FSI Announces Opening of Aspartic Acid Facility in Taber, Alberta

NEWS RELEASE Sept. 22, 2009

FSI ANNOUNCES OPENING OF ASPARTIC ACID FACILITY IN TABER, ALBERTA

VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA, September 22, 2009 – FLEXIBLE SOLUTIONS INTERNATIONAL, INC. (NYSE Amex: FSI, FRANKFURT: FXT), is the developer and manufacturer of biodegradable and environmentally safe, water and energy conservation technologies. The NCS Division, responsible for the majority of FSI’s revenue, produces biodegradable polyaspartic acid (TPA) for oil field scale control, detergent formulations, water treatment and fertilizer enhancement. On Friday September 18, 2009 The Company announced the opening of it’s new aspartic acid facility in Taber, Alberta, Canada. Attached is the opening speech from the event given by CEO Dan O’Brien.

Opening ceremony speech

Good afternoon, I’m Dan O’Brien, CEO of Flexible Solutions

Thank you all for making time to join Flexible Solutions and its hard-working employees at this ceremony to commemorate our new bio-factory.

The four years of planning and the two years of building that have followed have been the most interesting and most time consuming of my business career.

To your right, the weathered building that has been potato processing, sugar beet storage and vegetable freezing space over the last 30 years, is now a state of the art biological conversion plant. It is the only plant of its kind in the world and its years ahead of its competitors. The capacity of the plant today is 5,000 tons of finished aspartic acid and the current building will support expansion to 15,000 tons.

Many of you know that Flexible Solutions sells green chemicals for various purposes. Everything we sell biodegrades into safe simple end products. However, our biggest seller uses oil as the basic raw material, that, after many manipulations becomes a biodegradable finished product. This is good but we want to be better. We built this plant to replace oil with renewable, crop based, raw materials so that our dependence on oil becomes minimal and our good product becomes great. As this factory progresses to full speed, we will reduce our consumption of oil based raw materials to near zero.

At Flexible Solutions we believe that using specialized microbes to convert plant matter into high performance chemicals is one of the ways that humans will diversify from dependence on fossil fuels. In our small way we are part of the accelerating change from chemistry to bio-chemistry for chemical production.

What we do in Taber is simple yet complex. We buy beet juice from Lantic Sugar who buys the beets from the Alberta Sugar Beet Growers Association. We ferment the beet juice into aspartic acid with equipment that is similar to a brewery. Other machinery purifies the aspartic acid and dries it into white crystals then bags it into 1000 kilo sacks. The sacks are trucked to our sister company in Chicago where the aspartic acid is converted into poly-aspartic acid. The value of the poly-aspartic acid is much higher than the value of beet juice and there is a profit for FSI to use to build its business.

That is the simple side of the equation. The complex side is that the microbes we use as our bio-chemical factory are specialized and difficult to grow and very difficult to keep operating at high efficiency. Smart people need to be well trained and vigilant so that we make high value aspartic acid. Failure leads to large tanks of rotten beet juice, vinegar or really bad wine. I’m proud of how hard the FSI employees have worked to learn the skills needed to be production bio-chemists and quality control experts. While building the plant, we have even discovered patent pending improvements and trade secrets that we will use to increase efficiency now and to design better systems later when we expand our capacity.

What is poly-aspartic acid, commonly called TPA, used for? It is a versatile chemical that biodegrades in a month and can replace other chemicals that are toxic or do not biodegrade.

In 2008, we sold 9.5 million US worth to 4 markets.

1.Oilfield services where it is used as a biodegradable scale control chemical to keep the pipes clean and the oil flowing.
2. Green detergent makers: in detergent formulas TPA is a biodegradable substitute for up to 10% of the product.
3. In water treatment plants and low temperature cooling towers TPA can replace materials that take hundreds of years to degrade. And
4. In farming, TPA is widely used to increase yield by adding it to fertilizer. FSI is convinced that all of these markets have room for greatly increased sales.

FSI sells products all over the world and our employees speak many languages. We could have put this plant various places but after extensive research Taber was clearly the best. It wasn’t just the beet industry, the steady wind and sun for future energy needs or the famous Taber corn. We were welcomed here; the town of Taber has helped us whenever we needed advice and guidance. The people of the town and district have accepted the employees we brought to Taber with genuine friendship, we have hired many locals and we will be hiring more as we increase production. The South Grow Regional Initiative showed us how the local system works and introduced us to the right people to speed our success. The sugar beet growers believed in us – even after all the other ideas that have come and gone over the years. Lantic Sugar has made beet juice available in a form they have never sold before. The Alberta Farm Services Corporation provided us with a loan and so did the federal government through Agri-ops. These loans made it possible to go forward. Alberta Research Council helped us perfect our process. If I tried to list everyone who made special efforts by name the food would go bad but I really must mention; Linda Erickson, Ray Bryant, Bruce Webster, Doug Emek, John Beeston, Cameron Evesque, Denis Cote, Scott Olsen, Janet Marowitch and Larry Van Orman.

In short, this is a community success not just a corporate success. I, and every person in the Flexible Solutions organization, look forward to years of success and expansion to come. The fact that Flexible has chosen Taber as our base for renewable chemical production will alert other companies to the incredible renewable resource and capable employee base available. Taber can become the center of a bio-chemical production cluster. We will all be able to thrive because this community works together.

Thank you.