Nearly 80 delegates made their way to the Stanley Matthews suite at the Britannia football stadium at Stoke on Trent on 30 September. No this was not for a game of football but for a one-day seminar.
Organised by Barrettine Environmental Health in association Pest publications, the theme of the day was Keeping up with the pace. Throughout the seminar, the event organiser and chairman, Iain Turner from Barrettine, kept both the audience and the speakers on their toes.
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In his own presentation Iain made the case for reconsidering some older products which may have been around a while, but Iain advocated that market conditions had changed since their initial introductions and stated these were: “Products whose time had come.” Without doubt the oldest of them all, clocking-in at several million years old, was diatomaceous earth. Sold by Barrettine as Oa2ki this naturally occurring primarily silica-based, off-white powder kills by dehydration. Rezist repellent, fascinatingly originally developed to repel elephants, can be used to repel creatures closer to home – notably moles, foxes, rabbits and geese. Concluding his list was recently introduced Romax Rat CP based on coumatetralyl. Alan Morris from Bayer Environmental Science brought the audience up to the present day with a whirl-wind tour of the Biocidal Products Directive. Despite his best endeavours to put a positive spin on this piece of EU legislation, many will remember the figure he quoted of £200m now needed in 2009 to develop a new pesticide active ingredient – that’s the sale of an awful lot of Maxforce Quantum tubes which, quite coincidentally, was the subject of the second part of his talk. Frances McKim and Helen Riby, joint publishers and editors of Pest publications, provided the audience with some golden rules when dealing with the press. In moments of crisis, say when a company finds itself in the press following a restaurant closer for pests, the media is not your best friend and any mentions need to be minimised. The motto here is – Be prepared – you certainly don’t want to score an own goal! Whereas, the press can be used to your advantage with good news stories about your business – this way a business can profitably grow with only an expenditure of your time and effort. Oliver Madge from BPCA covered waste issues, pointing out that the responsibility for waste lasted “from cradle to grave”. Completing the line-up was Paul Butt from Natural England who gave an excellent presentation on wildlife issues in his usual no-nonsense manner, whilst Ronald van Lierop from Alchochem Hygiene called time-out on conventional UV-A lamps which require annual changing. Providing the support team was a selection of manufacturers and trade associations with exhibition stands which the audience could visit at half-time tea and coffee breaks.
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