Our 40 year old history

EP was founded in 1974 with a small chemical laboratory but a big aspiration to become the partner of choice for environmental solutions through best-in-class technical expertise.

The lab has always given EP a competitive edge because it provides the required agility to understand problems, optimize treatment solutions and evaluate technologies. In the mid 80's customers demanded industrial scale solutions and EP responded investing in water and wastewater treatment plant engineering and outsourcing operation services departments. At this point EP started to design and operate WTPs and WWTPs.

The continuous improvement towards engineering excellence provided by quick feedbacks from outsourcing operation services and chemical lab services proved to be a successful strategy and in the mid 90's EP invested to fully control the quality of its engineered products by verticalizing into the fabrication and assembly of industrial equipment through a ligh/heavy metalwork factory. A 775,000 sqft plot was bought and a well equipped 75,000 sqft factory was built allowing EP to cut costs and to provide every water/wastewater engineered products or services needed by the industry.

Towards late 90's and early 2000's EP focused in developing technology, expertise and marketing in targeted segments. The first one was the automotive (Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Scania, Honda, Volkswagen, ZF, Iochpe-Maxion, etc), followed by food (Bunge, AB Inbev, Pepsico, Coca-Cola, Masterfoods, etc), petrochemical (Petrobras, Braskem, Petroflex, Copebras, Oxiteno, etc), chemical (Prosint, Nitroquimica, Ihara, Chemetall, Surtec, Techniques Surfaces, etc) and packaging (Ball, Rexam, Cebrace, etc). By the mid 2000's, EP already had an extensive portfolio of cases and successful projects in virtually all industries. That includes but is not limited to aerospace, steel, aluminum, technology, pulp and paper, mining, landfills, agrochemicals, public sanitation, etc (3M, Vale, Embraer, Eleb, Mangels, Metalac, CSN, etc). 

It was around 2005 when stricter laboratory regulations got implemented and ISO/IEC 17025 (general requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories) became an industry requirement. Meaning that laboratories would need to become certified and invest in state of the art equipment/procedures to operate with low margins of error if they wanted to stay in business. EP saw in it a big opportunity to further invest in a department that has always been a core piece of its corporate strategy and also to expand laboratory services to the entire market.

Today there are 18 million m3/year that gets treated in plants that either EP built or currently operates. EP has imbedded personnel managing over 40 customers' water and wastewater treatment plants with competence and support from our highly experienced engineers. We are now using this scale in our clients' favor by negotiating, formulating and distributing a multitude of chemicals and consumables for water and wastewater treatment in a much larger volume directly from our newly assembled chemical formulation factory and distribution network.

Our 400 people team and our long-term relationships with clients has been and will always be our secret towards best-in-class technical expertise. This has been our success recipe for the last 40 years and will keep being the pillars of our businesses for the next 40+ years.