One of our customers, Canberra Racing Club, was operating during one of the worst droughts in living memory. Their business needed to provide best in class dust control to meet their customer’s needs. Their storm water harvesting system had not received any run off for over 12 months and they were purchasing water from the local water supply authority. The situation was so bad that the water supply authority had imposed water rationing through mandated restrictions. The customer was conflicted by the need to reduce water usage as well as maintain very high standards of dust control.

Canberra Racing Club asked us for a proposal to help them solve the dilemma of maintaining dust control consistent with their customer’s expectations and also reduce water usage at their site. The target surface was an 800 metre long exercise track that had a 100 mm bed of golf bunker sand. The track is typically used by over 150 horses on a daily basis. The sandy surface allows the horses to improve their fitness without causing harm to their legs and hooves.They were very excited about the environmental properties of Dust/Blokr® because it posed no risk to human or animal welfare. As this was the first time Dust/Blokr® had been used in this application we used a risk based approach to our planning. We consulted with the Cypher Environmental technical team in Winnipeg and the operations team at Canberra to develop a process to adapt Dust/Blokr® to solve this challenge.

Our customer eliminated both dust complaints and water consumption woes for dust control

An application plan was developed that used the available equipment on site to create an initial establishment dose of Dust/Blokr®. The early dust control performance was very good and no negative impacts on animal welfare were seen. Approval was provided by the customer to apply subsequent doses of Dust/Blokr® to achieve optimum dust control performance.

Dust/Blokr® was highly successful in maintaining dust control that met or exceeded stakeholder expectations. This was demonstrated by the reduction in stakeholder complaints from 2-3 times per week to ZERO after Dust/Blokr® was applied to the track. Canberra Racing Club reduced the water used for dust control to ZERO and this resulted in a water saving of 8 Megalitres per year. The irrigation sprinklers that previously provided dust control have not been used in 3 years. This water has been diverted to higher priority uses at their business than dust control. Dust/Blokr® reduced the cost of dust control in a way that the customer achieved a return on investment in under 12 months. Canberra Racing Club were very impressed with the performance of Dust/Blokr® that they then applied the technology to the other sand based tracks at their facility.