Full Circle Water is excited to welcome Alan Swift to represent our products and services in the Southwest. He is an industrial wastewater, concrete, and aggregate equipment specialist who provides solutions to contractors who generate slurry as a by-product of their operations.
Our partnership started when he met one of our owners four years ago at an agricultural show in California. Subsequently, he went on to design and build a system for a well-established company in New Jersey that provides a service to clients in the surrounding areas who produce and handle concrete and need to dispose of their waste slurry. They had grown to a point where their permitted property had become too small to handle growing demand. The plant Alan built for them in 2017 introduced the company to innovative design and control solutions, and helped them overcome their problem.
Like urban areas in New Jersey, New York, and Northern Pennsylvania, California producers are faced with similar problems regarding environmentally acceptable disposal of their slurry produced from mixer-drum washout, grinding, grooving, polishing, hydro-demolition, and so on. The only difference is that the Northwest doesn’t have a water shortage problem—the Southwest does! Because of this demand for water reclamation, treatment and recycling equipment solutions are an important and growing part of the business decisions many businesses are making.
Alan is accustomed to working with intricate systems that handle waste materials and subsequently need to comply with the many growing regulations covering their use. Born in England, he has a background in process machinery for the handling and processing of materials—namely aggregate. His arrival to California in 1985 coincided with the start of “rubble recycling” (tearing up roads and recycling the rubble to be reused) in the United States and its huge growth since. Recently, Alan and his colleague John Stones formed HydroPerfect Solutions for the specific handling of wastewater from industries such as vineyards and breweries.
He sees plenty of companies that don’t recognize their water consumption and recycling habits as a problem. For instance, take some of the biggest concrete producers in the Southwestern United States. Their sole concern is producing concrete. They clean out the drums and fill it with clean concrete. In a sweltering place like Las Vegas, they can’t pour out of the drum when the temperature is over 90 degrees or if the concrete has been in the drum for over 90 minutes. Consider if they get stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the jobsite. They have to drive all the way back to the plant and waste the concrete. They refill the drum and try again. Water—and money—is simply going down the drain. Materials are being wasted because it isn’t reclaimed. And that’s just a part of their industry; the costs are factored into the business expenses and they don’t think twice about it because it’s the way they’ve always done things.
“California leads the United States in terms of environmental issues, and right now that big issue is water. I see enormous opportunities for what we do,” Alan says. His aim is to identify problems clients have been overlooking for years. He hopes to solve those problems with products supplied by Full Circle Water.
You can find more information about Alan at www.slurryguys.com. Welcome to the team, Alan!