Sustainability & Environmental Impact in the Water Chemical Industry: A conversation with HASA CEO, Chris Brink

In this episode of Liquid Assets, Chris Brink, the CEO and President of HASA, discusses the company's work in producing sodium hypochlorite for recreational water treatment, primarily for swimming pools. He talks about the importance of communicating the value of their products and how they are not just commodities. He also emphasizes the need for responsible and safe use of water sanitation products in the industry.

• 🏊 HASA produces sodium hypochlorite for recreational water treatment, such as swimming pools.
• 💎 The company emphasizes the importance of communicating the value of their products and how they are not just commodities.
• 🚨 Responsible and safe use of their products in the industry is a top priority for HASA.
• 📣 Chris Brink believes in the power of storytelling and messaging in product development and improving the customer experience.

Meet Chris

Chris Brink is the CEO and President of HASA, a company that produces sodium hypochlorite for recreational water treatment. Brink has always been a product guy at heart, starting in R&D in the 90s. He became a technologist at a startup where he helped build products. Brink believes in the power of storytelling and messaging in product development and improving the customer experience. He emphasizes the importance of communicating the value of HASA's products and how they are not just commodities. Responsible and safe use of their products in the industry is a top priority for Brink and HASA.

Transcript

00:00
Ravi Kurani
Welcome to another episode of Liquid Assets, where we talk about the business of water, the intersection of policy, governance, business, and technology as it looks at the lens of water. Today we have CEO Chris Brink.

00:13
Chris Brink
Hi. My name is Chris Brink. I'm the CEO and president of HASA, and we make sodium hypochlorite, which goes to a bunch of applications, but primarily recreational water treatment, swimming pools. And our products make water safe, clean, and clear in a very environmental and sustainable way.

00:30
Ravi Kurani
Can you just go ahead and give us kind of a quick intro of who you are and what you're up to?

00:34
Chris Brink
Yeah. Thanks, Robbie. And thanks for inviting me to the podcast. I'm really excited to see what you do with it. There are a lot of podcasts out there, but you and I have been friends for a couple of years now, and I know you're going to bring your own angle and your own flavor to it. And I think it'll be great for the end of to hear, especially with the folks, you know, to hear perspectives, with the kind of questions you like to ask. So, a little bit about me. I would say I've always been a product guy at heart. I started in R and D back way back in the 90s. Now, geez, always have been some version of materials, usually in chemical technology of some sort, and have done all sorts of things from making better, more environmentally friendly insulations to products that make buildings perform better from an energy conservation standpoint.

01:21
Chris Brink
And now, for the last five years, been really lucky to helm the company here at Hasa, these 600 or so brave souls who work every day to get sodium hypochlorine out the door and to prove to folks that not all sanitizers are the same, not all bleach is the same, and that bleach is not a commodity. It's actually kind of a miracle in a bottle. So that's kind of the way I think about it.

01:45
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. Cool. I do want touch on your previous history around the building materials and kind of more sustainable things that you've worked on in the past from a product standpoint, but let's just double click into the sodium hypochloride. Say that's the most recent work you've done at Hasa. And I think for the audience out there, because I do kind of cater to a little bit more of a larger audience, just focus on water. Can you kind of explain what sodium hypochloride is? Walk us through the process. Like people probably know chlorine in pools. What's the difference? Why does it make a difference?

02:14
Chris Brink
Yeah, thanks. I mean, the term chlorine gets tossed around the lawn, and it can mean a lot of things. At the most fundamental level, it's the element itself. Chlorine seal two, and it does a lot of miraculous things in a broad variety of chemical processes. And when handled properly, it is probably still far and away the single most effective way to sanitize water. Now, you can get chlorine to the water in a lot of different forms. You can put it directly in as elemental chlorine that's done less and less, but that was very in fashion, say in the you can bind it to some sort of another molecule as a carrier in order to deliver it to the water, to make water safe, clean and clear. And there's really three predominant forms in the swimming pool industry today. There's trichlore taps which are bound with a molecule that essentially becomes CYA in the pool.

03:09
Chris Brink
Superstable does a great job, easy to use and has a lot of benefits for the less educated user. Also allows you to sort of fire and forget, throw the tab in the water and not really worry too much about what happens thereafter. As long as your water is stable. There's other forms of chlorinated isocyan rates, but then there's also calcium Hypochlorite powder shock dispersed product, another really amazing product. This product has to be handled really carefully, but if it's used right and responsibly, very effective. And then there is bleach. What we all grew up knowing is Bleach under the counter. But what I've learned, I didn't know a lot about Bleach actually when it came to hospital. But what I learned is bleach is not bleach. Is not bleach. It's actually kind of a nifty molecule. It's really sodium and oxygen and a chlorine. But by binding those things together, it does some pretty amazing things.

04:07
Chris Brink
First of all, it's very available. The chlorine is very effective. It is easy to use because it's in a liquid format. And at the end of the day, all it leaves behind is sodium chloride, salt in the water. So from a total life cycle standpoint, and most people don't know, elemental chlorine fundamentally comes from a process with called chloralky process where you have salt and power and a membrane and you turn it into chlorine and caustic and you do all sorts of stuff with it. But fundamentally the idea there is Bleach, starts from salt, does all the stuff it's supposed to do to make your water safe, to swim in or drink or shower in. And then at the end of that whole life cycle, it ends as salt. And if you wanted to go, I could tell you somebody who's been in the chemical industry for 30 years if you wanted to invent a product that is as effective as sodium hypochlorite is in safely treating water and say it needs to start from a simple basic material and end as a simple basic material and have really low impact to the environment all the way through the chain.

05:07
Chris Brink
You couldn't invent a molecule like that. It'd be like a dream molecule. And yet we all walk around every day because we've had Bleach underneath the counter, our life kind of taking it for granted, frankly. And so one of the things that I'm proud to do here today, if I'm not boring your audience too much, already was. Talk about how cool that is. That total life cycle of the molecule itself is something that is rare and underappreciated and even by our pros out there every day who are using the product and don't really appreciate what it is that they're doing delivering for their customers every day. It takes a lot to get the product from being salt all the way to making water safe, clean and clear.

05:51
Ravi Kurani
I think you hit on a really interesting point, right, because part of the slant of the liquid assets podcast is a bit on the environmental side as well. And I think what you've mentioned is a cradle to grave explanation of a product, right. If you're able to take something from A to Z and really not have it turn into something when you actually finish its process, I think that touches on a really good point there. And so if you were to change the messaging or change some of the education for the people out there, right, and we look at this kind of word of Chlorine and quotes or Bleach and quotes and it gets a bad rap, what would be like a few lines there that you would say from a messaging perspective? Because it does seem like it is kind of a bit of a messaging problem though.

06:35
Chris Brink
Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of heavy lifting needs to be done and I'm not enough of my shoulders alone are broad enough to carry that burden. Has to be an industry from the industry perspective and that's from the big C chemical industry all the way down to the pool pros that really advocate for the product with pool owners. But first thing is, Chlorine is the safest, most cost effective, most reliable and most environmentally sustainable way to make your pool safe to swim in every day. And there's just nothing even that touches it or is even close and it's the most proven and reliable way to do it too. It also, if she's right, will make your pool look better than anything else will, right? And at the end of the day, 20 years ago, people probably didn't care as much about ideas of circular economy and whether or not what their impact was.

07:28
Chris Brink
But you get the added bonus of knowing that you're also using the lowest impact type of products available now, how you get it in packaging. And we're really proud of our circular package, our returnable package. We think it's the best and that's what our strategy is, to continue to bring that to more and more customers and eventually coast to coast. But even if you're using any format of a Chlorinated product, you're already on the winning side of that equation. So we need to get that out better. And then there's all the other stuff like when you think you smell chlorine in the pool, you're actually smelling chloramines. Chloramines are bad. They smell bad. You think they're bad. You should think they're bad. You shouldn't have that smell in your pool. That doesn't mean you have too much chlorine in the pool. It actually means you don't have enough.

08:09
Chris Brink
It's probably the biggest misconception people have out there that has not been reversed yet. We need to work on yeah.

08:15
Ravi Kurani
Entirely. We get that a lot at Sutro, too. It's not here for me to know.

08:20
Chris Brink
Right.

08:20
Ravi Kurani
Talk about sutro. But definitely that is a problem that we see. You raise an interesting point around the circular economy that I want to go back to. You spoke about your packaging, and I think that's, like, a really interesting part of just products in general and product development of not only is the product that you actually sell the chlorine cradle to grave in the inherent nature of it, but can you talk to a little bit about kind of what the process and supply chain look like? Because that's also really interesting from kind of what Hassa is doing.

08:49
Chris Brink
Yeah, I mean, HaasA has distinguished itself on the West Coast as a great supplier. I won't say it's unique, but a very, at this point, increasingly proprietary model, right. Where we manufacture our sodium hypochlorite on the West Coast to our specifications, our standards, we know exactly what we're putting in the bottle. And then rather than put it in a bottle that we never expect to see again, we design and we engineer for purpose our one gallon bottles and the containers they go into so that they could be reused multiple times. And our plant, it was one of my guys at the plant who's running the plant now? Felix Sandoval. He said, you know, Chris, we're not just in the Bleach business, we're in the recycling business. And he's absolutely right. I mean, a Core COPSY for us is making the product. A Core COPSY is getting it in the bottle and getting it to customers.

09:44
Chris Brink
But an equal Core COPSY is bringing that bottle all the way back home. The pros start by bringing it to the distributor, and then we take it from the distributor, bring it all the way back home. Then we repurpose that bottle. We make sure it's cleaning to go back out the door, safe to go back out the door. We get it back out the door. Sometimes we do it in the same day. Sometimes we have bottles that come in that day that go out the same day. What that requires is a massive infrastructure at this point, because there are a lot of swimming pools in California. I don't know if I'm the first to tell you. And it requires us to have manufacturing facilities, bottling facilities, our own logistics, and amazing one step and two step distribution partners who then are handling that product responsibly, and then amazing pros who are handling the product responsibly, using it responsibly, getting the bottles back.

10:30
Chris Brink
It is an ecosystem, and it's an impressive ecosystem. And the coolest thing about it is you're saving a bottle and a box every time you buy a gallon of our product. And so it's inherently more cost effective. It's inherently more lower footprint in terms of impact. It's inherently more efficient. Even though there's a lot of extra work involved, that work is not nearly as expensive as all the other things that go into the model, the other types of models that are out there from a business perspective. So it's really proof that a circular economy can help everybody actually make more money through the supply chain already.

11:10
Ravi Kurani
Do you have general stats that you're able to share on kind of what the average life of a bottle is? How many bottles are you taking out of the supply chain through this process.

11:19
Chris Brink
From, like, a unit bottle in terms of life cycle? The bottle that varies, and it really varies by market. So I don't want to get into those types of statistics, but what I will tell you is that we conservatively estimate we're saving about 25 to 30 million bottles a year from going into landfills. So I probably put up a statistic with the Haas employees, and I show them each and every one of those employees is saving about ten tons of plastic just by being part of the endeavor. And at some point, we should extend that to all of our pros, let them know how much plastic they're saving. Yeah, I'm sorry. Everyone in that ecosystem is part of saving plastic every day, and frankly, doing it with a much more cost efficient model because they're getting a higher concentration product and they're not paying for the packaging over and over.

12:08
Ravi Kurani
That's awesome. Kind of move a little bit over to Hassa's markets. I know you were just talking about the swimming pool and spa industry, but also you guys cater to drinking water and industrial water. What does that look like? Can you walk us through kind of I think people understand what the journey of a swimming pool looks like. But what does a drinking water and industrial water journey look like? Who are the customers? Kind of how does it work when you sanitize water for those particular verticals?

12:32
Chris Brink
Yeah. Well, so our product is all certified for use in drinking water, which is not the case for all sodium microchloride that goes into all recreational water or swimming applications. So we're very proud of that. It's manufactured to the various highest standards. And we do that because we've got these plants that are making Bleach all day long, and they're doing it in the summer and the winter. And I think we all know you need more Bleach for swimming in the summer than you do the winter. So just part of good business and good and using our assets the right way we also have a very robust industrial and municipal water treatment business. So in that case, our returnable package looks like a 5000 gallon tag truck or a 2800 gallon, what we call mini bulk truck, where the truck goes around and it's sort of a reverse gas station model is delivering 200 or 300 or five gallons at a time to high schools and HOAs and motels and so forth.

13:28
Chris Brink
But we reach these other types of markets in a variety of ways where it makes sense. We are not trying to be a big three chloro alkali chemical company with smoke stacks and so forth. That's not our direction. Our direction is this returnable model. I would say almost 88, almost 90% of our product is in some sort of a returnable packaging format. And our focus is on high quality and our focus is on making sure that everyone through the value chain can be prosperous using the business models that we're putting out into the field.

14:04
Ravi Kurani
That's awesome. One thing I really admire of you as a leader, Chris, is your just ability to kind of set a vision for the company. And I've seen in the conversations we've had in the past just kind of your vision for the swimming pool industry, for the water industry and for hasa to as much as you can share. Can you kind of talk? About, one, your process of how you kind of craft that vision. And then, number two, kind of what that vision actually is for the company and for the water industry.

14:32
Chris Brink
Well, we love the idea of safe, clean, clear water. That's our fundamental brand prowess. And so we want products and delivery methods that are safe for our employees, for our channel partners, our professional users and the end users that are using the product. We want to make water clean. Right? So we want products that do the very best job of making water clean. And we also mean clean footprint. We mean products that leave no trace as much as possible. Are we perfect? No. Are we getting closer every day? Absolutely. With saving that 25 or 30 million bottles a year. And then we want not only clear water and clear products and if you look at our products, they are pretty clear, you can see right through them. But we want clear messaging, so education is really important. We want products that are easy to understand, products are relatively simple to use and products that work every time.

15:29
Chris Brink
So that's our fundamental brand promise. And what we want to do is work on just getting better at that every day. And we've done that within the L shaped footprint of the company that starts in Washington state, goes all the way through into the proud state of California and all the way to Texas. We've added, we've gone from five to what will now be by August, probably eleven facilities in order to be closer to customers and deliver that brand promise to those customers. And I wouldn't be surprised for the next two or three years, we're coast to coast because what we've proven is that is a working model and that we have got a great mousetrap to bring value to every participant in the value chain and we want to go and expand that coast to coast eventually.

16:11
Ravi Kurani
That's awesome. That's great to hear. You touched on a really interesting point that I think a lot of the audience would appreciate. I think part of the audience is around startup founders, around policy, around people that work in Water. And a big thing that stitches a lot of this together is storytelling and messaging. Like you just said from your background as kind of being a product guy, being at Dow and at Henry, can you kind of just walk us through if there are a few bullet points around the storytelling journey of kind of each of these companies or each of your adventures over there? Do you have any sort of tellings around storytelling, messaging around the product side?

16:48
Chris Brink
I think yeah, maybe my answer will be a little bit ten degrees off center of the way you asked it, but sure. I think when I think of there's different types of people who lead companies, different types of CEOs and whatnot I think of myself as a product person at the end of the day. I started making products very early in my career and I always think about the product and I always think about the value it's providing to whoever is touching that product in the value chain. And I just don't see a better way to look at any sort of running any sort of a company. I think being a product focused, customer focused leader is always going to be the key to success. And I also will tell you, I mean, six years ago, I never thought I would be in a company that was selling, quote, bleach, right.

17:33
Chris Brink
I'll tell you, every product I've ever had a chance to work on has a miracle inside of it. And it's our job to it's our job as leaders, setting a vision, exciting our own employees and exciting our customers about the products. Discover those small miracles inside of the products, of what each and every one of us does and to lean into the stuff that we're really good at and to improve the things we're not and to always try to articulate that in as simple way as possible so that people can understand it. Yeah, I haven't prepared yet. It's tricky. I'm fighting 100 years of the Chlorophylli industry and probably a little bit kind of lazy messaging or nonexistent messaging, but I'm fighting the good fight and I got 600 people with me here at Hasa that we're doing it every day.

18:19
Ravi Kurani
That's awesome. Do you kind of have like a tactical example of something that's on your mind right now that you're trying to fight from that perspective.

18:26
Chris Brink
Yeah. Big one is there's a bill out there sponsored by Ben Allen in the state of California. It's called SB 676. And the whole idea there is it will allow local communities to fund to apply a tariff on certain types of pool chemicals in order to expand education about water conservation, proper pool chemical treatment, and so forth. Look, the whole purpose of that, and I commend Cider Allen for sponsoring that bill, but the whole purpose of that is to get a clear and cogent industry centered dialogue on what's best practice. How should we really be communicating with the industry en masse? Host is not to be able to do it our own. No one company will be able to do it on their own. You have to really take a responsible, industry centered approach to communicating how these products should, could, and must be used.

19:22
Chris Brink
And then that'll help the pros. Because there's only so many companies doing what I do or things like what I do. Maybe there's ten or 15 of us, tops, right? 75,000 pool pros out there. Professional users and potentially professional educators of then 75,000. Multiply that by 100 pools per pro. A lot of pools, right. Pretty much covers every pool out there if you want to. There's a lot of abundance to be shared out there if we're all working in a more aligned fashion. And frankly, we're going to make water safer, cleaner, and clear for everybody. So that's sort of a high level good that'll come from it too. I know. Did I fell off of the line of your question? But I get no, I think that makes patience you and I have all the time. So I'm just pretending like we're sitting, having coffee, having one conversation.

20:17
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. And that's kind of the way that I want the podcast to go anyways. I want it to be a lot more organic. Let's go back to the basics. I always like kind of digging back into the why walk us through kind of when Chris Brink really started getting into this. Was there like a time in high school or college or what was kind of your upbringing like? I always loved to see founders and leaders in kind of the way that they were raised.

20:42
Chris Brink
Well, I always liked science, so I was focused on that and leaned in on what I was good at. And then I had the benefit of a great education at Loyola University and it was great from two perspectives. They allowed me to go pursue my passion for science. But the Jesuits over there forced me to learn a lot of other things. Right. They forced me to take political science when I didn't think I needed it, philosophy and theology and you name it, history and all that. And it rounded me out early before I knew what was good for me. So I think I would not be sitting in this chair today. Had I gone to a different type of an educational or didactic path, I probably would have just been a PhD sitting at a bench somewhere. Not that there's anything wrong with that. We love our PhDs and they produce amazing things, right?

21:29
Chris Brink
We got those folks over at Lawrence Livermore creating a son in a bottle right now, right? But luckily I was never smart enough to ever be that guy or gal. So luckily I got well rounded by Loyola. And then I realized, starting to work on products, just putting my head down, that you can make a fascinating problem out of anything and there's a lot of creativity in bringing those solutions. And I know engineer to engineer or technologist to engineer. I mean, that's part of the fun of the job. And then I learned later on, really in my early years, that you're just doing it to solve the problem but you're doing it to generate some sort of unique value for some sort of end user. And that's really kind of once I went to the Dow, I started with a company called Step In back in the 90s.

22:21
Chris Brink
That's where I really became a technologist. But then when I moved over to the Dow Chemical Company, I learned that there are ways to really think about and empathize with your end user, experience your customers business and figure out how what you're doing really is making a difference for them. And then from there I moved on to the Henry Company, which had been a family owned company for many years, much like Hasa. They were in building products. It was very different. It was materials, but it was different for what I did when I learned that there was not just a large, necessarily a large end user, but there are all these small pros. And then Homeowners really depended on the products we made. And it made me start to empathize with the value journey all the way to that final end user, which I think, in retrospect, prepared me perfectly for being able to be on the team here at HaasA.

23:08
Chris Brink
Because we have the exact sort of value chain there where we've got an end user whose experience is critical and maybe is not super informed about these products and how they affect their day to day lives. We got this informed pro community who benefit and make amazing small businesses and livelihoods out of that value chain. We got a distribution channel who does a great job with that last 5 miles and then folks like us who have to necessarily take a lot of responsibility and make sure that there's a virtuous cycle that's pushed through all the way. And the coolest thing about Pasa is that we get to do it. And it was, I think frankly, accidentally, that was this circular model. But now that our time has come so I think we're in a great position in terms of how people's mindset and the industry mindset and consumer mindset to be sitting where we're at.

23:56
Chris Brink
So we just got to lean into it and just get better and better at what we do every day.

23:59
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, definitely. Awesome. I think we're coming close to time here. One of the last questions that I wanted to ask you is what's one thing you wish people would ask of you that they don't? Right? I mean, you've been on plenty of these podcasts. You probably have a ton of conversations. What's one thing that you don't get to kind of talk about?

24:17
Chris Brink
I don't get enough time because a lot of people have a lot of opinions. We have a lot of end users. They're vocal. They have a lot of opinions about how the company should be run. I welcome them all because I'm always open ended my thinking about what we could be doing better. I wish I had more time to talk about how hard all of the folks here really work every day to even get the product out that goes out today. Sometimes that product is not harpset perfect. Right. Or sometimes the label is not facing the right way or something like that. That happens at every company, especially when you're putting out as much product as a company like HaasA does. But I think sometimes it's missed that there was a human being touching that product. And at HaasA, in our process, sometimes it's ten or 15 or 20 people touch that thing between when you send it back to us and we send it back to you, and a lot of care actually goes into it.

25:13
Chris Brink
But that care is happening at a rate of hundreds of bottles a minute. So we're doing our best, and I'm really proud of the people and I'm proud of the livelihoods we provide. And I just want people to remember, hassan is not a cold, uncaring company. We're a real company made of real people thinking about customers every day. And we know there's people all through the value chain. I never get to talk about that. So thanks for giving me a chance.

25:39
Ravi Kurani
Of course. That's beautiful to hear, Chris. We're going to make that on a little instagram post. I think I'll share that with you in, like a little reel.

25:46
Chris Brink
Cool.

25:46
Ravi Kurani
Well, thank you, all of you, for out there listening. You can find liquid assets wherever you get your podcasts. Chris, thanks again for joining us today. Maybe we'll have you in for another recap in another few months.

25:56
Chris Brink
Robbie, it's a pleasure. And by the way, it's great to see how things are going with sutra. That's absolutely still one of my hands down favorite products in the market today. Everybody should keep their eyes on that Sutra product. That's the future.

26:07
Ravi Kurani
Thank you. Thank you, Chris.

26:09
Chris Brink
Yeah. All.