How many times have you shown up at a job site only to find your containment has stopped containing? Sometimes it’s the tape coming unstuck, sometimes the homeowner has been poking around, and sometimes all you get is a collective “I don’t know” along with the ever-impressive shoulder shrug. For those of you with kids, you will recognize that scene. Whatever the case, containment is both necessary and a huge pain. It is labor intensive, heavy on the consumables which inevitably end up as disposables and, despite the apparent straight forward simplicity of the concept, it often requires an experienced tech to pull it off effectively. Someone who has figured out the tape doesn’t stick to a popcorn, for example. (Ugh, seriously, how was that EVER going to work?!)

Whether it is for isolating contaminants or to control temperature and humidity, containment is a necessary tool in our tool kit, but it is fraught with issues. If we don’t do containment right, we: