There’s no getting around the fact that a good dust control program will require investing a significant portion of your operational budget — but if your vendor is prepared to share the financial burden with you, you’ll end up saving thousands in the long run.
If you own an industrial site or unpaved road, you understand just how critical the issue of dust control is to your project’s success: good dust control ensures worker safety and environmental compliance, and protects your operation from unnecessary costs. However, because dust control is not an insignificant expense, many industrial site operators pay for low-quality solutions or avoid dust control altogether.
The truth is that the benefits of a good program far outweigh the potential consequences of poor dust control, but it can be hard to find a vendor willing to guarantee results for your investment. The solution to this issue is a risk-share program that protects operators from expensive solutions that fail to efficiently or effectively suppress dust. Rather than selling gallons of product to customers with little interest in how it’s applied, a good vendor will take on the risk of dust control failure by offering to shoulder much of the cost themselves.
Before we explore the benefits of a risk-sharing dust control program, it’s important to understand why an effective dust control program costs what it does.
Pay for a Program, Not Just a Product
Although it’s common to measure the cost of dust control in terms of price per gallon of product, this approach is flawed for a few reasons. First, there are 25 dust control chemistries that are used to make up more than 200 dust control products available on the market today, all of which come with different production costs and control efficiencies. The ultimate cost of the program will depend heavily on the product and chemistry used. Second, paying for gallons of product rather than results makes it very difficult to hold vendors accountable for program failures.
A more appropriate metric for the cost of dust control is actually cost per square foot over a duration of time. Different areas within a site have different dust control needs, and dust control success cannot be defined without specifying a period of time over which the program is expected to work.
When you pay for a dust control program, then, you’re paying for more than just a prescribed quantity of dust control product — you’re investing in a well-designed dust control strategy and an application process completed, or at least designed, by experienced experts.
How Risk-Share Works
Again, one of the dangers of paying for dust control by the gallon is that if you don’t see the results you want, you have no recourse other than buying more product. At Midwest Industrial Supply, Inc., we work with our customers to establish program objectives and guarantee to either achieve them within a predetermined timeframe or accept a portion of the cost of failure.
Our customers never have to deal with unanticipated costs associated with failed dust control programs. If we have to apply a higher volume of product than expected or apply it more frequently than expected, we absorb those costs ourselves. Plus, our rates aren’t subject to change, or based on some kind of shifting variable or sliding scale: when we propose a fixed monthly rate, we stick to it.
What’s more, Midwest will never lock you into a program that you no longer feel is effective or viable. We offer our customers a 60-day trial for every program we propose, and if they decide that they aren’t satisfied with the level of dust control, they can cancel at any time.
Even after the program begins in earnest, we’re willing to lose money to ensure you don’t invest precious budget in a solution that doesn’t work for you. After decades of implementing dust control programs for a wide variety of sites, we’ve learned that the most effective way to apply product is to apply around half of a program’s product gallons during the first one or two months of the program. But the Midwest pricing structure dictates that you’re charged the same predetermined rate each month, regardless of how many gallons we actually apply. That means you pay less for more dust control product during the first — and you can decide to walk away before the halfway point of your program’s duration, even though we won’t turn any profit at all.
At Midwest, we know all too well that effective dust control can come with a hefty price tag. That’s why we work to reduce the financial burden for our customers: so we can ensure that every operator has the opportunity to get the dust control they need.
