Business View Magazine | December 2019

169 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2019 packaging so the FDA-approved food ingredients are actually embedded into your plastic sheet or paper sheets. You take your part, put it inside the packaging, and the vapor comes out and essentially protects the parts from corrosion. As long as the packaging is intact, the vapor will remain for many, many years. We have clients who protected their parts over 10 years without any oil or grease, just putting it inside a VCI package. “So this is kind of our primary product. We’ve found different ways of adapting the concept of a VPI to protecting things, so, for example, if you go to Home Depot or Lowes, you can now buy a Zerust vapor capsule to put into fishing tackle boxes or gun cases. Flambeau already puts them into their tackle boxes for you. The military is using our product, as well as other industries besides manufacturing. “The petrochemical industry asked is there something we can do in terms of preventing leaks and spills. Going after oil industry infrastructure, we found ways to adapt our VCI inhibitor concept to oil industry assets, specifically oil storage tanks, pipelines, and offshore platforms. The bulk of our revenue comes from the terminals and refineries. We originally started with supplying the offshore platform industry. Petrobras was our largest client for the first few years and they used a product, Flange Saver, and it’s now part of their technical specifications for addressing flange corrosion. Overtime, what we’re seeing is our VCI concept more accepted at the terminals and refineries which have oil storage tanks and they’re having corrosion underneath the tank bottom plate. It would be easy to go inside a tank, where you can coat or paint or all kinds of stuff, but if it’s underneath, there is no way to get under the tanks and try to protect the bottom plates.” “The parent company, Northern Technologies, wanted to be environmentally responsible and there’s a lot of plastic being used, so it ZERUST OI L & GAS