ESD Flooring w/ SelecTech CEO Tom Ricciardelli

After a LONG hiatus, we're back! Our break was for a very good reason though. Listen to find out why!

In this episode, we welcome SelecTech CEO and co-founder Tom Ricciardelli. Tom is a technical flooring expert on static control or ESD flooring. He is also chairman of the committee formed by the ESD Association (www.esda.org).  His company, SelecTech, is a leader in the manufacture of innovative flooring products and has a very interesting story on how it came to be.

Tom gives us a quick recap on what ESD is (we also have a full overview episode on ESD) and discusses the importance of having an ESD-protected floor.  We also talk about what the ESDA is, LEED certification and sustainability, as well as a very meta pet peeve.

For more information on SelecTech's ESD flooring visit https://staticstop.com/

Side note: Worthington Assembly is currently selling their used MY100 pick and place machine. If interested contact Chris at cdenney@worthingtonassembly.com or visit https://www.worthingtonassembly.com/my100-sale for more information.

pickplacepodcast.com

Transcript

Chris: 2:04

welcome to the PickPlace podcast, a show where we talk about electronics manufacturing, everything related to getting a circuit board into the world. This is Chris Denny with

Melissa: 2:13

And this is Melissa Hough with CircuitHub.

Chris: 2:16

Welcome back, Melissa.

Melissa: 2:17

Welcome back, Chris.

Chris: 2:19

What's it been like a week? Is that

Melissa: 2:20

Sure, a week can give or take, like, a few months.

Chris: 2:24

a few months. Yes. It's been a little while since we've recorded. And I know the last time we recorded we said, Hey, we're going to get back on track. We're going to start releasing episodes again. And we did not. We are big fat liars, but we had good reason for lying. Didn't we,

Melissa: 2:44

Yes, we did.

Chris: 2:46

What was that good

Melissa: 2:47

that is because I, back in the end of April, gave birth to my first child. So, I've been quite busy, as you might imagine.

Chris: 2:56

Yeah, I think, I think we get a pass from the

Melissa: 2:59

Well, I think we were planning on trying to pre record more episodes before. The event, but that didn't end up happening.

Chris: 3:07

Yeah, we only got a couple in. So, but no worries. I mean this, at the end of the day, this is not an avenue of income for either of us.

Melissa: 3:15

Mm hmm.

Chris: 3:16

But it's not like, it's, it's one of those things where it's like, okay, if you don't rely on it, then you don't have to get to it. And then all of a sudden it's like, ah, one more week, ah, one more week. All of a sudden, three months go by. You're like, oh my goodness. But,

Melissa: 3:29

Yeah.

Chris: 3:29

I don't know about you, Melissa. I, I really enjoy, do. Yeah, like recording these

Melissa: 3:34

Yeah. When you told me, when you sent me the invite saying you had an interview set up, I'm technically still on maternity leave, but I really wanted to join because I knew I'd be jealous if you recorded it without me.

Chris: 3:49

Oh, which reminds me of an amazing podcast that my coworker turned me on to speaking of jealousy. And it was all about the 60 songs that defined nineties, define the

Melissa: 3:59

Oh wow, I gotta listen to

Chris: 4:01

Oh, it's so good. You got to listen to it. But one of them was, Hey, Jealousy by the Gin Blossoms. And that was, it turns out super upbeat rock song, like perfect nineties song. Incredibly depressing. And I'll just leave it there. You just got to listen to 60 songs that, that define the

Melissa: 4:16

A lot of those songs are though, I find.

Chris: 4:18

Oh my gosh. Apparently the

Melissa: 4:20

When you really listen to the lyrics, you're like, Oh man, this is really depressing.

Chris: 4:26

but you know, what's not depressing is our

Melissa: 4:27

No, definitely not.

Chris: 4:29

We bring the energy. That's like us and Rogan, right? We're just like the two most popular podcasts on the

Melissa: 4:34

go hand in hand. Oh

Chris: 4:36

Exactly. So, but yeah. We thank all of our dozen listeners. No, just kidding. You know, it's amazing. We haven't recorded in so long and our number, obviously our number of downloads each week went down because there wasn't any new content, but it doesn't go down much, which means we must be getting new listeners regularly.

Melissa: 4:55

Yeah, so thank you if you're a new listener.

Chris: 4:57

Yes, thank you very much. So that's exciting and this is perfect timing for my neighbors to mow their lawn So hopefully my microphone does its job and you don't hear a lawnmower right outside my window Why are they mowing the lawn?

Melissa: 5:11

apologies in advance if there happens to be a crying baby in the background at some point of this interview.

Chris: 5:16

and gentlemen, we are professionals Very good. All right, wonderful. Well, welcome back Melissa. I'm happy to be back recording we have, we actually have a bunch of Various guests lined up. We have episode ideas lined up. We've been brainstorming some we want to have an episode of what's been going on the past few months and what has kept us so busy besides bringing new life into the world. And so we have plans to record that. We have some plans to get back to some listeners submitted questions. So we do have some good stuff coming up. It's just yeah, life gets busy. There you have it. But we had an opportunity to record with a guest today, and he was available, and we interrupted Melissa's leave of absence, and she graciously was... able to join us here today, but we wanted to talk to Tom Riccadeli and Tom is a flooring expert, but we like to think an ESD specifically flooring expert, and that is why we find it so interesting. If he was just installing carpet in bedrooms, I don't think we'd have him on the show, but since he tests ESD flooring, which is very important to us, we thought it'd be a great opportunity to have him. I have a little bit of Real quick bio about him. He's a chairman of the committee formed by the ESD association to write ESD guidelines for lab and healthcare settings. And his company, which is Select Tech is a leader in the manufacturer of innovative flooring products with long term value in immediate benefits. And I can attest to that because I know of my competitors who we are friendly with that use their products and they're very happy with it. So welcome to the show, Tom.

Melissa: 6:57

Welcome,

Tom: 6:58

Oh, thanks for having me. This is, looking forward to this.

Chris: 7:01

Awesome. Awesome. Happy to have you here. First, if you don't mind, I gave just your two sentence bio there, but if you, if you'd be you tell us a little bit about what it is that you do, maybe why you founded Select Tech and you know, how you came to be where you are today.

Tom: 7:17

Yeah, I'm not sure how I got where I am. It's it's been a long, tortuous route. I actually started this company 30 years ago. We're coming up on our anniversary. And our mission was to create products from recycled materials. So we had...

Chris: 7:30

Oh, no kidding.

Tom: 7:31

Yeah, and so we had some unique technologies and had a passion for recycling.

Chris: 7:36

So you were green before it was cool to be green.

Tom: 7:38

Oh my gosh, yeah, it was such, such a bad idea. Financially, from a world standpoint, it was

Chris: 7:44

Sure. Yeah, of course. Yeah.

Tom: 7:46

we were making all kinds of things. Made these, a line of decorative planters that looked great. Just like clay indestructible made out of old pallet wrapping. I still have some they'll never break down. They're they're awesome

Chris: 7:59

That's so cool.

Tom: 8:00

And other things and then we got involved with a DuPont business that was trying to recover carpet waste

Chris: 8:05

I've never heard of DuPont. What do they do? No,

Tom: 8:07

Yeah, so a small little company

Chris: 8:09

tiny little.

Tom: 8:10

used to make gunpowder and now make other things, but Yeah, it was their business that made the plastic that goes into stain master carpet

Chris: 8:18

Oh, interesting.

Tom: 8:19

and so they had a they had an interest to recycle the carpet and we had a way of doing it so we told them we could help them and they said yeah but we really want you to make it into a flooring product so we were like

Chris: 8:32

As fortune 500

Tom: 8:33

I guess we'll figure that out and so we did actually we created this pretty industrial product and we're partnered with DuPont and we started down that path and then as we got going I mean DuPont was such a big company, a big partner, market was pretty big compared to some of the other things we're doing that we We kind of just transformed into a flooring business, partnered with DuPont. Then DuPont shut the division down. We were kind of like,

Chris: 8:59

companies are want to do.

Tom: 9:01

so now we're a flooring company, even though we started as a recycling business. And we said, well, what the heck, here we are, we better figure this out fast. So we did and we were selling mostly into non EST space. I mean, not really all, all non ESD space. And then we had a customer that liked our product. For other areas and they said, geez, we, we like your product for what it is and we would love for it to be ESD because we have that need. So just like with DuPont, we said, sure, we can figure that out

Chris: 9:32

figure that out. Sure.

Tom: 9:33

was not easy, but we did it.

Chris: 9:35

I was gonna say this rinse and repeat the same story you just told yeah,

Tom: 9:39

right. So that's why, like, I have no idea how I ended up here, but here we are and over the years we've become really good at ESD flooring. In fact, it's almost entirely our revenue stream. It's probably about 85% of

Chris: 9:51

oh Wow,

Tom: 9:52

Yeah. And we've grown our business. We've grown our portfolio of products that we offer. We've grown our knowledge. I mean, I think we're probably the most knowledgeable company in the world at it. We've just, for whatever reason, we've gotten hook, line, and sinker into it. We've learned a ton. I get super involved at the ESD association. I learn a ton from the other members. And it's just sort of a thing that we do and we're pretty good at it.

Chris: 10:17

well, I'm curious to ask about like, okay, so 30 years ago you decide to start a company Recycling materials. What was your background that you thought? Hey, I could do this Like how did you or you just were like I have to do it and I'll figure it out.

Tom: 10:33

Well, a little of both. I mean, I was chemical engineer at MIT and so that's like chemical plastics kind of stuff. And I was working for a startup that had gone public that was handling medical waste. And one of the things they wanted to do, so that partly was their passion was to recycle what they could out of the medical waste streams, kind of. Sounds like a really bad idea, but

Chris: 10:55

hmm

Tom: 10:55

they were determined to do it. And I was hired as a business analyst, but I ended up getting involved in facility development and I helped them build a facility that was doing it. We, it was pretty interesting. We had to disinfect things and then we had to separate. And it was all pretty cool process. And that, that's what got me into it. And they didn't make it financially. I was. Kind of looking for a job, and I thought, you know what, I'm just going to go into this and start my own business.

Chris: 11:24

Well, good for you. Both feed in, huh? So, very interesting. So, you started to talk about your relationship with the ESDA. And first of all, can you tell, are you, do you feel comfortable explaining a little bit about what the ESDA Association is before you getting into your role at the ESDA? Just in case listeners aren't familiar with them.

Tom: 11:44

Yeah, absolutely. So the, you know, the ESDA is the group that writes all the standards and guidelines for controlling static, predominantly in electronics manufacturing. So there are different, you know, and we, throughout the group, and I've learned a ton, like I said, we understand static and how it's generated and how to control it. We could apply those principles across other industries, but the ESDA as an association is focused on the electronics manufacturing environment. Yep. And so their standards particularly, in fact, we have disclaimers in our standards that say, you know, if you're making bombs, go look somewhere else. Right. So it's that kind of thing. Yeah. So that's what, that's what we do as an organization. It's a pretty robust organization. There are lots of volunteers. We're all volunteers. From from across the industry defense contractors to consultants to, you know, other, other participants and, you know, you learn a ton that there's a lot of knowledge embedded in the people and, you know, we end up as volunteers. We end up participating in pretty much all the standards working groups because you go to the, you go to these meetings to, you know, work on your committee, but you're there. So, you know, what am I going to do for the next two hours? Well, I'm going to go sit in on packaging or, or, you know, wrist strap, the wrist strap meeting, and you, so you do it all. So you learn a ton, right? So I'm, I'm kind of the elite in house expert on flooring, but we have a lot of people that are on my committee and they get involved and we, we, so we all know a lot about a lot of things.

Chris: 13:16

Oh, that's, that's interesting. Very interesting. I'm, I'm going to tell a quick aside. This is in case you're not familiar with the show. There's lots of tangents and it's all my fault. But you talked about you know, ignore these standards. If you're making bombs, I'll never forget. I went to there's a, this. It's actually a relatively small business. I mean, small, maybe like a hundred, 150 employees in the middle of Connecticut. And they were, they were looking for welders and I was selling welders at the time. And, and they're showing me around and they're showing me, you know, we're trying to weld these wires to get them. Okay. Whatever. I have no idea what they do. Right. You know, they just, they don't even have a sign on the door. And and then I start to like pick up on them, like, Oh, they're making explosives here. Like I started to pick up on that. And to this day, I don't know if they're making weaponized explosives or like industrial explosives for, you know, breaking up rocks. I have no idea. I, I, I realized that they are and I talked to the guy about it. He goes, Oh yeah. He goes, actually, that's why this is, this campus is many small buildings rather than one large building. They, you know, because that way there, if anything horrible was to happen, you destroy one small building. He explained to me the walls, I think the walls were like four feet thick or some crazy, incredibly thick wall. Right. But the roof was relatively lightweight. He goes, and this whole thing's designed to explode up. He goes, so I'm like, Oh, so like, it's designed to have a controlled explosion. So we're okay. He goes, Oh no, no, no. We're dead. He goes, but, but everybody around us is okay.

Tom: 14:48

yeah, you're going up in the atmosphere, but

Chris: 14:50

I'm like, all right, I'm getting out of here. Thank you very much. Yeah. So, yeah, never, never forgot that experience. That was quite an experience.

Tom: 15:00

yeah, that's awesome.

Chris: 15:01

But okay, so that's, that's pretty interesting. And then your role, you, you, you specifically focus on the flooring aspect of ESD control. And and so I would assume your name is on some of the standards that you can get from ESDA. Yeah.

Tom: 15:16

Yeah, so I chair the flooring, we have a flooring committee, and I chair that committee, and so we, we are our committee is responsible for The test standard for testing flooring also a guidance document on what ESD flooring is and kind of how you, you know, different types and that kind of thing. And then I also volunteered, and this is where the ESDA kind of, we went off the reservation a little bit.

Chris: 15:39

Okay.

Tom: 15:40

Different members of the group, particularly the consultants, were getting inquiries from healthcare facilities or, you know, to solve problems. There were problems happening. And so the ESD Association decided to tackle that as a topic and we are writing a guideline to control. Static and static problems in healthcare facilities.

Chris: 16:01

okay.

Tom: 16:02

And I volunteered to chair that committee. And so we're, we're, we have a document that's, I hope we'll be ready by the end of the year. It's, so again, it's pretty, it's outside of our normal realm because we typically focused on electronics manufacturing facilities and to tackle the healthcare setting is different for us. It's a different audience that the way you would control it is different. The levels of risk are different. The specific risks are different. So, but we're doing a great job with it. I'm pretty happy with the way it's coming out and I can't wait to get it published.

Chris: 16:34

interesting. That's like immediately my mind goes, what is, what is even the risk? Like, I don't even know, like, like you have families walking in with balloons. Like,

Tom: 16:44

I know.

Chris: 16:46

I'm not sure that's going to be an interesting one. So, all right. So, but for, for I'm going to just very briefly touch on in case listeners aren't too familiar. Because sometimes we get listeners who are very new to the industry. I hear back from, from like managers of, of other companies that have their new hires listen to the show. And so sometimes the new hires aren't totally familiar with ESD yet. So we had, we had an episode way back. We're on episode 63 now. I believe it's 63. But we had an episode a while back, episode 42, which was titled ESD, how to protect PCBs from ESD damage. And it was all about, I think, Melissa, correct me if I'm wrong, it was just the two of us, probably? I don't think we interviewed. Yeah. Okay. And so you, you heard a bunch of false information from somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about, for sure. I promise you. And but it was basically all about how, how Worthington and, and CircuitHub businesses like ours try to Try to try to protect products from e s d, not just flooring, but also like how we use static shielded bags and, you know, the wrist straps and all that kind of stuff. You know, I, I love to, and I, and I hear back from listeners all the time, we, the midtier, grittier, we can get into things the more they love it. So this is our opportunity to get into the nitty gritty of flooring. I think. I think like we, we can, we could have a whole episode on e s d bags sometimes, but like

Tom: 18:09

Sure.

Chris: 18:10

Let's talk about ESD flooring now because so, so again, if, if you're listening to this episode and you haven't listened to episode 42, I highly encourage you to, because otherwise some of this might go over your head if you're not already familiar with what ESD is and, and why it's a risk in electronics manufacturing, but in, in our case CircuitHub. We have a special, now I'll give you our background of our facility so you're a little bit familiar with it because I wasn't totally familiar with your business up until recently, but we put down just like, what do they call like, like the generic tile, like the V, is it VFD, what everybody calls this

Tom: 18:46

VCT.

Chris: 18:48

VCT.

Tom: 18:49

Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: 18:50

and then we put, we, we buy a chemical, we put a wax over it and we don't do it. Right. We, we hire professionals that this is all they do. And it's totally different from how SelectTech does it. And I'm actually like really jealous that I didn't discover this beforehand because after learning more about your product, I'm like, Oh, we totally missed the mark. And, and I saw you published an article with a with a competitor of ours, good friends, like we like those guys, but they I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna give them free publicity here on my, on my podcast. But yeah, obviously a great product. Let's, let's talk about what, can you tell us what really is the role of having An ESD floor. In other words, you know, what is this floor trying to do for somebody like Worthington, who's got Fuji pick and place machines and they're trying to assemble circuit boards.

Tom: 19:42

Yeah. So the floor is a, it's a, it's a uniform grounding mechanism basically. So, the reason you would use a floor rather than like a mat or something more spot is because it gives you very broad protection. So it, it's a grounding mechanism. So it's going to take charge from say a person and you generate charge. all the time. You actually generate charge by walking on the floor, right? So anytime two materials contact and separate, it generates some charge. Could be a lot, could be a little, but you're always generating charge and you always want to kind of drain that to ground. So the floor does that. With an ESD floor in an electronics manufacturing environment, you need to be, the person needs to connect to the floor, so you need proper shoes. ESD shoes. A lot of people like their talk about misinformation and confusion and that kind of thing, but there are, you know, competitors that say, Oh, our floor is so good. You don't need ESD shoes. Well, in an ESD environment, that's not true. And I've, I've

Chris: 20:41

I've never heard that.

Tom: 20:42

Oh yeah, no, it was a thing for a while. So it's, you know, our floor is so great that you don't really need shoes, but you do.

Chris: 20:48

Our antibiotics are so good. You don't need to wash your

Tom: 20:50

right. Yeah, good to go. I

Chris: 20:53

well, that might not be true.

Tom: 20:56

I like to put it in context. So like when you touch a doorknob and you feel that shock. That's at least 3, 000 volts. Could be higher, right? So you're in a dry environment, you feel it, that's like 3, 000 volts. You damage a circuit at 100 volts or less. And so the whole ESD program in an electronics manufacturing environment is written to control charges to under 100 volts. So you've got 3, 000 volts is an uncontrolled or more uncontrolled environment. You need to control static. In an electronics manufacturing environment, it's got to be down to below 100 volts. So, you want that connection to ground. And if you, if you're not wearing proper ESD shoes, you're not going to connect in a good enough way to where your body's down below 100 volts.

Chris: 21:43

Or, and what a lot of. People at Worthington and CircuitHub do is we have like grounding straps, like there's a, there's a whole, our entire sole of our shoe is covered with a material that makes contact with the floor. And then it has a for lack of a better term, because it's not really a wire, but it's sort of like a wire that goes up inside of your shoe to pull it off your body and onto that strap.

Tom: 22:05

Yeah, so that's one type of footwear. You can have shoes, like a shoe is made to be, have the right, it's conductivity. So, it's got to conduct electricity at a certain amount. And we measure the opposite of conductivity. We measure resistance. So, we want a low resistance. and therefore the proper code.

Chris: 22:23

So in our environment and I'm going to do my very good. Remember, and this is an audio medium. So no, no, nothing visual here, but I'm gonna do my very best to describe something visual. We have we've, we've purchased almost certainly the standards that your name is on because it's all about ESD flooring and and followed them to try to make sure that our facility is safe. And then we audit it. To make sure that we're, you know, the, the flooring is still working and then, you know, if it's fallen out of the spec, then we treat it and get it back into spec. There is, if you can picture an outlet on your on, in your house, you're sitting in your, your, your kitchen or whatever, and you have an outlet on the wall. We have large copper foil tape that runs up the wall and into that outlet and makes contact with the ground. Literally, so if you look at your plug, you have the two rectangular plugs and then you have the round one. That round one is connected to ground and it's called ground because guess what? It goes to ground. Literally, you go outside, there's a big eight foot Poles sticking in the ground that everything is touched to that just, I don't know, there's something about the fact that the earth and ground is all connected just blows my mind, but I digress. So, it's just a common point that everything can connect to. And and then we have that tape comes down onto our floor and then, and then we have kind of like a T shape and we're following basically the spec that's been given to us about how to protect our floor. And we have a wax that goes over it. Now this wax has some kind of a, maybe you know, Tom, I, I don't actually know what is in here. There's some kind of material that makes this wax work differently than if you just go to a cafeteria and they have a nice shiny wax that makes it look pretty. There's something in this wax that, that absorbs static electricity. Do you know what that something is by any chance?

Tom: 24:10

Usually it's like an aluminum oxide. It doesn't really absorb it, it conducts it. So

Chris: 24:15

excuse me,

Tom: 24:15

yep, it just makes it so that the electricity will flow through the aluminum oxide particles. And then finally make its way to the grounding strap and to ground. That's a good point, is if you can, you can have a great floor, you need shoes, like I said, but you also have to ground it. If the floor is not connected to ground it's really not going to do what it's supposed to do.

Chris: 24:36

And it has to be grounded regionally. Right. I remember reading the spec. There's, there's, there's so many feet. You need to make sure you continue to have these things. Because we just put in a new extension to our building. Well, same building, but we extended our, our, our part of the building because a previous tenant moved out. We have the whole building now, which, boy, we do, we do need to have a makeup episode because there's so many things to talk about. But anyway, and when we did that, we had to measure, you know, we measured everything out. We made sure that we had all this stuff and, and the tricky thing. What we keep finding is the traffic areas. You got to treat those regularly because the traffic areas that wax wears away. And all of a sudden, yeah, when I'm near, when I'm within five feet of the, of, of my copper foil, everything's great. But as soon as I go to the hallway, boy, we're awfully low on that spec. We got to build it back up. Yeah. That keeps happening to us. Cause it just gets worn away. My understanding is though and this is, you know, your opportunity to kind of plug how you guys are different. Cause I'm actually, I'm. Genuinely, very interested to understand more about how your product works. Your, the, the tiles themselves, it's not the, what you call, it's not VFT, is it VFT? Is that the term I keep forgetting?

Tom: 25:48

VCT.

Chris: 25:48

VCT, gosh, and I said VFT before, anyway, VCT. It's not standard VCT material, which is what people will put in a cafeteria or whatever. You have some kind of special material that you make , your tiles out of, is that correct?

Tom: 26:02

Yeah, so we have, we have every product. We also have a wax that we can sell people, but we, what got us into the business with the customer that asked us to do it was our interlocking system. We have two different Interlocking system. So the tiles snap together. From an ASD standpoint, the beauty of that is that the conductivity is built into the tile. We don't rely on anything else. When you snap them together, they electrically connect. So they both physically connect and electrically connect. And that gives you an incredibly reliable path to ground. So, yeah, so it's just a really super system. And over the years, like I said, we have two different products. One is a solid material. It comes in, originally it only came in black, because we had

Chris: 26:49

Like a Model T.

Tom: 26:51

Yeah, we basically add graphite to the plastic and the graphite makes

Chris: 26:54

Oh, wow.

Tom: 26:55

Yeah, it works great. So it conducts electricity, but it makes everything black. So, and then we invented a product that has a covering on it, but the covering has got static control elements built into it as well. So it's a two layer. System and it looks a lot nicer. So it's the same, it's got all the same interlocking benefits and connectivity and reliability and all that, but just looks nicer. It's also more expensive. And then more recently we invented a different additive that's based on a metallic composite fiber. It's not graphite. And we can color over that. So the solid color product we can make in any color now. We just, we just did about a hundred thousand square feet in a bright blue for the customer that they, that's what they wanted. So we matched the blue that they wanted. And and I know, so one thing I should say as I'm talking about all this, we still use recycled materials in our products. When somebody asks us to make a custom bright blue, we can't use recycled material

Chris: 27:54

Ah, okay.

Tom: 27:55

trying to color match. But in all the other products, we still use pretty high recycled content. Black and gray solid color tile. We, it's 96% recycle

Chris: 28:06

That's so cool.

Tom: 28:07

yeah, so we, it's important to us.

Chris: 28:09

I have a bunch of questions for you and definitely I want to talk to you about the recycling aspect of For sure, because I think that might be what I'm most interested in understanding more about, but you're describing how a few of your products work. You have, you have solid material and then you have like a two layer material. In my mind, I'm picturing this almost like the laminate flooring that I put in my basement. Like it's, it's kind of click together. Or is it like a dovetail kind of a

Tom: 28:35

Oh yeah. It's more of a dovetail. Yeah. So we have it to, yeah, not the click groove thing. Yeah. It's ours is a dovetail. Yep.

Chris: 28:42

And, and by doing that, Is it, is it like a floating floor where you don't need to glue it down?

Tom: 28:48

It is a floating floor. Yep, that's the beauty of it. You can put it down. I mean, we have many customers, and you'll appreciate this, where you have an office, and you want to make a little test lab there, and it's got carpet in it. You just put our tiles right over it.

Chris: 29:00

Of course. Cause then you ground to the tiles and your, your life is good. Brilliant. That is brilliant. And more importantly, and I think this might get into the aspect of recyclability. You, you could just pick it up.

Tom: 29:13

Just pick it up. It's portable, so you can reuse it, but we'll take it back. We'll actually pay to get it back.

Chris: 29:18

You'll pay to get it back.

Tom: 29:20

We'll grind it up and use it to make new tiles. Yep.

Chris: 29:23

Come on.

Tom: 29:24

We're the only company in the world of any, even in conventional flooring, that'll do that, and it's

Chris: 29:29

Well, yeah, when we just, cause we just did like I said, we just did a big site, all that tile that we tore up, dumpster, great big dumps. And every time I see this, I'm like, boy, how, how many times, how many dumpsters a day are like, are happening like this? You know what I

Tom: 29:42

Oh, it's huge. Yeah, the flooring. I mean, the beauty of our product, since it's not glued, is we can get it back if, you know, the tile that you threw away is covered in adhesive.

Chris: 29:51

Yes, exactly. Right. And that, and that adhesive I'm, I'm imagining would make it very difficult to recycle, right?

Tom: 29:57

Very difficult.

Chris: 29:58

Yeah, because it's going to take way more energy to get that. I guess they just burn it off. I don't even know. I'm not a chemist.

Tom: 30:04

They just dispose of it. They, there's, they, they don't recover that

Chris: 30:07

They can't recover it. Yeah. Wow. Unbelievable. That's really cool. So, so, I, I read on your website that by using your, how, okay. So, all right. Sorry. So many questions, so many questions. So you're using recycled material. Super cool. That when you're buying the floor, as long as it's not the custom blue material. Oh, hang on a second before I got to the question I was about to ask. I'm going to think of the other question I was about to ask. Do you have any idea why? Every facility I ever see that's manufacturing electronics in Asia always has a green floor. Is that just like a cultural thing? Do you have any idea about that?

Tom: 30:42

no, it's cultural. Yeah.

Chris: 30:43

It's just a cultural thing. Okay.

Tom: 30:44

Yep.

Chris: 30:45

I wasn't sure if there was like the select tech of, of, of Asia that just like dominates with their green flooring. It's just what they prefer. Okay.

Tom: 30:53

Yeah. And I think that's changing too. It's we're, yeah. Yeah.

Chris: 30:57

Because in the United States, every facility I've ever been into, it's, it's almost always white. Occasionally you see a little bit of a gray. It's like some kind of like a speckled look. Like a white speckled look is a very common look that I see in the United States anyway.

Tom: 31:12

But even that's, but even that's changing 'cause

Chris: 31:14

Is it?

Tom: 31:15

well, 'cause now we have l e d lights and l e d lights are so much brighter than the incandescent, so the floors used to have to be really bright'cause of the lighting, now that the lights are so bright. It's like too bright. So now they want to go with slightly darker colors. We sell more grays now and less

Chris: 31:32

couldn't you just use less LEDs?

Tom: 31:35

I don't know. Like we definitely sell a lot more gray flooring than we used to. And

Chris: 31:39

That's funny. Yeah. Interesting. So, all right. So I had to ask the green question and I've, and I, I feel like I may have asked that before, but yeah, I think it is just a cultural thing

Tom: 31:48

yeah, totally.

Chris: 31:49

they prefer green. Now I saw on your website that if you, if you're building a business, let's say Woodington assembly, we actually are planning on. Building a new building in, in the next couple of years. If you use your flooring, that can contribute towards your LEED certification. Now forgive me if you're not prepared to answer this question, but I tend to ask weird questions. What exactly is LEED? Like, are you familiar with what it is and why somebody would pursue it?

Tom: 32:18

Yeah. So LEED is a voluntary system. It's stands for LEED Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design. It's the whole purpose of LEED is to build healthier buildings.

Chris: 32:30

Okay.

Tom: 32:30

You know, the built, they call it the built space. The built space is, I think the largest energy consume, consuming thing in, you know, in our world. So it's, so it's important to make it energy efficient, but it's also important to make it healthy. So the lead covers all kinds of things like lights, windows HVAC, energy. They include And there are all kinds of things, like I said, that go into it. And they have a point rating system. And so the building, if you're deciding to pursue LEED, they have different levels, LEED Silver, LEED Platinum, and the higher you go, the more points you need to get. And so the whole building gets points and you can get points. across the board. So it's not like the floor, like you can use a floor that gives you lead points, or they should say contributes to lead points, or not. I mean, you could be getting a boatload of points from putting in a super high efficient, you know, something, right? And that's enough points, right? So you don't care about the floor. But and a lot of the points for flooring are, they're sort of hard to figure out. Like, so recycle content is not a thing that people, you can get point, you can contribute to your points with recycle content, but it's convoluted and nobody cares, honestly, about the recycle content. The flooring, where it gets the points, is it has to be what they call low emitting. So it doesn't give off a lot of VOCs. And every, now, no architect will spec a floor that is not low emitting. So it's kind of become a requirement. So thanks to LEED, all flooring material is now low emitting.

Chris: 34:09

Well, that's good.

Tom: 34:10

And all of ours are. So, you know, we have them tested. You have to get them tested and certified and pass this thing. So we are certified low emitting flooring. There is, like I said, the recycled content, it's just. It's really difficult to figure out how we contribute and it's... The level of impact is so small. From a recycled content, one thing you, it's recycled content, it doesn't matter if it's foreign or not. All concrete has recycled content, so

Chris: 34:37

Of course.

Tom: 34:38

that's where they get their points for recycled content. Because there's so much concrete, and it's a, it's by a, it's by a weight and value metric, right? So it gets, it's like, it's

Chris: 34:49

ha ha. It doesn't get heavier than concrete.

Tom: 34:52

Right, exactly. The concrete's heavy, it's got a lot of dollar value in the building, and it has a lot of recycled content. So, and the steel too, a lot of steel has recycled content. So that's where you get the, your value in recycled content. It's very difficult to, like for our products, even though we're super proud of what we do the recycled content is not really a lead thing for

Chris: 35:13

Interesting. But I, I don't know. It's like, to me, it feels like, to me, it feels like, like, of course it should contain recycled. Of course it should. Right? Like, why, why wouldn't it? And when we build buildings in the United States, well, let, let me just talk about residential buildings. We tend to use wood. Right. And cause in the United States, we got a lot of wood. I think most of it comes from Canada, but still at least here in the Northeast, a lot of it comes from Canada. Yeah. Comes from North America. And the cool thing about using wood, my understanding is anyway, that you can plant a new tree and as long as you're keeping up with how much you're cutting down, it's a relatively sustainable material, which feels great. But then like you tear down a building. And then you bury the wood? Like, that always puzzled me, because what are you going to do? I guess you could reuse it somehow, but probably not. Anyway,

Tom: 36:03

Well the wood, the wood decomposes and it becomes... Yeah, so it's a, it is a completely closed circle. The wood is a, from a green standpoint, I think it's probably the most environmentally friendly.

Chris: 36:14

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the fact that while it's growing into more building material, it's, it's got leaves and it's doing good work, right?

Tom: 36:20

Absolutely, yeah, so it's, yeah, it's considered sustainable.

Chris: 36:24

very cool. Yeah, as you can tell, tangents, just tangents galore. We're just going to rename this show, you know, 100 Tangents with Chris Denny.

Tom: 36:30

but that's my life, that's how I ended up where I am. It's all tangents, it's like,

Chris: 36:34

yeah, brilliant. The take back program. So where you, you, you, you will take the flooring back. You want that material because I guess you're putting special, you're putting special chemicals in it that, that make it what your special sauce is. I have to imagine those chemicals are not cheap, so it's worth it for you to get it back.

Tom: 36:52

It is, totally, yeah.

Chris: 36:53

And now are you, I understand your headquarters is in Massachusetts. Is your, is your processing facility also here in the Northeast? Is it in Massachusetts?

Tom: 37:03

Yeah, we use two, we have contract manufacturers that make our stuff for us. One is in Western Mass and one's in Southern Vermont.

Chris: 37:10

Shadows of the Western Mass. Awesome. All right. Can you name the town?

Tom: 37:14

Pittsfield?

Melissa: 37:15

Okay.

Chris: 37:16

Very good. That's like 20 minutes from me.

Tom: 37:18

Yeah, there you go, yeah.

Chris: 37:19

Very cool. Yeah. Pittsfield. Pittsfield is one of those towns that like it's, it's got so much going on, but it's sort of in no man's land. As far as like, like it's not near any other big city. Like it's really far from Albany. It's really far from Springfield. Like it's, it's in its own sort of Island out there. It's but there's a lot going on out

Tom: 37:39

Oh yeah, it's great.

Chris: 37:40

Yeah, there's you and you hear about the history of like big organizations that have a headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pittsfield. Okay, good for them Anyway, our listeners from California are loving this discussion of obscure Western, Massachusetts cities

Tom: 37:56

They'll have to come visit.

Chris: 37:57

Yeah, exactly it is yeah we say all the time it's a beautiful place in the world to live Western, Massachusetts is an Amazingly beautiful place in the world to

Tom: 38:05

It is

Chris: 38:06

I don't think I would have stayed here so long if it weren't so So, anything else you'd like to discuss? I mean, I could, I could probably pick your brain forever. Am I leaving anything out that is unique and special that you've had an opportunity to talk about before and you found interesting, or?

Tom: 38:22

Well, like, I mean, so the, you know, you talked about the material you bought and you weren't happy with it or whatever. I mean, we offer every product. We have glue down tiles. We have three different glues. We have coatings, waxes. We have what are now called resinous floorings. Used to be called epoxies.

Chris: 38:39

okay.

Tom: 38:39

And so one of the things we do is we sit down with a customer. We don't like really care what they, we, well, we care what they buy, but we don't, we don't, we're not inclined to sell them one thing over another. It's just, we try to understand their needs and we always start with like, what's your sensitivity? What are you making? And we, you know, so we'll gear them towards what works best for them. So what you bought may have been what was best for you. I don't know. But if we had had a conversation, we may have taught, we may have, you may have chosen something different. Or, or you may be really happy with what you have because you feel like you've looked at everything. And we, so we like, we're just totally unbiased and we're the only company that has that and it's, that's part of why we got so involved with the ESTA. We wanted to understand everything. Soup to nuts. The other members, a lot of them are users. You know, they have factories like you and they come in with all their stories about things that didn't work and the things that didn't work out for them. And, and you just learned so much from that. And it's like, we take a lot of pride in helping our customers get to where they really should be. Like I've had so many customer presentations and like at the end, the customer looks at me like, Oh, I'm so glad you came here. I

Chris: 39:51

Yeah. No, I it well because we always Okay, you give us too much credit. We didn't like spend time picking out We were just like rushed and we're just like yeah, we need Something, just do it, you know?

Tom: 40:03

Right. Oh yeah. So

Chris: 40:05

usually how it goes. If I had had a conversation with you ahead of time, if we had recorded this podcast a year ago, we would have made a much better decision. Cause we would have had, we would have had a resource to talk to about these things.

Tom: 40:16

Absolutely.

Chris: 40:17

What that being said, one of the things that we often find is a bit of a challenge is we can find anybody. To, to clean our facility. I mean, people are just knocking at our door every day, asking, you know, if, if we need cleaning services, we can find anybody to put down wax. We can find anybody to do all this stuff. What we can't find as a specialist. What we're struggling to find is somebody who's like, look, I got it. I understand ESD flooring. I will help manage this for you as a service, as opposed to buying, like now, Tom, I understand I can buy your product, but I don't know, do you provide services or do you know contractors that specialize in ESD flooring maintenance?

Tom: 40:57

There are some out there different. There are a couple of big companies. California actually has a really good one.

Chris: 41:02

Of course they do. They've got all the things. They've got all, they got the beautiful weather. They've got all the high tech. Let's, enough of them.

Tom: 41:09

actually, I prefer our weather, so that's a whole different

Melissa: 41:12

too. And I'm from California.

Chris: 41:14

Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, and she's living in Massachusetts. So there you go.

Tom: 41:18

Right. There you go. we're the best, but yeah, no, it's hard to find and and the companies that don't understand it That's where they make a lot of mistakes They'll put down a conventional wax over your floor and all of a sudden it won't work And you got to strip it off and put down, you know, the right the right

Chris: 41:35

Yeah, we do. We do manage it. You know, like we, like I said, we've, we've, we've bought the spec, we've studied it, we've put somebody in charge of it. And we've told them like, Hey, you own this, this is your baby. And we need you to, and he's internal to our business, but it's like, you know, he's got to build circuit boards. He doesn't want to be, he doesn't want, he doesn't want to be managing an ESD program. And it would be nice if there was a third party service that we could go to. Well, it's just like, you know, I'm, I, I just had we've talked about in the show before we bought Fuji pick and place machines and I like to, every time I buy a piece of equipment, I pre negotiate, we will have a follow up visit in 6 to 12 months because what we like to do is we like to get really comfortable with the product, we like to understand as much as we can about it, and then we want you to come in and polish off that last 10% that we haven't, we don't quite understand yet. And it always works out great, and we had that opportunity with Fuji recently, it was, it was fantastic. And it's, it's sort of like, you know, why can't there be, and maybe people just don't value it enough, but why can't there be a, hey, I'm the ESD maintenance like expert. I will come in once a year and I will, I will, you know, audit your floor and redo everything and stay on top of it. Why do I always have to manage it myself? Why do we have to appoint somebody internally to manage it ourselves? I, business opportunity, people, whoever's listening, whoever's listening to this.

Tom: 42:56

We do have a we do have a rep in Northern California who has started a business Servicing ESD floors.

Chris: 43:02

see, there you

Tom: 43:03

Yeah, so it is an opera. It is a big opportunity

Chris: 43:06

All right, reps. I know, I know my reps listen to this. There you go. There's a, there, there's an avenue of revenue for you for when that, when times get tough. Your interest rates are high right now. I don't know a lot of people buying machines. Maybe you want to become an expert in managing the ESD floor. Melissa, this is a business idea. We're going to do, we're going to do, we're going to do two things. We're going to do ESD floor maintenance, and we're going to do those temperature controlled shower faucets,

Melissa: 43:27

Oh yeah, yeah,

Chris: 43:28

punch in. Yeah.

Melissa: 43:29

Wait, y'all thought

Chris: 43:30

by the way,

Melissa: 43:30

exist, though. I didn't say

Chris: 43:31

They do exist. We, we had, so Tom, a while back we were, we were going off about, I don't know if it was

Melissa: 43:39

No, it was my pet peeve, yeah.

Chris: 43:40

It was, and, and it was like, you know, you just, you just want the shower to be the right temperature. You don't, you know, you don't want it to be going up and down on you and somebody flushes the toilet and it's too hot and, you know, and there are mechanical systems that try to regulate that, but I'm like, why not just punch in a temperature? And then right after that episode aired. We still call it airing, whatever was published. We got all these emails, like with links to Amazon and all these like faucets where you could just punch in the temperature. I'm like, Oh, of course. Yeah, these exist. Of course they exist. That's that's all we'll do though. Melissa. We'll just temperature controlled faucets and,

Tom: 44:15

Well, now all you can do is ESD floors because the faucets are already there.

Chris: 44:20

That's right. That's right. Brilliant.

Melissa: 44:22

all I have time for, anyways.

Chris: 44:24

let's see. That's right. Seriously. Time. Where, where does it go? I'm really looking forward to Melissa doing an episode. She had an idea about catching up to speed. I think I mentioned it in the intro with what's been going on in the past few

Melissa: 44:37

Or catching me up.

Chris: 44:39

catching you up to speed. Yes. Yes. You need to know everything that's been going on. So I'll try to remember what all happened. Cause when you live it, you forget all the things that. You know, it's like, well, I don't know. It just like happened. And then, oh yeah, that's new. Oh yeah. That's new. Oh yeah. We should probably talk about that. All right. Another tangent. Sorry, Tom.

Tom: 44:57

No, I like the

Chris: 44:58

how it goes.

Tom: 44:58

Yeah, no, I love it.

Chris: 44:59

Let's talk about the most important aspect of the Pick Place podcast. It really should be called the Pick Place Pet Peeve podcast is really, cause this is, this is what it's all about. This is why the listeners tune in. They fast forward the first 45 minutes. They just wait to hear the pet peeve. This is why they tune in. This is why they download it. This is why everybody just, you know, Knows of Chris Denny, even though they only listen to Joe Rogan and Chris and Melissa. This is all they listen to. It's for the pet peeves. So lay it on us, Tom. I understand you got, you got a good story. You got a good pet peeve to

Tom: 45:29

Mine's a cute little story. It's about my kid when he was younger. Melissa, you'll appreciate this as you're getting into the world of small kids. But it's, it, so my pet peeve is a hornet. Yeah,

Chris: 45:39

I don't think anybody likes

Tom: 45:41

My son at the time, he was, he's 26 now, he was six and he's out in front of the house and we have a, you know, brick walkway there and there's a hornet drilling, drilling a hole into the bricks or between the bricks creating a little nest and he's got his eye on it and he's out there with his little bug catcher cage thing and... I'm like, what Clark? What are you up to? And he's like, oh, I'm, you know, we got a hornet. I gotta catch it. I'm like, all right, well have good luck. Don't get stung. And so he gets the, he gets the waits for it to go in. He captures it and gets it in the, the, the little cage. And he's like, all right, dad, I caught it. What do we do with it? I was like, well, we'll take it down to the end of the street and we'll let it go into the woods and it'll be good to go. So we let it go. And a couple hours later he's back out there with his cage. I'm like, Clark, what are you doing? And he's like, The Horner came back, Dad, and I'm like, Alright, well, we'll catch it again. We'll take it further away. So he catches it again, and Alright, we'll take it to the other end of the street, you know, much further away, and we let it go, and a couple hours later, he's sitting there with his cage. I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, it's back. He goes, I'm going to catch it, and it's going to become my pet. And keep in mind, he's six years old, right? So I'm like, Alright, well, if it's going to be your pet, what are you going to name it? And he says, it's going to be my pet peeve so that's my pet peeve story.

Chris: 46:56

I like how you went meta with us on that. That was good. I like... That's hysterical. Kids are the best.

Tom: 47:04

Kids are the best, yeah.

Chris: 47:05

That is just, that is just the best. Now, I do wonder, do you think it... I wonder if, if they're like you know how birds always come back to their same nest. I wonder if that hornet is like, I'm going to find my way back.

Tom: 47:16

Oh, it must, it must, I was taking it pretty far away and it was coming right back.

Chris: 47:20

Yeah. That is fascinating.

Melissa: 47:22

it was the How do you know it was the same hornet though?

Tom: 47:25

Well, I don't for sure,

Chris: 47:26

they put nail

Melissa: 47:27

Oh, okay.

Chris: 47:27

I don't

Tom: 47:28

we tagged it. We tagged it with an RFID tag and where'd you

Chris: 47:33

Yeah. Well, we have a customer that would probably sell you an RFID tag for tagging bugs. We, well, we do have a customer that tags birds. They, they do, it's a university actually, and I don't know exactly know what they do with them. I assume some kind of bird migration, but they're these incredibly lightweight. Like you, like micrograms, like it's not even a gram. Tags that they put, presumably on a bird's leg? I'm not sure where else they would put it. But and it's so cool, the best part about it is they made the shape of this thing in the shape of a little fish. It literally looks like a little fish. And even like the design elements, like the individual chips and the vias on the board have like the eyeball and the gills, like the whole thing looks like a fish and it's a functional bird tracker is the coolest thing people are so creative.

Tom: 48:20

They are

Chris: 48:21

Super creative

Tom: 48:22

gotta love it.

Chris: 48:23

You, you do, you gotta love it. And we love you coming on the show. Thank you, Tom. I really enjoyed our conversation. What's the best way if people have questions for you? How, how should they get in touch with you?

Tom: 48:32

So we have a website. Staticstop. com is our is our ESD division. So www. staticstop, just like it sounds, stop. com. And that's got all of our contact information. There's a bio of me on there and the whole thing. So

Chris: 48:47

Sorry for, sorry for laughing, but before, before, before we had you come on the show, I kept telling Melissa how I confused Select Tech and Static Stop all the time in my brain. And I did not realize they were the same company.

Tom: 49:02

same company. Yeah, we so we confused the world. We like doing that. You know, we got in when the customer asked us to make a product. We thought, you know, this is pretty cool. But we want the world to know that we're serious about it. Like we don't want, cause there are so many companies like big flooring companies. that have an ESD product and the salespeople don't know anything about it. Partly because they shouldn't. They, you know, they're selling millions of square feet of office flooring and for a salesperson to spend time learning ESD, it's just not worth their time. And we wanted the world to know that this is, you know, this is important to us. We're going to take it seriously. We're going to understand it. So we created a whole division, Static Stop. It's all in URL

Melissa: 49:43

Hmm.

Tom: 49:44

and all the thing, yeah, so that's why we did it.

Chris: 49:47

if you're going to buy ESD flooring from somebody, it should be somebody who's got their stinking name on the ESD flooring spec.

Tom: 49:54

Yeah, right, I

Chris: 49:55

Yeah.

Tom: 49:55

right, so

Chris: 49:57

I think so. Brilliant. Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for coming on and thank you for your contact information and yeah, staticstop. com, I guess. And then from there, they can probably find your email or your phone number or whatever. Get

Tom: 50:09

it's all there, yeah.

Chris: 50:10

As always, feel free to email us. We're contact at pickplacepodcast. com. Of course, you're welcome to tweet at us at CircuitHub or at WAssembly. So long as, well, yeah, well, you X us. You can X us at what I don't, what is the verb now? I don't even know. Post at us? I don't even, because are they calling it tweeting? I'm so confused.

Melissa: 50:29

A lot has changed in

Chris: 50:30

got messages.

Melissa: 50:31

to get on threads now instead, you know?

Chris: 50:33

Oh, I'm on the

Melissa: 50:34

No, we gotta get Is Worthington on threads?

Chris: 50:37

No, no, just the Chris Denny is on the

Melissa: 50:39

I gotta get CircuitHub on.

Chris: 50:40

discussions about beer and Formula One, then you'll follow me on threads. But yeah, those are my topics du jour. But as always, we, we encourage you to, if you have a friend that you think might like the show and, or, you know, if you really need help sleeping at night, recommend this show to them. I'm sure they will find it very entertaining and they'll be up all night listening to it because this is just. You know, it's, it's the best fun fact. My my parents tell me that they listen to the show and they never have any idea what I'm talking about, which is fantastic, but they're great. They're the best

Melissa: 51:12

They're like, we just like to hear your voice, Chris.

Chris: 51:15

It's something like that. Yeah. If they were going to have no idea what ESD is, mom, listen to episode 42. You'll learn all about ESD. There

Melissa: 51:22

You know, actually my mom did listen to the entire episode, ESD episode.

Chris: 51:27

What

Melissa: 51:28

I don't, randomly. She just thought, that's, that's, yeah, that happened to be the

Chris: 51:31

Well, now she has to listen to episode

Melissa: 51:33

I'll have to tell her.

Chris: 51:34

more about the ESD flooring. There you go. Yeah, but please coworkers, colleagues, anybody you can think of that might benefit from the show. New hires, you know, we're happy to have them and as always get in touch with us. We're happy to answer any questions you may have.

Melissa: 51:48

Yeah, really nice to be back and really enjoyed recording and looking forward to more. And hopefully we're not lying this time, Chris.

Chris: 52:00

You brought new life into the world. I'm buying new life. I'm getting a new puppy. So I will be a little busy with my new puppy soon.

Melissa: 52:06

Okay. Well, after you're done with your new puppy.

Chris: 52:10

That will do it. Sure. I'll just, I'll just put her back. Like, sorry, honey. I got to record the PickPlace podcast. No time for puppy.

Melissa: 52:18

Well, on that note, thanks for listening to the PickPlace podcast. If you like what you heard, consider following us in your favorite podcast app, and please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts from.

Chris: 52:31

Thanks very much, Tom. Thanks,

Melissa: 52:33

Thank you.

Tom: 52:34

Good talking to you guys, this was fun.