Members of the Total Environmental Concepts, Inc. team include (left to right) Principals John Ray and Ted Bedell with Director of Operations Mary Anne Faudale.

New fuel tanks in place at Maryland Transit Administration in the process of being backfilled using stone shooters.

Geologist by education, Ted Bedell always envisioned going to work for a large oil company in the exploration field. However, a job in between undergraduate and graduate school led him in another direction—into environmental consulting and remediation.

Today, Bedell is President of Total Environmental Concepts, Inc. (TEC), one of the premier environmental consulting, remediation and construction services companies in the Mid-Atlantic region. TEC has approximately 70 staff members, including environmental construction mechanics/operators, service technicians, professional scientists and engineers operating from four office locations in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area.

Going a Different Direction

With an oil glut limiting exploration at the time he received his undergraduate degree in geology, Bedell took a job with an environmental lab cleaning glassware and later analyzing bulk building materials for asbestos content. After graduating with a master’s degree in geology from East Carolina University, and still with no viable options to work for Big Oil, he took a job with an environmental and industrial hygiene lab inspecting buildings for asbestos-containing materials and assessing the risk to building occupants. That position morphed into other work evaluating environmental issues associated with commercial properties that were part of real estate transactions.

When company leaders at that firm left to form their own company, Bedell joined them as their first employee. He worked with this firm for 13 years as it grew and developed. During that time, he met current business partner John Ray at a Washington Redskins game they had been invited to by a common vendor. Ray had earned a master’s degree in environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins University. While Bedell wanted to convince Ray to join him at his current company, Ray said if he were going to make a move, it would be to start his own environmental consulting firm.

In 2000, the two started Total Environmental Concepts, Inc., working out of their homes. Initially, they provided environmental consulting, site investigations and environmental assessments for commercial properties during real estate transactions, and designing, installing and operating remediation systems for cleanup of subsurface contamination of soil and groundwater. Since then, the firm has grown from two to more than 70 employees, with Bedell focusing on overall operations and corporate management, and Ray heading up corporate strategic management and business development.

“We had a plan and knew all along we wanted to develop our construction capabilities,” Bedell says. “Our focus included site investigation and remediation at petroleum sites impacted by leaks. Everyone uses petroleum—gasoline, heating oil, diesel fuel and motor oils—and there were a lot of issues with underground storage tank systems not meeting regulatory requirements.”

In those early days, the firm did a lot of work in Virginia, where site owners could be reimbursed for corrective actions from the state’s Petroleum Storage Tank Fund. The firm saw slow and steady growth over the next 11 years. In 2011 and 2012, TEC acquired two companies. While one of those acquisitions didn’t work out, the other added new capabilities dealing with the assessment and cleanup of munitions and explosives of concern. This new expertise enabled TEC to provide technical support for state regulators charged with cleaning up former defense sites across the U.S. What was then a one-man operation has grown to employ five people today.

A Global Presence

While TEC’s main focus is the metropolitan Washington, D.C., and Baltimore areas, the firm operates everywhere from the Mid-Atlantic region to international locations. Headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland, the firm also has offices in Hanover, Maryland (near Baltimore), and in Springfield and Richmond, Virginia.

The Baltimore office is focused on petroleum construction and service, while the Springfield office is more involved in environmental health and safety consulting. Richmond handles landfill and stormwater construction. “While each office has its own specialty service, we provide customer support for all our services out of each office,” Bedell says.

Standing Apart from the Competition

While there are many companies that provide environmental consulting services, most don’t provide construction services for the remediation work that needs to be performed. “What makes us unique is that we can provide all those services in-house,” Bedell says.

TEC provides three main areas of services: 

• Environmental, health and safety consulting, which includes property assessments, compliance assistance and management, remediation systems design and construction health and safety monitoring.
• Environmental construction, which includes landfill construction and closure or repair, facility decontamination and demolition, stormwater management facility construction and maintenance, hazardous materials abatement (asbestos, lead paint, PCBs, etc.) and water/wastewater treatment facilities.
• Petroleum systems services, which includes underground storage tank (UST) and aboveground storage tank (AST) installation, upgrades, removal and maintenance/service, UST compliance inspections and repair, testing and monitoring, installation of recovery systems and 24-hour emergency response service.

“Of those three areas,” Bedell says, “petroleum systems services make up about three-fourths of our work.”

The advantage of providing comprehensive services is that the business lines feed off each other, leading to additional work for TEC, and giving the customer a one-stop shop. “For example, a company might call us because its fuel storage system equipment alarm is going off,” Bedell explains. “We will investigate and find they’ve had a fuel release in their containment sump. Our construction group can come in and make repairs. We can also offer consulting services to assess the release’s impact on human health and the environment to meet state regulations. The customer can come to one source to get all that done rather than dealing with two or three different companies.” TEC customers range from commercial, municipalities, state highway departments and metropolitan transit authorities to property management companies with apartments and office buildings that have tank systems and emergency generators fueled with heating oil. “Data centers have to have backup power and many facilities have diesel storage tanks for their backup generator,” Bedell notes.

Bedell says everyone at the firm works together to do whatever it takes to meet client needs. “I’m a professional geologist and we have environmental engineers, but we’ll work hand in hand with the field staff on a job site to make sure things are safe. The environmental consulting and construction field is a small industry, where office staff, field workers, foremen and superintendents have often worked together at previous companies,” he says.

“We tap the knowledge and experience of our staff,” Bedell adds. “Our superintendent, Willy Overstreet, has 40 years of experience in the petroleum construction industry.”

TEC is taking a lead in putting women in leadership positions. Three out of its four construction project managers are women, and the company’s operations director is female.

“We’ve done very well in finding good people, and it just so happens that we have a number of women leaders doing a great job in a typically male-dominated industry,” Bedell notes.

Because the environmental consulting industry must meet state certification and license requirements, TEC is continually training and offering continuing education to its staff. “We have to be certified to install and upgrade underground petroleum tank systems in many of the states where we work,” Bedell says. “In addition, our people obtain 40-hour OSHA HAZWOPER training along with training in fall protection, trenching and excavation support, confined space entry and much more. We train our petroleum service technicians on all equipment for fuel storage and dispensing and management systems as required by each manufacturer.”

In 2012 and 2017, TEC received the Silver Level of Achievement in the Associated Builders and Contractors STEP (Safety Training Evaluation Process) Award program, underscoring its commitment to providing a safe work environment and practices for its employees.

“We’re a company that promotes from within,” says Director of Operations Mary Anne Faudale. “We want to take employees to the next level and set them up for success and continued growth. We are truly a very customer service-oriented, hands-on type of company that still answers the phone. During normal business hours, you don’t get a voicemail message system. We feel good communications is one of the keys to our success.”

Over the years, TEC has handled some interesting projects, including decontamination of several federal mail-handling facilities after an anthrax scare in 2001. In the past year, they completed a tank removal project at the Pentagon. Over the past five years, the firm has replaced and upgraded fuel-handling systems at rail yards and bus facilities as part of an $8 million project for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in Washington, D.C.

TEC employees have traveled the world, providing services as a subcontractor for the U.S. Department of State and going to more than 40 countries to assess and enhance embassy petroleum systems.

“A lot of our international work is related to emergency generator fuel systems. In many of these countries, the power supply is not stable and the embassy needs to have the capability to operate 30 days or longer on backup power. We assess and upgrade their system, if needed, to increase reliability,” Bedell says.

For multiple years, TEC has been recognized by the Washington Business Journal as one of the largest environmental firms and as a Top 20 environmental consultant in the Washington, D.C., area.

Bedell says while the firm’s jobs can range from a few hundred dollars to multimillion-dollar projects, they’ll do whatever it takes to meet a customer’s needs. He once responded to a school superintendent’s request to dispose of a dead deer on an elementary school playground before the school opened that Monday.

“We’ve grown because we’re able to identify customer needs and get the people in place to complete the job,” he adds.