Environmental Express To Relocate

An expanding Mount Pleasant company manufactures and sells these public health products to major utility companies, large factories and environmental testing labs across the country.

Environmental Express Inc. said Tuesday it plans to move to a business park off Clements Ferry Road in Charleston by late May. In recent years, the 50-worker company has added space onto its cluster of buildings on Wando Park Boulevard.

The layout doesn't make sense anymore, said Dennis Pope, chief executive officer.

"It's very, very inefficient," Pope said.

Pope said that supplying environmental laboratories is a stable business because testing is often required by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies.

Environmental Express sells products that can, for example, measure the safety qualities of the water that runs off from landfills. Its disposable plastic jugs, a top-selling product, measure whether the processed water at a wastewater treatment plant has enough oxygen to be released back into rivers and lakes.

The company's website shows products that look simple, but Pope said the process to manufacture them can involve several steps.

He pointed to the company's filtration papers, which trap solids in the water that passes through. Workers cut them into shapes and run them through deionized water three times before a robot weighs them and packages them in stacks of 100.

Paul Strickler started the company in 1988 on a growing trend: labs no longer wanted to make these types of filtration papers and specially treated sample containers themselves. Buying the pre-made products allowed some labs to hire cheaper labor because it simplified the testing process, Pope said.

"Our biggest competitor is the old method," he said, noting that Strickler later sold the company to a Florida investment group.

Half the products that Environmental Express sells are manufactured in the region. It also distributes other products.

Moving across the Wando River to Berkeley County will allow the company to expand from its 21,000-square-foot space to 35,000-square-feet of space. It has offices, product research space and a manufacturing area.

The company will lease a third of the space at a 112,000-square-foot vacant warehouse.

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