Make Something Better

George Bernard Shaw’s masterpiece play Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts (1912) and later film based version “My Fair Lady” (1964) starring Audrey Hepburn is based on the tale of “grubby” Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle. Eliza is refined by a professor of phonetics Henry Higgens on a bet that he can get her to pass for a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility and impeccable speech. Of course the transformation is a success and Eliza goes on to navigate the rigid British class of the day with new found confidence and independence. Henry Higgens had also risen to the challenge of “making something better.”

In the late 1980’s Ron Smith served on the support committee for government productivity in the province of Ontario and was an ambassador to the Industrial Accident Prevention Association. The manufacturing world was also a “grubby” place back then and numerous slip and fall injuries were occurring caused by unsafe maintenance conditions and liquids on facility floors. Loose clay based absorbents existed but were messy, time consuming and contributed excessively to plant waste streams. In 1987 Ron met Chris Stringer, founder of the Molly Maid Corporation who was introducing a product in Canada called the absorbent “sock.” This product was filled with highly absorbent ground up corn cob, was light weight compared to loose absorbents and wrapped easily around spills and equipment without the mess and volume. The absorbent sock also was given the affectionate nickname “pig” because of its sausage shape and appearance of wallowing in a spill. Ron and Chris formed a partnership and together set out to make the Canadian industrial landscape a better and safer place to work. They formed the Pigmalion Environmental Services Group and through direct marketing campaigns introduced the absorbent sock and spill kits to manufacturers throughout Canada. News spread quickly of the innovative products that improved safety and Pigmalion Environmental was quickly operating coast to coast and later on in the United Kingdom.

Today Pigmalion Environmental has a customer base of over 15,000 companies and has multiple categories of environmental products to choose from including Canada’s first closed-loop recycling absorbent program ReNew. Our staff of experts can provide fast customized solutions to any environmental product need or application. The mission is still the same…”make something better” that protects our precious environment and keeps work places safe, clean and compliant.