Massey Services, Inc.'s PESP Strategy

Describe your Organization’s Five-Year Goals Related to Pesticide Risk Reduction

We firmly believe that the use of pesticides is necessary to effectively manage pests. However we also believe that there are significant opportunities for pest management professionals to reduce their reliance on pesticides as a primary means for controlling pests. At Massey Services, Inc. we have been at the forefront of this endeavor since 1990 when we created the concepts of pest prevention. Pest prevention is a customized environmental management program that eliminates the conditions avenues and sources that support pest infestation in order to keep pests from getting inside your home in the first place. Prior to this move we practiced traditional pest control which involves the routine application of pesticides in and around your home, whether they’re needed or not, to control or eliminate pests. This change has allowed Massey to consistently reduce the amount of pesticides used in the home environment over the last 17 years.

Because we have allready made significant reduction in pesticide usage and the associated risk, the challenges that we face over the next five years are how we can continue to reduce our dependency on traditional pesticides and become much more adept at making environmental modifications that are designed to keep pest populations at very low levels thereby reducing the pressure that pests place on the indoor environment. The focal areas of our environmental management program includes the structure itself as well as any lawn and landscaping that can support pest populations and which surrounds the structure.

What do you envision doing (broadly) to try to resolve your major issues?

The focus for our pesticide risk reduction:

When performing general household pest control services we will reduce the total amount of pesticide applied per customer on an annual basis and as effective reduced risk products become available adopt those in lieu of products with a higher risk.
When performing pest control services in a school we will remove all pesticides from the school’s indoor environment.
When performing commercial rodent control services we will reduce our dependency on toxic rodenticide baits.
When performing lawn, tree and shrub care services we will reduce the amount of pesticides applied on an annual basis to lawns and landscapes for controlling weeds, insects and diseases.

While all of these areas of risk reduction pose different challenges; such as the availability of effective reduced risk products, the customer’s acceptable threshold levels of pest infestation or damage as well as training and education of service technicians, we believe these are realistic and attainable goals for the next five years.

Goal 1 and Tactics

When performing general household pest control services we will reduce the total amount of pesticide applied per customer on an annual basis and when effective reduced risk products become available, we will adopt their use in lieu of higher risk products. Our Quality Assurance Department will provide more comprehensive training to service technicians to teach them the skills needed for modifying the environmental conditions in and around a structure, which can support the success of pest populations. These skills will include basic exclusionary tactics such as caulking sealing and screening as well as sanitation requirements. We will increase the intensity of our initial training for new service technicians so that their understanding of basic pest biology and behavior will allow them to make safer and more effective treatment choices. The expected impact of this intensified training will be a reduction of pesticide applications to control pests.

We believe the EPA has a direct responsibility to work with manufacturers to streamline the registration process so that new products can come to the market in a more efficient and affordable way. If the barriers to product registration are too expensive or time consuming the manufacturers will not be able to affordably bring them to market.

We will measure the success of our efforts by tracking and quantitatively analyzing the material and supply usage of each service person on a monthly basis and comparing it to the establish usage goals. We will make adjustments to training and service procedures as needed to attain the goal. The quality assurance department will work with manufacturers and distributors to screen new products for use in our existing service programs with the goal of replacing higher risk materials with less toxic or lower risk materials.

Goal 2 and Tactics

When performing pest control services in schools we will remove all pesticides from the school’s indoor environment. In addition, when performing commercial rodent control services we will reduce our dependency on toxic rodenticide baits.

As part of a previously EPA funded research grant our company studied the feasibility of performing pest control services in schools without the use of traditional pesticides in the indoor environment. This research led to the development of a non-pesticidal service protocol for schools that we have begun implementing in the field. Since the implementation of this program we have made little progress at gaining and retaining school accounts. The biggest challenge we face in providing these services to schools is the process of bidding new contracts and rebidding on existing contracts.

Currently, a purchasing agent for the schools is required to accept the best lowest bid when purchasing pest control services. The existing vendor is at a disadvantage because everyone who is bidding for the business knows what the current vendor is charging for the contract. Invariably this leads to lower bids winning the contract in a quasi-reverse auction atmosphere that usually results i n the current vendor losing the contract. The usual effect of this process is that the school ends up with a vendor who cannot afford to provide the level of service that is required to effectively manage the pest pressures that are indigenous to schools. To overcome this issue we will create a marketing and communications campaign that is targeted at school officials and their associated purchasing departments to better educate them on the scope of services that should be performed in a school setting.

Goal 3 and Tactics

In commercial rodent control situations we are currently researching the use of new technologies for monitoring rodent bait stations. We believe the current process of monitoring for rodents with rodenticide bait blocks on a continuous basis needs to change. Our research is designed to create a service protocol that will be able to efficiently identify rodent movement and feeding patterns in and around commercial sites with significant reductions in labor and usage of rodenticides.

Goal 4 and Tactics

The resurgence of the common bed bug has reached critical levels to where there is practically no section of the country that has not experienced infestations. Some of these pest populations are highly resistant to the currently labeled materials. As a result of persistent treatment failures, we have been researching the use of heat as a means for eliminating populations of bed bugs from hotels, dormitories or residential homes and apartments.

When performing bed-bug control services we will only use reduced risk non-residual materials. We will continue to develop and market thermal remediation services to eliminate the need for repeated residual pesticide applications. We now consider our proprietary heat process to be far superior to traditional pesticide treatments as a means of controlling bed bugs and we will broadly market and sell these services going forward. This decision will greatly reduce the number of pesticide applications made to the indoor environment thereby greatly reducing the associated pesticide risk.