Celebrating 30 Years in Business!

One of the first independent industrial hygiene consulting companies in Michigan, BDN Industrial Hygiene Consultants was formed 30 years ago when current company president Brent A. Bassett and two of his fraternity brothers at Ferris State College realized that a private consulting company could provide monitoring services directly to industrial employers and help employers reduce accidents and injuries, lower their insurance costs, and provide a better working environment for employees.

"Back then, the insurance companies would send out an industrial hygienist who would help them determine how much to charge a company for liability insurance," Bassett said. "Whereas the insurance companies were doing it for their own benefit, we could do it for the employer's benefit."

Initially, BDN provided only noise monitoring and chemical exposure monitoring services, but as its clients' needs expanded, it began offering a variety of safety and training courses, indoor air quality monitoring, and sampling for asbestos, lead and mold. Downsizings in the manufacturing industry during the mid-1980s and early 1990s significantly changed the market for industrial hygiene services, Bassett said, and BDN adapted by filling the gaps left by corporate staffing reductions.

"A lot of larger companies that had safety and health professionals on staff eliminated many of those positions," he said. "Now they basically have a safety and health manager that sets policy but no longer has the time to go out into the facilities and do the monitoring or gather the data related to employee exposures. As they downsized their safety and health departments, they needed trained individuals to do the monitoring."

Downsizing has also prompted clients to ask BDN for help with CAD assistance, clerical assistance, accounting and project tracking. In many such cases, BDN sets up a multi-phased subcontractor project in which it provides total project management for the client, including reporting, recordkeeping and data management.

"That's where we're going as a company, to providing project management for safety and health projects, bringing together a team that can perform all the functions for fairly large projects," Bassett said. "We bring the team together and then we supervise and manage that team."

The company is able to do so because it has developed a network of relationships with other companies, he said. So even though a client request may not fall within BDN's services, it has enough contacts to assemble a team that can handle whatever the client's needs are.

Thirty years of case by case field experience in industrial, commercial educational and municipal settings provides a knowledge base that transfers when confronted with the problems of industries adapting their facilities to a contracting economy, as well as municipalities or small businesses confronting demolition and development issues and complex brownfield redevelopment issues. The skill set that allows BDN to mobilize in manufacturing settings also applies to time-sensitive Federal and State-initiated property redevelopment concerns.

Currently BDN Industrial Hygiene Consultants offices in Portage, Grand Rapids, Detroit and Chicago. Besides industrial hygiene consulting, the firm also provides a variety of on site and on-line training courses, including pending U.S. EPA-accredited Lead Dust Sampling Technician Course and the Lead Renovator Courses intended for renovation and construction professionals dealing with potential lead hazards.