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My first apartment after college had a dart board on the wall and my friends and I were not always on target (or even on board). While preparing to move out, the game was removed and along with it any hope of getting back my deposit–the pristine circle on the wall was surrounded by hundreds of tiny holes.

Someone said that you could fill in wall holes with toothpaste and it would have the same effect as spackle. I gleefully set about pressing toothpaste into the holes. One lesson I learned that day is not to use mint gel toothpaste–it looked white upon application but dried to a high gloss light greenish-blue color. Somehow I still got my deposit back.

So where am I going with this?

One of the consulting services I provide is a multi-media environmental compliance assessment (ECA) wherein I build an inventory of information about a manufacturing facility and prepare a report that outlines the facility’s environmental compliance status and next steps. Because I do not usually have complete access to my client’s data and am not onsite for more than a day or 2, I need to rely on them to obtain much of the information needed. Unfortunately, some information is simply not available so I need to make educated guesses in order to keep the project moving forward.

I have re-coined the term ‘spackle’ for the act of filling in the holes in environmental inventories. In honor of my original experience with spackle, I use a light greenish-blue color in the inventories to indicate that this value is an educated guess and to serve as a reminder to revisit it when time permits or the information is located.