Prove It

by Joe Moore

When I got into this fifteen years ago, widespread standardized testing wasn’t widely recognized so a manufacturer could pretty much say whatever they wanted.

You made a device. You said it captured sediment. You took it to a municipality and tried to get it approved. That was the process.

The pushback we got from the government side was two words. Prove it.

That turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to this industry.

A number only means something if you know how it was made

Standardized testing is how you prove it. If we can agree on the method and we can agree on how we measure sediment retention, then a number actually says something. Without that, a number is marketing.

Here’s where it gets complicated, and this is the part I don’t think gets talked about enough.

In the filter sock world we have ASTM D5141 and we have ASTM D7351. One is a small-scale test. The other is large scale, at the toe of the slope. Both are legitimate. Both produce a percentage. Both end up on a spec sheet looking about the same.

Do the regulators know which one they’re looking at?

I’m not being cynical about that. It’s a real question. If you’re a reviewer with a stack of submittals and two products both claim high retention, the number by itself won’t tell you that one was measured on a bench and the other was measured on a slope.

And then there is the field

Every one of these tests happens under controlled conditions. Then the device goes on a real site, where it gets driven over, buried, backfilled, and left alone for a month.

That gap between the lab and the field is the entire maintenance conversation. Silt fence has been going in the ground for decades. Ask what it’s actually separating out on day ninety, in the rain, after the grading crew has been through, and the honest answer is that it depends completely on whether anybody has touched it.

Why the council work matters

This is why I put time into the Erosion Control Technology Council. Somebody has to collect this data professionally, under the same standards, and put it in front of the people writing specifications. No single manufacturer can do that and be believed, and no reviewer should have to sort it out alone.

The part that worries me

Here’s what I see happening now and I think it’s a problem.

Specification writers are more and more reluctant to specify anything by name. Everything goes in generic. I understand why. Nobody wants to look like they’re steering a job.

Take a minute and think about what that does. A company invests in testing. Invests in improving the product. Gets the data, does the work, earns the number. Then the spec is written generically and everybody who never did any of that gets to bid it too.

Do that enough times and companies stop doing the work and contractors simply look for the least expensive option that will meet the specification.

That isn’t a business problem. That’s a clean water problem. The whole point of testing a BMP is so the thing going in the ground actually performs. Take away the reason to invest in performance and you get products that meet the words of the spec and miss the intent of it entirely.

Clean water doesn’t come from a generic line item. It comes from somebody choosing to do the harder thing, and being able to point at the proof.