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Wyatt Earp of Springfield, MO. wants to clear the air.

Earp, who claims kinship to the legendary 19th century lawman, comes armed not with six-guns but with a 25-year history of service to industrial and commercial customers seeking a vendor to serve as what I call "a single-source filtration provider."

I grew up in the Kansas City, Mo., area and earned a degree from the University of Arkansas, had worked in the filtration industry in Missouri, Florida and elsewhere before moving to southwest Missouri and caring for a number of years for his aging parents, who both are now deceased.

Earp relocated to Bono in 2006 and accepted a job as vice president for operations with a Northeast Arkansas manufacturing concern, but quickly decided that wasn't the fit. Soon I began getting phone calls and e-mails from former customers all over the United States, so I began to re-establish relationships with my former suppliers so I could "keep continuity of product lines." I formed Earp Filtration in August 2006.

We don't stock locally, but are set up as a factory direct supplier offering wholesale distributor pricing to customers in Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. I've had to opportunity to hook up with some local concerns, providing filters to Riceland Foods, Jonesboro City Water & Light and a number of industries in the region. I'm local, I'm here on the ground, and I can walk into a big plant, start at the roof with their air handlers and go all through the plant down to the floor as well as complete dust collection systems, bag and cartridges as well as industrial air cleaning systems.

A growing area of the business, he said, is supplying materials for gas phase phase filtration, which involves removing caustics from the air and cleaning it in a number of manufacturing environments. Earp also has worked to design what he calls "safe harbor locations" for such firms as nitrogen plants and refineries that provide works a place to go in the event of a release of a caustic chemical.

In addition, he said, he is working with Indian tribes in Oklahoma to install air filtration systems in the tribes' casinos that remove tobacco smoke and bring the inside air in the casinos up to the same quality standard as that of the ambient air outside. "That's unheard of," he said.

I try to target place that have odor, smoke or caustics issues," Earp said, and work with them to resolve air quality issues for them. He performs air quality testing first before recommending a filtration system or custom-designing one, Earp said. "Indoor air quality is something I'm really stressing," Earp said.

(Courtesy of Northeast Arkansas Business Today)