The company motto, “American Made, Mother Nature Approved®” sums up everything that is ENPAC. In the highly demanding field of spill prevention, control and containment, there are imitators, and there are innovators…
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ENPAC LLC is continuously designing and creating new products to help control and contain spills of oil, chemicals and other hazardous materials. The company is a global leader in spill containment and has been ranked one of INC. Magazine’s 500|5000 fastest-growing companies.
“We have a small market, and we are in a niche industry, but in our industry, we are the biggest player and the biggest brand,” says Alec Janda, International Sales Manager at ENPAC. The company has over 800 products available and a further hundred products through its separate entity: Black Diamond ECO Solutions. For almost thirty years, it has been a leader in the industry and introduced new spill containment products and solutions to market long before the competition.
ENPAC manufactures its quality products from its massive facility in Eastlake, Ohio. Formed in 1988, the company remains under majority owners Scott Janda, the vice president of business development, and Tim Reed, chief financial officer.
Alec Janda, who joined ENPAC straight out of school, has been around spill containment and prevention his entire life. While still in school in Columbus, Ohio, he worked for a number of other companies, including rainwater catchment industries, during summer vacations to get a broader feel for other areas within the environmental field. Along the way, he acquired considerable experience that is helping to benefit the company today.
“That background has certainly helped with the approach we take to our products,” says Janda. “People think of them as spill containment, and believe that we’re dealing with chemicals all the time, but when you look at it, at the end of the day, we are an environmental safety company, and we’re trying to keep chemicals from ever getting into the environment in the first place.”
There are many competitors out there, yet ENPAC remains the world’s leading manufacturer of spill prevention, containment and control products. The company is driven to eliminate or reduce environmental damage resulting from spills. It continually strives to exceed its own expectations and standards for the betterment of its many customers and the planet.
At its state-of-the-art molding technology centre in Ohio, the company designs and manufactures polyethylene spill containment products that are highly effective and offer the greatest value for the dollar. It provides unique and innovative products to the oil, gas, chemical and manufacturing industries as well as hospitals and police departments ENPAC even helps bakeries; a recently developed product was designed to catch any baked goods falling off the line before they hit the floor.
Hazardous spills are not only harmful to the environment, but cost industries through the costs of downtime from workplace injury and clean up. According to ENPAC, the cost to business and industries of workplace accidents across America is in the millions of dollars every single year. ‘The average hazmat spill or lost-time accident costs about $30,000 per incident.’
Customers working with ENPAC realize that they are benefiting the environment while helping protect the bottom line. Its massive catalog, containing literally hundreds of products available online, provides the world’s most comprehensive line of spill prevention, containment control and hazmat handling products. ENPAC provides customers with products such as overpacks / salvage drums, cylinders, spill pallets, spill kits, sorbents, steel products and products for portable containment, dispensing, storage and stormwater management.
The team of designers and five staff engineers bring experience from an array of backgrounds to ensure all products undergo rigorous testing, both as computer simulations and real-world. “Our engineers have a wide variety of backgrounds, stemming from design all the way up to the actual construction of the products,” comments Brian Walters, the vice president of sales and marketing. The company works with CAD as it uses computer-cutting tables for its flexible products. The precision establishes that products have correct load ratings and meet other benchmarks before molds are created.
ENPAC’s products are subjected to a battery of tests, including drop testing, stack testing and pressure testing. Rigorous UN, DOT testing and other mandated tests are required by law. However, it is the company’s real-world tests that demonstrate just how durable ENPAC’s products really are.
Spill pallets, for example, are tested to see how much weight and volume can be held. Competitors often use pressure machines, with a flat bar pushing down onto the spill pallet, to determine when it breaks. However, these tests are usually done in a warehouse at ambient temperatures, which are not what spill pallets will always encounter under actual day-to-day conditions.
“We do real-world tests, where we put actual 55 gallon drums on the unit, because that is what it is made for,” says Janda. “It then goes into a hotbox at full capacity weight-wise for an extended period of time, mimicking a real-world test in a very hot environment. And we do that exact same test, same weight, in a freezer. So we know that our products are going to work at extreme capacity whether you’re in Antarctica, or in South Africa. We go above and beyond in that aspect compared to our competitors.”
ENPAC’s overpack salvage drums are designed to contain 55 gallon steel drums. Vital to many industries, standard metal drums often get punctured when being moved by forklifts and begin leaking chemicals, oils or other liquids. These drums, or those succumbing to corrosion, are then placed into ENPAC’s plastic salvage drums. In many cases, the drums are used to prevent leaks and spills from happening in the first place.
Recently, ENPAC introduced a new 95-gallon Poly-Overpack salvage drum, a redesign of the very first product company ever offered and truly the future of salvage drums. The unique 1095-YE is unlike any other drum on the market, as it stacks, locks and transports with extreme security and efficiency. Once stacked together, drums lock, thereby ensuring safety. The all-new design allows for two tightening bars, which helps make the product even more user-friendly than before and the double start thread makes the 1095-YE require just half a turn to tightly secure leaking drums. Even transportation of the drums themselves has been changed, with products shipping in four packs with four lids which nest together, remaining safe, strong and saving on space and transportation expenses.
“Since day one, that was our first product, and we have put years into research and development, product testing, quality and design analysis and more, to come out with a new 95 gallon salvage drum, which we just launched,” says Janda. “The old drums could only be stacked three high; the new drum can be stacked four high, so it optimizes shipping capacity, and the delivered cost is lower.”
The 95 gallon Poly-Overpack salvage drum, like the company’s other products, is proudly made in the United States using the most chemically-compatible plastics possible so drums, spill pallets and other items can contain the most variety of hazardous materials.
ENPAC’s products are available through a large network of industrial and safety product distributors, giving them the largest international presence and brand recognition in the industry. In fact, their products are available worldwide through a distribution base that spans over 50 countries.
The company is also behind ENPAC University. Held twice a year, the three-day program teaches employees and distribution partners about the company, the marketplace, competition, competitors, industry regulations, products, how they are manufactured and much more. “When you graduate, you leave knowing all about the industry and the many products that we sell,” says Walters. “This ensures a well-educated distributor base that knows it has the resources and ENPAC’s support behind them so they can sell the product.”
ENPAC continues to grow and offer more environmental solutions for its many customers. As a great believer in employee advancement, the company cross-trains workers so they can advance to other departments and get an increase in pay. The private company believes in the personal touch not only with staff but distributors and customers, who often submit ideas for new products to the company directly through an online product idea form.
“Our distributors will let them know that we also do custom manufacturing, or that we can make the product with a drain,” says Janda, who looks forward to introducing new products to the marketplace in the coming years.
