Eco-Friendly Pest Control Services

Using loads of pesticides is not always the best route to take when it comes to pest management, says Fred Willey. As owner and president of Invader Pest Management, based in Glendale, Arizona, he talks here about more eco-friendly ways to keep those pesky critters at bay.

We are the only company in Arizona partnered with the EPA, or Environmental Protection Agency, through their pesticide environmental stewardship program. What that means is that we had to put together a written plan on how we would reduce pesticide use. In today’s green environment, everyone wants less pesticides and to be greener. So as a company, we came up with a written plan on how to achieve that and still get good results.

We were pretty proud to receive that designation from the EPA. To do so, we use Integrated Pest Management, with the use of inspections, sanitations, mechanical controls, cultural controls, exclusion and, of course, a judicious use of our pesticide materials. We also are proud that we have a lot of customer communication, and provide a lot of customer education.

By doing this, a lot of times it is not our goal to go out and use liberal pesticide application as the first step. After a thorough inspection for pests, often we can find out what the causes are, and deal with them without using pesticides at all.

In Arizona, for example, the cause of an infestation is often excessive moisture. We live in the desert here, and if it is 115 degrees outside, then most pests, bugs, rodents need what we need — water. That means that excessive water on your property could be attracting all the bugs because when it’s hot outside, the bugs will be thirsty. If we go to a house and we notice that one of the sprinkler system pieces is leaking and full of water, we might simply recommend that the customer fix this system to stop the leak.

When there is a dry environment, there are fewer opportunities for bugs to congregate. That means it’s not necessary to use pesticides to get rid of bugs; we just had to fix or change the conditions which attracted them in the first place. That is one little thing, but in a desert environment moisture is key. So it is one of the first things we always look for.

Sanitation is huge too. It might sound funny, but if you give your child a popsicle and send him outside to eat it on the back patio, and it melts off the stick, you will have a sticky mess on the patio that is full of sugar. Ants love the sugar, and as a result, now you have ants everywhere. So, it might be easier to clean the popsicle residue than it would be to use pesticides.

When it comes to pest control, common sense is often more important than anything else. It is sometimes funny to think that a solution could be that simple. We do a lot of ant control, for example. I can be inside a kitchen and customer tells me that he has ants all over the counter. So we just have to fill the cracks and holes that the ants were getting through to stop them from getting inside the kitchen in the first place.