Republic Services Selects Locus’s EIM™ Software for Environmental Data Management

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., September 11, 2007  — Locus Technologies (Locus), the market and technology leader in on-demand environmental data and information management services, today announced that Republic Services, Inc., has selected Locus’s award-winning Environmental Information Management (EIM™) software to organize and manage data collected at their Countywide Services facility in East Sparta, Ohio. As an On-Demand web-based solution, EIM meets all their project requirements for environmental data management, allowing for quick deployment and multi-party access.

Republic Services, Inc., is a leading provider of solid waste collection, transfer, and disposal services in the United States. The company’s operating units are focused on providing solid waste services for commercial, industrial, municipal, and residential customers. The Countywide Services facility joins more than 35,000 existing EIM sites of all sizes, industries, and locations that comprise Locus’s customer base. Republic Services selected EIM as the best choice to meet stringent regulatory deadlines that require expedited sampling, analysis, reporting, and regulatory data submittals. The EIM environmental data management system played a pivotal role in complying with the regulatory requirements by providing a completely off-the shelf software solution and fast deployment. Locus’s skilled environmental data managers supported Republic Services to get multiple labs and project teams up and running in record time.

“Before EIM, Republic’s site did not have an environmental data management system that could be quickly deployed, and accept electronic submissions from analytical laboratories. EIM allows Republic Services to quickly share data on this fast-track project, while reducing the data management effort and cost.” said Neno Duplancic, President and CEO of Locus. “Republic Services chose EIM software, because it came equipped with what they needed, allowing direct upload of laboratory data, subsurface and air emissions data management, quick and easy export of data to regulatory agencies, and easy collaboration for a geographically disperse project team – all key elements of this project. By using Locus’s environmental software, this project is now on the cutting edge of technologies that use data visualization, mashups, automated data validation, and project collaboration tools which resemble popular social networking technologies that serve as the core to Locus’s Web 2.0 offerings. Locus is proud to be contributing to the success of companies of all sizes, in all industries, around the globe, including Republic Services, one of the nation’s largest waste management companies.”

Santa Clara Valley Water District selects Locus Technologies for recycled water study

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., August 25, 2007 — The Santa Clara Valley Water District (SCVWD) selected Locus Technologies to perform a study of potential groundwater impacts from expanded use of recycled water for irrigation in the Santa Clara and Llagas Groundwater Sub-basins, California.

For this project, Locus will be using several investigative techniques to assess the potential impact to groundwater from use of recycled water. In addition to fate and transport evaluation of recycled water chemicals of concern, such as NDMA, HAA5, and trace metals, Locus will perform soil core bench tests and conduct a full-scale pilot test to monitor chemical concentrations as recycled water percolates through the vadose zone. From these tests, Locus will assess the soil aquifer treatment capacity, evaluate the potential of recharged recycled water to degrade the groundwater quality, and develop water quality standards for the recycled water to be used in the Llagas and Santa Clara Groundwater Sub-basins. To help the stakeholders in their practice, Locus will identify best management practices for irrigating with recycled water and identify necessary ongoing monitoring requirements to protect groundwater resources.

This award cements Locus’s reputation as a company on the forefront of the high-end environmental consulting business on complex groundwater problems.

“This is an important win for us at the time when companies and government are under pressure to achieve sustainability goals,” said Mr. Elie Haddad, Vice President of Locus’s Environmental Services Division. “On one hand, there is a push to reuse recycled water, and, on the other hand, this reuse should not degrade our precious groundwater resources. Our study will bring the balance between what seems to be competing goals. We are very pleased to be selected through a competitive bidding process by SCVWD for this important groundwater study. We look forward to continue partnering with industry and local governmental agencies to protect the precious Silicon Valley groundwater resources and provide long term stewardship for this most important resource.” added Haddad.

Project execution will come primarily from Locus’s office in Mountain View, California.

Locus to promote seminar on carbon trading and finance in San Francisco

Greening of America Through On-Demand Software

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., July 2, 2007 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in Web-based environmental data and information management services, will join Global Change Associates and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP to promote a seminar on carbon trading and finance. The seminar will be held on July 17, 2007, at Pillsbury’s San Francisco office at 50 Fremont Street.

Led by carbon markets experts Peter C. Fusaro and Jay Gould, partner and co-leader of Pillsbury’s Investment Funds & Investment Management Team, the seminar, “Carbon Trading is the Missing Link in Clean Tech Investment,” will explore what role carbon trading plays in clean technology investment and how to establish a successful carbon hedge fund.

“This is the second in a series of clean technology investment seminars we are hosting with Pillsbury, which launched one of the first multidisciplinary climate change practices in the nation. We are very excited that Locus Technologies, the leader in environmental information management, will promote the seminar, as the information management component of carbon trading is an important factor to consider in implementing sound carbon strategy,” said Fusaro. “Our last seminar attracted more than 150 people as California continues to be the center of carbon market activity for the foreseeable future.”

“We see carbon emissions management as the next logical expansion of our highly successful LocusFocus environmental portal. Many of our Fortune 100 customers using LocusFocus for environmental data and information management will find it easy to expand in our on-demand portal to include management of greenhouse gases (GHG). Many of Locus’s customers are actively looking for the tools and advice to move forward and formulate real carbon strategies in advance of upcoming regulations. Once regulations are promulgated, companies could lose substantial dollars by not planning ahead for this change. Locus’s customers that are already engaged in this highly topical discussion and are prepared to adopt carbon management strategy at this time can leverage the LocusFocus environmental portal for GHG data management with minimal additional investment and provide their shareholders with transparency on this issue. This seminar is perfect forum to get up to speed and educated on this important matter, particularly for the companies with operations in California that will be subject to California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, Assembly Bill No. 32 (AB32) relating to air pollution,” said Dr. Neno Duplancic, President and CEO of Locus Technologies.

The seminar will cover the basics of environmental trading, carbon trading and finance, some clean tech solutions, information management, how to implement a carbon reduction under the Kyoto Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), and the basics of how to build a carbon fund.

GHG management will impose additional burden for environmental information management. Establishing a comprehensive GHG inventory is the foundation for future GHG management and compliance strategy. However, performing the GHG inventory can be a challenging process for many organizations, particularly for data acquisition, validation, and real time reporting. To make intelligent decisions about GHG management, clean energy, and other factors affecting the quality and sustainability of life, businesses and government entities must have better tools to manage and interpret this information in real time. Robust environmental information management systems are needed to store and analyze this data, and the LocusFocus environmental portal is a solution.

“Carbon trading is a new asset class for hedge fund finance and investment,” said Gould. “Indeed a recent report by the National Venture Capital Association showed that while U.S. venture capital investments, as a whole, were down by 33 percent in 2006, compared to five years ago, investments in American clean tech companies were up 243 percent in that time–more than two and a half times the growth rate of the next strongest industry over that period.”

 

ABOUT GLOBAL CHANGE ASSOCIATES INC.
Global Change Associates Inc. is a leading edge consultancy on energy and environmental financial markets based in New York lead by Peter C. Fusaro. Peter is the best selling author of “What Went Wrong at Enron” and a leading proponent of market-based solutions for environmental remediation. He created the annual Wall Street Green Trading Summit in New York each spring, and is recognized as an international leader in clean technology and emissions trading. He co-founded the Energy Hedge Fund Center in 2004.

Achiever of the Week, Environmental Business Journal

EBJ BUSINESS ACHIEVER OF THE WEEK: LOCUS TECHNOLOGIES.

14 June 2007 — This week we salute Locus Technologies, winner of a 2006 Business Achievement Award in the IT Merit category for continuing the development of its EIM software, a package that allows companies to upload and view environmental information pertaining to their sites and facilities—exclusively over the web—using an on-demand model (i.e., “Software as a Service”). During 2006, Locus added portal infrastructure through Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which allows users to integrate EIM’s web-based applications to any other application. In effect, the company says, this added capability makes EIM the “Yahoo” of the environmental world. Locus also expanded EIM to work with the popular Google maps. A user can now add overlays of environmental information to a Google map and display shadowed “info windows.” The result is a Google map mashup, a web application that seamlessly combines EIM content from more than one source into an integrated presentation. Using this mashup, EIM provides a data box listing the chemical concentration in groundwater, borehole information, and other relevant environmental information associated with location. Customers selecting the EIM package during 2006 included ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, Northrup Grumman and Texas Instruments.

For more information on the EBJ Business Achievement Awards please visit www.ebionline.org.

Web 2.0 to the Rescue For Dirty Data Management in the Environmental Industry

Environmental Business Journal, Instruments and Information Systems

Locus introduces environmental Electronic Data Deliverable (EDD) standards

A growing need exists for a standardized format for transmitting environmental electronic data. There are more than 15 different standards in use in the U.S. alone, most of which are antiquated. Locus leverages the latest XML technology to drive standard consolidation and ease of use.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., May 30 2007 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based environmental data management software, announced today the release of a set of its first standard Electronic Data Deliverable (EDD) formats for the reporting of environmental laboratory analytical data. With the recent signings of several large Fortune 100 clients, and the upcoming tenfold increase in the number of sites with data in the company’s flagship product, EIM™, a growing need exists for a standardized format for transmitting electronic data. Several EDD formats already exist in the environmental industry—some promulgated by government agencies—and others by vendors of commercial software products. However, some of these format “standards” suffer from the requirement that data be submitted in multiple files, while other formats, have antiquated requirements related to field lengths or valid values that originated at a time when hard disk space was at a premium.

Locus’s Extensible Markup Language (XML) formatted single-file standard EDD allows for much more flexibility in file structure, because the data self-identifies each field using labels to bracket its contents. The content is similar and compliant with the (Staged Electronic Data Deliverable (SEDD) format. SEDD is an inter-agency effort spearheaded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to create a generic XML-based format for electronic delivery of analytical data for environmental industry.

To simplify the work of legacy systems, Locus is also releasing an EDD standard format, which consists of 53 explicitly defined fields maintained in a single file. Clients may request that additional custom fields be included to meet specific agency, the major state submission, or project requirements. The selection of the fields that are included in the Locus EIM EDD format was based on input from Locus’s user community and experts in analytical data management, as well as a review of the most popular currently used EDDs. The contents of the format permit data to be validated to EPA Level II, if a customer so desires. Locus envisions this format to be transitional for the companies and laboratories that are not yet ready to adopt XML-based technology, but are tired of dealing with multiple and antiquated file formats, which only serve to increase IT costs.

Since the release of EIM in 1999, Locus has allowed companies to design their own EDD formats, and Locus will continue to support this flexibility in its systems. However, Locus believes that the promulgation of a standardized format will allow laboratories to reduce the costs of creating EDDs, minimize errors in the reporting of data, and more quickly support new EIM clients.

“As the leader in environmental data management software, Locus strives to provide guidance, direction, and endorsement to the best ideas in an effort to standardize data management processes. Currently, there are more than 15 different standards for analytical data submittals, and this needs to change,” said Locus’s president and CEO, Neno Duplancic. “We believe that the standards we are releasing today, one transitional and one XML-based, will take steps toward achieving that goal and will help drive uniformity in the marketplace. With more than 35,000 sites reporting through LocusFocus EIM, Locus customers represent the largest users of environmental lab data, so this effort should help drive consolidation of the standards. Locus is committed to meeting all federal and state EDDs and leading the industry in reducing proliferation of incompatible formats by strongly endorsing XML-based SEDD standards,” added Duplancic.

Locus’s XML-based EDD accepts files in Stage 2a SEDD format, which contains the basic analytical results (including the sample ID, analyte, result, and qualifier) plus method quality control data. The EIM import module includes data verification and consistency checks outlined in the Document Type Definition (DTD) for Stage 2a, as well as forms for viewing the data in the imported SEDD file. Both formats can be downloaded for free from the Locus’s website at www.locustec.com.

Whitman Strategy Group and Locus Partner to help business, government optimize environmental information management using the Web

Greening of America Through On-Demand Software

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., and WASHINGTON, D.C., April 20, 2007 — The Whitman Strategy Group, a consulting firm that specializes in energy and environmental issues, and Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in Web-based environmental data and information management services, announced today that the two companies are partnering to help businesses and government better manage environmental data and information using the Web.

By the year 2020, the environmental industry is expected to generate more data than the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Internal Revenue Service, and the financial and health industries combined. To make intelligent decisions about site cleanups, reductions in CO2, clean energy, and other factors affecting the quality and sustainability of life, businesses and government entities must have better tools to manage and interpret this information in real time. Robust information management systems are needed to store and analyze this data, yet, until recently, spending on such systems has been almost non-existent.

For example, the issue of global climate change is getting much more serious attention in our country. A major reason for the increased attention is that quantifiable data is available. One of the ongoing challenges is for companies to be able to adequately measure and track their greenhouse gas emissions. The ability to accurately collect and analyze information regarding the extent of an environmental problem and to estimate the costs associated with it are critical steps in environmental remediation and restoration.

With their combined environmental consulting services and information management expertise, The Whitman Strategy Group and Locus plan to help government agencies and businesses improve on the management and accessibility of this data through the use of Locus’s Web-based environmental information management systems.

“Advances in technology in recent years have made instant access to environmental data a reality. Coding this data by geography and making it available on the Web will help government and industry expose information they have been collecting for years and put it to beneficial use,” said Christine Todd Whitman, President of The Whitman Strategy Group and former EPA Administrator and Governor of New Jersey. “Locus can help businesses and government entities characterize their environmental problems faster and easier, so that valuable technical resources can be spent designing solutions, instead of searching for information.”

Environmental compliance currently ranks high on the list of corporate responsibilities. Companies that prove they are being environmentally responsible are increasingly attractive to investors, and they increase their global competitiveness. Yet, even the most sophisticated organizations acknowledge that assessing and quantifying environmental liabilities can be extremely challenging. “By improving consumer and business access to geocoded environmental data and overlaying it with other data sources, tremendous opportunities open up for greater understanding of and support for environmental issues,” said Dr. Neno Duplancic, president and CEO of Locus.

Many companies that have made a commitment to environmental stewardship and sustainability use Locus’s Environmental Management Information (EIM™) software and services to make better use of their technical resources. Locus is currently working with the U.S. Department of Energy and such companies as Alstom, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Philips Electronics, and Raytheon to help them better manage their environmental data. Locus Technologies makes it easier for organizations to comply with local and international regulations and laws, while increasing productivity of their environmental staff and consultants, and significantly reducing IT costs. By keeping all information about sites in LocusFocus ePortal, a single, centralized, Web-based system, companies can aggregate information in real time, automate the flow of laboratory data, check the clean-up status of every site, monitor the financial performance of consultants and contractors, and obtain and comply with ISO 14001 requirements.

ABOUT WHITMAN STRATEGY GROUP
The Whitman Strategy Group (WSG) is a consulting firm that specializes in government relations and environmental and energy issues. The firm was founded by Christine Todd Whitman, former EPA Administrator and New Jersey governor. Governor Whitman is currently co-chair of the National Smart Growth Council and serves on the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations and The Millennium Challenge Corp.,as well as several corporate boards.

For more information about The Whitman Strategy Group, visit www.whitmanstrategygroup.com.

Map software pinpoints environment hotspots

Services utilize convergence of tools like Google Earth, EPA data

Locus delivers U.S. EPA Superfund data through ePortal and Google Maps Mashup

Users can instantly see information on U.S. EPA Superfund sites

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., April 2, 2007 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in Web-based environmental data and information management services, announced today that it has expanded its hugely popular Web-based LocusFocus ePortal Google™ Maps Mashup to include U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data. With Locus’s portal toolset and Google’s Map API (application program interface), users can now look for data in a rich map interface and gain instant access to data once hidden away in governmental data silos.

Using Locus’s Mashup, users can search by map location, zip code, or state and instantly see information on the U.S. EPA Superfund sites in their area. With the same ease as finding addresses or driving directions, anyone can now access U.S. EPA Superfund data previously only available in much more complex interfaces or not available at all.

“Advances in technology have made instant access to EPA Superfund data a reality,” said Dr. Neno Duplancic, president and CEO of Locus. “With an XML data stream provided by the EPA, Locus was able to quickly create a user-friendly map view into complex Superfund data. As the EPA releases more information, the application database can easily grow to display all types of environmental information, from regulatory permits on a site to other EPA program data such as the latest Toxics Release Inventory chemical information.”

“We are thrilled to see innovative technologies from private industry enabling the delivery of environmental data from government-managed data resources to the Web,” said Pat Garvey, a Geospatial Download Service Manager with the EPA. “It is gratifying to see the private sector take the initiative to deliver EPA data in an engaging and easy-to-use Web interface that allows citizens, as well as companies, to make use of the vast amounts of data the EPA has collected.”

The LocusFocus ePortal Google™ Maps Mashup can be viewed at www.locustec.com. In addition, Locus will be presenting the Mashup and other innovative technologies at the EPA-sponsored “Long-Term Stewardship Roundtable and Training” in San Diego, Calif., April 4-5, 2007.

Customers who already use Locus’s Environmental Information Management system can Mashup their own site data and access it through their existing interface. By zooming in on a site through Locus’s Google Map interface, customers can click on soil boring and groundwater monitoring well locations to retrieve analytical, geotechnical, geological, or any other data available for these or other locations.

“This advancement will help the EPA reach out to constituents and share information it has been collecting for years,” said Rick Bergquist, chief software evangelist for Locus. “It’s a win-win for all parties: citizens can easily access data they never had before, and the EPA can easily deliver data to the public at no cost to the government. This service is now possible because of Locus’s innovative On-Demand environmental information products.”

Locus’s environmental data Mashup is part of the company’s commitment to providing innovative, cost-effective environmental data management solutions to the environmental community and giving companies that want to become “green” the state-of-the-art tools they need to manage, show and document their progress.