Many people may not think of the pest control industry as green, but it has been getting greener and greener for many years, and the best way to make an industry green is to educate that industry and for customers to request green. So are heat treatments green?
Yes and No - let’s examine it.
In a home, it used to be Flea Treatments were one of the most intrusive treatments, often using three different materials (2 insecticids and one insect growth regulator) to solve the problem. Often times (depending on products chosen), the homeowner would need to leave for a few hours. People, rightly so, asked lots of questions. They wanted the fleas gone, but we needed to treat many more surfaces than for example, spiders or ants. Yet interstingly enough they didn’t have a problem feeding their pet an oral flea treatment that has one of the same active ingredients we use at 100 times the dosage without questioning it.
I say this because treatments for bed bugs are similar, to an extent, as that for fleas, yet now we often have to treat the mattress and/or boxspring, which historically was not a site we could treat (for most products).
So given the intensive nature of bed bug treatments, and how one treatment usually doesn’t do it, if one could use heat and lessen or eliminate the need for pesticides, wouldn’t that be considered green? This is the yes part.
The no part could be that to generate the heat we need, we are using a lot of energy, in the form of electricity, perhaps from diesel fuel or perhaps propane.
Since ADAM’S offers heat treatments for bed bugs, are we being green?
I’m not 100% positive, and would like feedback, but I do know this - we offer heat treatments in part to lessen the pesticides needed, but more so to solve the problem quickly - within hours - which pesticides don’t do, offering our customers the fastest relief available.
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You are both getting at the question, “What is Green?” Are we talking in a narrow or broad sense of the word. If not using pesticides means being green, then of course, heat treatments are green treatments.
Just as one has to ask if corn substitutes for natural gas is green when it takes so many toxic resources to grown corn, so we have to ask about the methods to generate heat for bedbug treatments.
Perhaps one of you can answer this question. I truly don’t know the answer. In heating a house for several hours to 120, is the generated heat causing inadvertant gases to leach from home products. I am sure this happens when a heat treatment results in a mishap and items in the house melt. Melting plastic can not be very green!