Deicer maker sets up shop at former Texaco site in Glenmont
After several years of planning and renovating, Innovative Surface Solutions is up and running at its Glenmont location.
Specializing in deicing products, the northeastern company started moving product out of the River Road facility in September. It’s sited at the former Texaco petroleum storage site, which has sat unused for about 30 years. The company started renovations about two years ago, and with 48 million gallons of storage space, it offers great proximity to transportation infrastructure by road, rail and the Hudson River.
If you’re in this business, you need to be able to hold large inventories, said Daren Crawford, sales director at the Glenmont Innovative location. `Having this asset gives us basically the largest inventory of snow and ice removal and dust control products in the Northeast.`
Innovative has long offered environmentally friendly solutions to ice and dust mitigation. Perhaps the most popular and notable is Magic Salt, which won a Design for the Environment designation from the EPA for the Magic Salt line in 2008.
In addition to solid deicers like Magic Salt, the company also carries liquid deicers that can be applied directly to the roadway or added to treat salt or other solid deicers. Those products cannot only beat salt in effectiveness, they’re also much less corrosive, a fact car owners and the environment can appreciate.
Despite being out of use for so long, much of the equipment from the Texaco days was still serviceable, Crawford said.
`Texaco, when they built this place, they built it right. … It’s pretty impressive,` he said.
The location is not yet up to full capacity. Once up and running at full tilt, the location will employ eight, plus another five salesmen on the road. A ribbon-cutting ceremony is scheduled to be held in the spring when all the work’s done to the 53-acre site.
Crawford said Innovative accounts for about 25 percent of the U.S. market when it comes to deicers. For the 24-year-old company, selling municipalities on new technology can be the toughest part of the business.
`We’re trying to lead a very conservative market into a new age,` said Crawford. `It’s strictly about usage….if we can help the municipality to lower their usage of sand and usage of salt, environmentally that’s going to have a long-term positive impact.`
Innovative supplies a number of area municipalities, including the City of Albany, a 10-year customer, the state Department of Transportation and the Thruway Authority. Crawford said the company is in talks with the Town of Bethlehem about adopting their products.“
