What do you do with your used Sentricon® System stations? One Certified Sentricon Specialist™ found a way to help his business and the Earth.
William Hoffman, owner of Hoffman Exterminating in Mantua, N. J., started recycling Sentricon System stations about six years ago. The company takes recycling seriously inside the office and out ─ with recycling policies in place for everything from soda cans to plastic pesticide jugs.
“We started by triple-rinsing and recycling the pesticide containers we used,” Hoffman says. “Then I met Karen Kritz, who heads up the pesticide recycling program for the state of New Jersey. I told her, ‘We’re collecting a lot of plastic like old rodent stations, old Sentricon stations and old Exterra stations. What do we do with those?’ She did some research and said that it’s a different type of plastic than the jugs, but there’s a site in New Jersey where we can take them for recycling. So we’ve been doing that for about six years now.”
While Hoffman knows this recycling program is good for the environment, it’s proven to help his business as well ─ thanks to the state of New Jersey.
“What the state of New Jersey has done to promote this program, is that if you’re a pesticide applicator, you take the materials to them for recycling and they give you one core credit per year.
“The core credit maintains your pesticide license in New Jersey,” he continues. “The alternative is to attend a class or take a test. Core training is the safety training of your license, so you must maintain that to be able to apply pesticides in New Jersey.”
The Sentricon® System has long been touted as a “green” product due to the fact that it uses a very small amount of active ingredient, which doesn’t seep into wells or water sources, and that it received the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
And actually, Hoffman says, when they started recycling Sentricon System stations, they didn’t even realize the company would receive credit from the state.
“We didn’t realize there were credits until after we started the program,” he says. “We did it because we just couldn’t keep throwing it all in the trash. We were already doing a lot of recycling in our offices, and it didn’t make sense that we were doing all that recycling and the pesticide containers were just getting thrown away.”
Contact your Dow AgroSciences sales representative, or your state Pest Control Association, for information about recycling Sentricon System stations in your area.