Published June 2002

KEECO enters
Chinese market with
$100 million deal

By John Wolcott
Herald Business Journal Editor

Lynnwood’s Klean Earth Environmental Co. (KEECO) has made a major Asian market breakthrough, landing more than $100 million in technology-and-service agreements with China’s Sichuan Anxian Yihe Constructional & Chemical Group Co.

The contracts are for using KEECO’s patented cleansing techniques to treat process waste from sodium dichromate production, as well as developing uses of its patented Silica Micro-Encapsulation (SME) technology in China.

Executive Vice President Jim Roma said he believes this will be the first of several announcements of Chinese ventures for KEECO, due to the support the company has gained in recent months from various Chinese government agencies and the Asian Development Bank. The work in China is part of KEECO’s global expansion plans.

“This is the achievement of a significant milestone for KEECO’s Silica Micro-Encapsulation treatment systems,” said the company’s Chief Operating Officer, William Anderson. “The SME approach is the premier technology that can meet stringent new requirements that are now being enforced in every industrialized country.”

The KEECO agreement was signed in early May during the first U.S.-China Infrastructure Development meetings held during the Asian Development Bank annual meeting in Shanghai. The sessions brought together Chinese central and local government officials and U.S. firms and their Asian affiliates to conduct private discussions to promote the use of the bank’s technical and financial resources in the development of new public and private infrastructure in China’s poorer and western regions.

“We’ve been working on the China market for the past two years,” Anderson said, “and we are now engaged in a venture that will become a model for developing these types of contracts, just as our processes set a standard for the treatment of toxic wastes in Asia.”

For years, stainless steel has been a major export product for the People’s Republic of China, but accumulated toxic wastes from the process now amount to nearly 5 million metric tons that need treating, and that’s just the legacy stockpile. Future production wastes also need treating, he said.

KEECO has been the first company able to take on that challenge, using its patented processes for encapsulating toxic materials to neutralize their environmental impact.

Anderson expects to hire 15 to 30 employees at its Lynnwood office, as well as 85 Chinese nationals in Sichuan province, in connection with the $100 million contract. Work is expected to begin next January in China. KEECO will train Chinese employees as hazardous site workers.

KEECO also recently won the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Export Achievement Award for 2001, recognition of the firm’s global successes in marketing its SME technology in foreign countries. The award was presented to KEECO’s CEO, Jimmie Andrews, in ceremonies in late May at the World Trade Center in Seattle.

KEECO’s SME treatment is now being used or evaluated in Canada, China, the Philippines, Japan, the United Kingdom, Chile and Peru.

In the United States, the company recently won a contract from the Maryland Port Authority for the second phase of its Baltimore Harbor dredged soils decontamination work as a prime subcontractor with EA Engineering, Science and Technology. KEECO is part of a demonstration project designed to show that contaminated dredged materials can be treated sufficiently to produce cleansed soils that are marketable for other uses.

Back to the top/June 2002 Main Menu