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Have you ever looked at a storm drain and noticed a little stenciled marking explaining to you that this water flows to a river, lake, or to the ocean -and that it is up to us to protect the environment? Perhaps you've been involved in an Earth day exercise where you indeed painted stencils on the storm drain areas around your city or town. If you have I believe this to be a noble thing to do for your community, and for the environment.

Even though I am not an environmentalist by a long-shot, I do believe that we must protect our clean water supplies, and the air we breathe. It is for this reason that I often recommend to small business people to try to find simple solutions to prevent pollution runoff from their property into the storm drain. There are many devices which can help with this, and there are many very expensive ways to prevent this.

If you attempt to build a clarifier, or a triple trap along discharge pipes, and water's the journey to the storm drain from your business property, it can cost you between $25,000-$35,000 at the bat of an eye, not to mention the hassle of going to the planning commission, and then introducing your business to the local storm water regulation people. Probably not something you want to do, because you don't want to put a red flag in front of your property, asking them to; "come look at me." After all one citation can run you thousands of dollars, and in that case you did not do yourself any good.

However, if you pollute into the storm drain dirty water, and everyone else in your city does this also we will have a problem with clean water and we do need to do more to prevent dead zones in our ocean, algae blooms in our lakes, and we must save our rivers and streams from unnecessary pollution. Therefore we need to stop the pollution runoff from our small businesses, factories, industrial operations, and even from government agencies - who believe it or not have historically been the worst polluters of all. Please consider all this.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow wants you to know in full disclosure that this particular article was sponsored in part by; http://www.wpctsi.com/ - Water Shed, a maker of storm drain solutions.

NYTimes.com - Solar City