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46 47 COLD JET, LLC baking soda, I have contaminated water or sand or baking soda that I have to deal with and that can be quite expensive and it can be an envi- ronmental problem depending on what you’re cleaning.” “Part of the nature of dry ice particles as a blast media is they’re very soft,” he continues. “A hardness scale for minerals is a one to ten scale with talc being a one, diamond being a ten. Dry ice is about a 1.5 on that scale. Other blast medias: baking soda would probably be about a two or two-and-a-half; walnut shells, maybe a four; garnet is probably around a six or six-and-a-half; aluminum oxide, which is a very hard one, would be around eight-and-a-half, or so. In fact, we call dry ice a ‘non-abrasive clean- er’ because it is non-abrasive on most metals. We can clean metal parts without damaging them in any way. And that’s true even if they’re hot. So, there are a number of applications that are beneficial to use dry ice to clean because it won’t damage the surface.” Marlowe also stresses that even though CO2 is a greenhouse gas, largely responsible for the progression of global warming, dry ice blasting is actually more beneficial to the environment than utilizing other blast media.“We don’t add CO2–we just phase-change it,”he says.“We take it from a gas to a liquid to a solid and back to a gas. So,we’re simply phase-changing the CO2. It is an environmentally friendly and sustainable process because we don’t add any CO2 and we displace using water or chemicals.You get much longer asset life and better asset utilization rates, because we can clean without damage.” Marlowe reports that about 10 to 15 percent of Cold Jet’s machines go to service contract providers, but that most of the company’s customers are manufacturers in many different industries. “Food and beverage is big for us. There are a lot of applications there,” he states. “Power generation; oil and gas. And then, restoration and remediation–fire restoration, mold remediation, historic rehabilitation - things like that. Those are the big applications for us.We are the OEM; we make the equip- ment and we sell it all over the world.We’ll sell to direct end-users, or we’ll sell to con- tractors who offer the service. But everybody who’s doing manufacturing probably has some application where they’re using dry ice or dry ice would be a good idea to use.” Cold Jet’s global headquarters are in Love- land, Ohio, near Cincinnati, where it does most of its manufacturing. “We have a fabrication and machining site and also a final assembly site where we do most of the sub-assemblies In fact, we call dry ice a ‘non-abrasive cleaner’ because it is non-abrasive on most metals. We can clean metal parts without damaging them in any way. And that’s true even if they’re hot. So, there are a number of applications that are beneficial to use dry ice to clean because it won’t damage the surface. TYSON MARLOWE DIRECTOR OF GLOBAL TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT