OK, this is not a story about “The Russian Laundromat” or unscrupulous real estate moguls. Instead, we have recently been asked in two separate projects to “launder” money at banks, as in, clean the stacks of cash due to contamination.
Most recently there was the case of a bank customer bringing in stacks of cash that were contaminated with fiberglass particles. There’s got to be a back story to that, but we can only guess as to the source of the fiberglass. We are not talking about a few bills, this was thousands of dollars. The fiberglass particles, which were not readily discernable to the staff, became airborne and caused respiratory discomfort to the employees and customers of the bank. We were able to come in and supervise the removal of the fiberglass particles using specialized vacuum cleaners and the bank was able to get back to business right away. The fiberglass particles were bagged and disposed of properly.
Another case of “dirty money” happened after Hurricane Harvey. We were called in to remove large sums of flood and sewage impacted cash to a facility where the money was counted, bagged, and labeled, and sent off for cleaning prior to being returned to the branch facilities. This, at first sounds fairly simple, but our staff had to be approved by the bank, had to follow the Federal Reserve contaminated currency guidance, and were monitored at all times. Nobody wanted to have any cash come up missing. Every last cent was cleaned and returned to the branches where they were able to get into circulation to help the community recover from the disaster.
We get a lot of interesting environmental projects, but some stand out as just plain unique! For more information about this project please contact Austin Heider.