recognized expert in environmental management services with an emphasis on contaminated land management, due diligence service in mergers and acquisitions, implementation of EH&S management systems, and ISO 14001, as well as occupational EH&S services. ALSTOM Power Environmental Consult is part of ALSTOM Power, which offers a range of boilers, energy recovery, and environmental equipment. ALSTOM has annual sales in excess of 22 billion euros and employs approximately 120,000 people in over 70 countries. The Company is listed on the Paris,London and New York stock exchanges. More information on ALSTOM can be found at www.alsto.com.

Monitoring Waste From a Safe Distance

ENR Magazine

Walnut Creek, Calif., 7 August 2000 — Locus Technologies announced June 26 that its Environment Information Management System has finished a testing period and is now being offered as a Web-based application.

Locus provides consulting, engineering and construction management services to help solve design and construction problems associated with hazardous materials handling and other waste management tasks.

The company’s EIMS system manages the large amounts of sampling, analytical, and geotechnical data that is typically collected during the investigation and cleanup of contaminated waste sites.

The system can be used to plan and schedule sampling events, input field data, upload electronic data from analytical laboratories, produce downloadable reports and files, perform statistical and trend analysis, and create and display plots and other graphics. It also is capable of sophisticated numerical modeling for surface water, groundwater and air and contaminant migration.

“We have a very comprehensive Website where we manage all information associated with contaminated sites,” says Neno Duplancic, Locus president and CEO. “We not only manage it but also provide a means to interpret the data and use automated systems that are plugged into the same Website to control treatment itself. We can press the buttons on the screen and turn on the pumps all over the world.”

Duplancic says the software can “eliminate the need for somebody to sit in a pickup truck and go to the site to change a filter or turn on a pump.”

By Tom Sawyer

Locus Technologies Discusses Brownfields’ Allure, The Business Journal

What’s a little contamination when land prices are surging?

Ted Cuzzillo — Contributing Writer
Contaminated land is a scourge in many urban areas, but in the booming South Bay it’s often more than worth the trouble of cleaning it up.

“Demand is so huge,” said real estate broker John Troughten of Cushman Wakefield, “the contamination doesn’t even matter.”

These aren’t the highly contaminated Superfund sites but rather their less dangerous and more easily reused relatives called brownfields. While there are certain technical standards for a city or other government entity to declare a site a brownfield, the term also has wide informal use for any land with contamination that temporarily limits its usability.

Because they can more easily be put back into productive use, brownfields have prompted several state and federal programs to subsidize remediation and help define liability.

But in the booming Silicon Valley, simple economics usually obviate slow-moving government programs.

 

Changing Economics
The rule-of-thumb discount on land with a contamination stigma–whether formally designated or not–is 30 percent. That’s generally plenty to pay for remediation.

Perhaps more important, said Mr. Troughton, are rapidly appreciating values on land and the value of any development on it. While the cost of remediation and building remains almost the same, values are soaring. “The monstrous amount of profit that’s happening is because of super demand,” he said.

The growing scarcity of commercial land has forced sites that were once not even considered for development out onto the market, said Mr. Troughton. “It used to be that you could pick between two or three pieces of property, but now you’re lucky if you get one.”

Preparing a site for reuse is called remediation, not cleanup, since few sites are ever cleaned to their original states. Factors determining how clean “clean” is include pressure on site owners from their attorneys, technical consultants, regulatory agencies, the general public and their representatives, according to Michael Lane, a principal at Greenbrae Environmental in Marin County.

 

How it got that way
Brownfield remediation in the South Bay is generally easier than in San Francisco,
Emeryville or other areas around the bay with more varied industrial histories.

The bulk of Silicon Valley contamination can be traced to the 1950s and ’60s manufacture of semiconductors by such companies as Raytheon, Fairchild Semiconductor and GTE. They used a solvent known as trichloroethylene, commonly known as TCE and at the time believed to be nontoxic.

Toxic or not, it wasn’t supposed to escape the underground fiberglass vaults used to store it. Fortunately, TCE readily dissipates when exposed to air. Also, land can be used even as remediation continues — usually with the lowest possible profile.

“Brownfield in Silicon Valley is probably the best kept secret,” said Neno Duplancic, president and CEO of Locus Technologies.

And while they may not be as bad as Superfund sites, brownfields aren’t innocuous. Mr. Duplancic cites an article published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine (www.nejm.org) that says 80 to 90 percent of cancers are due to environmental exposure, not genetics (Unfortunately, this article has been removed).

“Yet in the past 15 years, the explosion of molecular genetics has overshadowed environmental explanations by revealing genetic mechanisms underlying cancer,” the article says. Mr. Duplancic called the research “a significant boost for environmental industry.”

 

Pump, scrub, or let it be
The Netscape Communications campus in Mountain View, cited by many as an example of successful reuse, employs ongoing remediation.

Machines continuously pump groundwater up and over activated charcoal within structures resembling 1950s-style science-fiction rockets. These “air scrubbers” reduce what are already unmeasurable levels of concentration with no evidence of risk to health, Mr. Duplancic said.

The process is analogous to rinsing detergent from a sponge. After many rinses, it still seems to have more in it.

Old gas stations were another source of contamination in the form of petroleum distillates. Like TCE, gasoline dissipates easily in the air. Another, newer technique is to use petroleum-eating microbes.

Builders can also help avoid the effects of remaining underground contamination. For example, instead of disturbing contaminants by hammering piles, some builders use a “spread” foundation — a concrete pad underneath the entire building — and vapor barriers to stop gases from leaking upward into the building, perhaps concentrating in a closet that’s opened only once or twice a year.

The new Microsoft campus on Torre Avenue in Cupertino used both techniques to remediate dangers from effects of leaks from an old paving company’s 20,000-gallon underground diesel tank.

A controversial new trend is “monitored natural attenuation,” said Mr. Lane. Contaminants are left in place and monitored at regular intervals.

The legal environment has evolved over the last few years. Historically, prospective land buyers feared being held liable even if they had no involvement in polluting.

“The liability hasn’t changed,” said Jim Hanson, the Region 9 brownfields coordinator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in San Francisco. “but now there’s a lot of new policy and enforcement discretion.”

A new lender liability policy clarifies that unless a lender had some involvement in management of site, the EPA won’t consider it potentially liable. Also, when property sits above a contaminated aquifer but was not the source of pollution, the land owner will not be held responsible.

Other new tools include insurance that kicks in if property is remediated and then more contamination is found.

Are there more brownfields in the making? It’s a lot less likely today. In Mountain View, for example, pharmaceuticals is the only manufacturing industry now, said Michael Percy, principal planner for the city. And the controls are “a thousand times more strict” than in the past.

Ted Cuzzillo is a freelance writer based in Point Richmond. Contact him at
theodore@cannolo.com.

Copyright 2000 American City Business Journals Inc.
Click for permission to reprint (PRC# 1.1641.325135)

The ‘Other’ E-Biz Continues to Grow

Engineering News Record

Read the Press Release Here

Locus Technologies awarded remediation system installation at Union Pacific Railroad Yard in Tracy, CA.

WALNUT CREEK, Calif., 5 May 1999 — Locus Technologies today announced that they were awarded a contract for groundwater remediation system installation at Union Pacific Railroad’s yard in Tracy, CA.

The remediation project will be managed in four phases: (1) construction of the infiltration trench, (2) construction of the extraction wells, (3) installation of the treatment system, and (4) system automation. As a leader in the field of groundwater treatment and automation, Locus will apply the most advanced techniques for installation of mechanical, electrical, instrumentation, and control systems.

Locus Technologies is thrilled to have the opportunity to install an advanced automated groundwater treatment system at UPRR’s Tracy Yard. This is the third in a series of UPRR groundwater treatment system automation projects awarded to Locus Technologies in recent months. “It clearly demonstrates that Locus’s state-of-the-art Internet-based automation technology, when coupled with system installation, provides significant reduction of the overall cost for groundwater remediation projects. We are pleased that we can transfer those savings to UPRR,” said Mr. Neno Duplancic, President of Locus Technologies.

Locus President Receives The Business Journal’s 1998 Silicon Valley Entrepreneurial Award, The Business Journal/Special Supplement

Founder of Locus Technologies has made his mark in the environmental cleanup arena

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 27 June 1998 — Entrepreneurial Award Finalist – Emerging Category

Mary Duan
Special to the Business Journal

 

When someone comes looking for the services of Locus Technologies, it is because they have a problem that company co-founder and CEO Neno Duplancic likens to cancer.
But it is not an anomaly of the human body that Locus seeks to cure. Rather, its target anomalies in the air, water, or soil that leads people to the Mountain View-based company.

“If you get to cancer early enough, there is a chance you will survive and get out of it. But if you let it go too long, your chances of survival are minimal,” Mr. Duplancic said. “It’s the same with environmental contamination. If you get to the source early and move aggressively to contain, chances are it would be a major headache and you won’t have to spend a lot of money to remediate. But if you wait until next quarter and then the next quarter, it’s going to cost more and more.” Locus Technologies was founded in April 1997, at a time when nobody, its founders included, thought it was a good time to start an environmental firm. Indeed, Locus found its origins in the failure of another environmental firm where Mr. Duplancic and the seven others who comprise Locus’ management team once worked. Two factors led to the rocky times for the environmental industry. First, environmental regulations that created significant market growth in the 1980s diminished demand in the 1990s.

When Congress enacted Superfund regulations in 1980, an army of engineers and geologists switched to environmental work But that work began to grind to a halt in the 1990s because while a lot of money had been spent investigating remediation, not all that much remediation actually took place.

Second, merger mania began sweeping through the industry.

Mr. Duplancic’s previous employer was acquired by a group of investors, whom he said underestimated the financial needs of the company while at the same time overestimating their management abilities.

“The company found itself in a serious financial crisis,” said Mr. Duplancic. “But we had a good team and good clients and we split to form the new company.”

Meanwhile, the previous employer fell into bankruptcy.

Mr. Duplancic founded Locus with one goal-engineer the lowest cost remedy at its clients’ sites while satisfying regulatory environmental standards. The company helps clients minimize environmental liability by using pure science and renegotiating site remedies with regulatory agencies.

Chevron Oil, for example, was facing a $45 million fee for remediation at the Purity Oil site, where companies dispose of used oil. Chevron officials were somewhat skeptical when Locus told them they could take a different approach.

After conducting studies, Locus was able to come up with a remedy that cost Chevron less than $10 million.

“Better, faster and cheaper. Everything starts with a single bore hole in the ground,” Mr. Duplancic said. “Clients hope we will hold their hands and get them out of trouble. They just want the cheapest and safest way out and that’s where we come into play.”

Mr. Duplancic gained his knowledge of the environmental industry during his years at IT Corp., which eventually became the largest environmental company in the United States, and at D’Appolonia Consulting Engineers in America and Europe. There, he was responsible for nuclear power plants and offshore platform projects in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Like many startups, Locus operated on a tight budget at its outset. Startup financing came from six of the founding partners and a Bank of America line of credit.

Mr. Duplancic said within its first two months, Locus landed several major contracts, negotiated favorable payment terms with its major client, and negotiated to rent office space from two major clients.

In its fifth month, Locus became profitable. Initial revenues for 1997 are estimated at $10 million.

Companies from Xerox to Schlumberger, which bought Fairchild Semiconductors and inherited its contaminated sites, have turned to Locus Technologies since its founding. In so doing, some of these companies have found Locus was able to solve problems that had confounded other environmental firms.

Xerox, for example, had been trying for some time to obtain a letter of closure from the Regional Water Quality Control Board for a site in Hayward it wanted to vacate.

When Xerox retained Locus, engineers conducted an environmental audit and found contaminants in a shallow groundwater aquifer and a small area of the unsaturated soil above the aquifer. The water contamination was not a threat to public water supplies, but the soil required remediation. Using a conventional method – a soil cap – would have required a maintenance lifetime of 200 years to keep the Environmental Protection Agency happy.

Using a new policy that was about to come into effect, as well as newer technology to reduce the soil contamination, Locus eliminated the need for a soil cap. Within three months after landing the project, Locus obtained the letter of closure for Xerox.

The Xerox project was Locus’ first job and it remains a favorite story of Mr. Duplancic’s.

“This was a case where no matter what Xerox did and how they did it, none of it made a difference because they couldn’t get that letter,” Mr. Duplancic said. “Xerox had used many consultants there, they called us on short notice and we were able to figure out how Xerox could use this new policy.”

Mr. Duplancic’s involvement with Schlumberger dates to 1982, when he was with a previous employer.

He and members of his team were retained by Fairchild Semiconductors to address the now-infamous South San Jose site, which at the time was considered to be a small project.

When Schlumberger acquired Fairchild, it also acquired the company’s problems, which snowballed so much that Mr. Duplancic’s team now manages all of Schlumberger’s contaminated sites in California and one in New York.

“They didn’t know at the time they had such a problem. But they are very responsible corporate citizens,” he said. “They are trying to prevent the spread of contaminants and we are applying some pretty exciting technologies.”

Tom Jones, who manages contaminated sites for Schlumberger, believes that not using Locus is a mistake most companies can’t afford to make.

“In environmental cleanup technology, disciplines are intertwined. I don’t know if it was by happenstance or design, but Locus has each of the disciplines represented in its group,” he said.

Barbara Jagiello, a San Francisco attorney who met Mr. Duplancic at a Croatian-American event, finds that people are drawn to Mr. Duplancic not only because of his impressive credentials, but because he doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about himself.

“He listens a lot and watches a lot and he seems to have a good sense of people and how they are likely to respond,” she said.

Mr. Duplancic is watching how his company is likely to grow in the coming years. Most likely, he said, expansion is in the future.

“We know what we do well and we are good at it,” he said. “Our goal is to put a couple of more points on the map, where our primary growth will come from, and then we will try to go international.”

Automatic Savings, Civil Engineering Magazine

Read the Press Release Here


Walnut Creek, Calif., 1 June 1998 — In the last several years, growth in the environmental remediation industry has slowed. One reason is that at many contaminated sites remedial construction activities have been completed and the operation and maintenance (O&M) phase has begun. However, this slow growth, accompanied by increased competition, does not necessarily translate into cost savings for the owners of contaminated sites with long term O&M requirements.
Long-term O&M costs often dwarf engineering and remedial construction costs, but they don’t have to. By negotiating with regulators for adequate cleanup standards, reducing labor through automation and standardizing environmental reporting and record keeping, site owners often can shut down a system early or reduce the long term operating costs of environmental treatment systems by 30% to 50%.

Construction of a $1 million groundwater treatment plant operated for 30 years or more, for example, typically would be preceded by five years of consulting, regulatory negotiation and engineering costs. These initial costs would total about $300,000. After construction, the O&M phase might continue for 30 years. If the initial O&M cost is $40,000 per year and the inflation rate is 3%, the true future cost of O&M exceeds $2 million, which is substantially higher than consulting, engineering and construction costs combined (see Remedy Total Cost). Even a 10% reduction in O&M costs can produce enormous savings in the long run. The following four strategies can help to lower overall O&M costs:

  • Negotiate with regulators to reduce O&M requirements
  • Design a system that will require less servicing
  • Automate the system so that human factors play a minimal role in routine tasks
  • Computerize environmental data management and reporting

The ability to influence overall project costs is greater at the early stages of development. The engineers and scientists involved in the project need to establish a scientific approach to determining when to shut down in situ remediation systems, such as groundwater treatment or soil vapor extraction processes. These processes typically provide an initial rapid decline in contaminant concentrations, followed by a gradual flattening of removal efficiency over time.
Contaminant levels eventually get so low that the system can no longer reduce them. In many cases, the contaminant concentration may be higher than the cleanup standard, but continued operation of a treatment process in this situation is unwarranted, wasteful and ineffective. No discernable benefit can be obtained.

A policy for shutting down a treatment process that is based on the rate of change of the concentration versus time could save millions of dollars in cleanup costs. This would be consistent with Californian’s Containment Zone Policy. The policy, adopted in October 1996, recognizes the futility of trying to remediate groundwater to drinking water standards without considering technological and economic limitations.

In addition, a shutdown standard based on science could justify an impracticability waiver from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, based on the inability of the system to achieve required cleanup levels using available remedial technology. This approach offers the owner an opportunity to shut down a system early and renegotiate sampling and reporting frequency. When a system can no longer significantly reduce the concentration of contaminants, groundwater concentrations change slowly. Frequent well sampling and monitoring are unjustified and wasteful.