AutoNation offers a vehicle disinfectant treatment using Clorox’s Total 360 Disinfectant delivered through an electrostatic sprayer. COURTESY OF AUTONATION

CLEANLINESS HAS ALWAYS BEEN A COMPONENT of operating any business, but since the outbreak of the pandemic, enhanced cleaning techniques have come to the forefront as businesses try to rebuild consumer confidence. Some businesses have adopted new cleaning techniques and others have repurposed existing equipment to address COVID-19, while others have recognized the pandemic as an opportunity to offer new products and services to other businesses or directly to the public to address cleanliness concerns. The common thread of the enhanced cleaning methods is they employ unusual materials and technologies to move beyond spray bottles of disinfectant, six-foot spacing stickers, signs requiring masks and hand sanitizer dispensers to reassure the public that it is OK to patronize businesses again.

The owners of Seed & Bean Market, a CBD market and cannabis cafe in downtown Fort Myers, invested in a handheld SteraMist Cold Plasma Arc cleaning machine from SteriMist USA as part of their response to operating the business during the pandemic.

Seed & Bean Market in downtown Fort Myers uses a handheld SteraMist Cold Plasma Arc cleaning machine as an extra means of sanitizing surfaces in the market and café. TERRY TINCHER / COURTESY OF SEED & BEAN MARKET

“Our whole concept for Seed & Bean is to be a comfortable wellness gathering place that is a lifestyle,” said the market and café co-founder Cole Peacock. “If you’re going to come here, you expect to have a clean location and expect wellness to be top of mind. So, all the typical enhanced cleaning that good businesses are doing for best practices, we took it a step further.”

The SteraMist machine was developed in response to the 2001 anthrax attacks as a collaborative project of the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The machine runs a 7.8% hydrogen peroxide disinfectant through a binary ionization process caused by the cold plasma arc that converts its reactive oxygen to produce an ionized hydrogen peroxide fog. The oxygen kills pathogens by destroying their proteins, carbohydrates and lipids, disrupting the cell walls. Seed & Bean uses the machine to mist surfaces such as countertops and tables as an additional safety measure on top of standard cleaning methods.

Seed & Bean Market in downtown Fort Myers advertises that it uses an enhanced disinfectant system called SteraMist. ERIC RADDATZ / FLORIDA WEEKLY

“We’re not scientists, so we didn’t want to sit there and try to figure out what exact dosage to pour out of bottles of peroxide into something else to do this,” Mr. Peacock said. “For us, the research with the technology they have, with it being EPA-approved for use with COVID-19, shows that it had been tested and had gone through the rigors of being approved, certified and regulated. It just made sense for us to go with someone that has done the science that we could feel confident that what we were using met all the markers that they should meet to be in this pandemic.”

Other businesses in the Florida Weekly publishing area are opting to use different versions of hydrogen peroxide based cleaning systems. Some businesses, nonprofits and governmental institutions have signed up with the ClenzOzone system. ClenzOzone combines the use of a 5% hydrogen peroxide containing cleanser, which is a stronger solution than the CDC requires for disinfecting, followed by a hydrogen peroxide fog application. Don Gasgarth of Charlotte County Ford provided a testimonial for ClenzOzone’s website, where he wrote, “Very happy with the ClenzOzone system. It has brought a lot of confidence to not only our customers but also our employees. We are doing our part to make everything as safe as possible.”

Project Pure Life sanitizing entry portals can be custom built to suit a customer’s needs. COURTESY OF PROJECT PURE LIFE

A business offering enhanced cleaning as a service to the public is AutoNation, which has a Toyota dealership in Fort Myers. AutoNation locations offer a car treatment called PrecisionCare that delivers Clorox’s Total 360 Disinfectant, an EPA-registered non-bleach cleaner, through a special electrostatic sprayer that reaches the back, sides and crevasses as well as the front of surfaces sprayed. The electrostatic sprayer does this by introducing a uniform electrical charge to the spray so that the disinfectant particles repel one another but are attracted to surfaces so that they stick and form a uniform coating of the disinfectant on objects.

Vinny Antonio, president of Disinfect Group USA, stands next to one of his company’s sanitizing entry tunnels. COURTESY OF DISINFECT GROUP USA

“The solution is made by Clorox, so you have brand recognition, and the application of how it’s applied through the electrostatic sprayer is much more effective than even using a fogger hooked to an air line,” said Dave Wilmore, senior vice president of customer care at AutoNation’s headquarters in Fort Lauderdale. “What is different about their solution is their electrostatic sprayer is superior to others because of the reach.”

AutoNation formed an exclusive partnership in the summer of 2019 with Clorox to offer this disinfectant service for automobiles, which proved fortuitous when the pandemic began. Places such as car washes are also offering other types of disinfecting services. The Mint Eco Car Wash in West Palm Beach has put up a sign offering a free anti-COVID fog, and its website makes mention of a complimentary interior disinfecting treatment when customers purchase interior services for their vehicles.

Institutions that had already made investments in cutting-edge cleaning technologies have found the decisions fortuitous in the midst of the pandemic. Jupiter Medical Center in Palm Beach County had purchased Tru-D SmartUVC robots last year to use UV-C light to fight “superbugs” such as methicillinresistant staphylococcus (MRSA). The hospital is now deploying the robots as an additional means of cleaning patient rooms after COVID-19 patients are discharged. Research has shown that traditional cleaning methods with disinfectants may not fully clean up to 48% of surfaces. UV-C spectrum light kills bacteria, viruses and spores by damaging DNA and RNA. This makes UV-C light exposure a useful follow-up after traditional cleaning to destroy any lingering pathogens.

“We always want to make certain a room is as clean as possible for the next person going in, and our teams are literally putting their lives on the line to take care of patients so we want to make it as safe as possible for them, “ said Dr. Charles Murphy, chief quality and patient safety officer at Jupiter Medical Center. “With SARS in the early 2000s, which was a similar virus (to COVID- 19), the published studies showed that after 15 minutes, the UV-C light would kill the virus and completely inactivate it.”

The robot delivers 254 nanometer UV-C light that is powerful enough to reflect off of the ceiling and walls to treat the opposite side of objects. The robot also measures the reflected rays to deliver an effective dose of the decontaminating light. Jupiter Medical Center uses a higher setting for COVID rooms, so the robot may run the light for 30-45 minutes, during which time no one may enter the room because the strong UV-C light also damages human tissue. Other industries have now purchased UV-C robots; Dr. Murphy said that some airlines are now using them to decontaminate airplanes.

“One of the nice things about the UV-C light is that, if you’re worried about aerosols suspended in the air, the fact that this thing gets every square inch of the room and gets what is in the atmosphere, it gives us an added degree of feeling we’ve done everything we can for staff and patient safety,” Dr. Murphy said.

Amid the business difficulties of the pandemic, two Southwest Florida businesses have spotted opportunities to sell pathogen safety devices with usefulness that could extend well beyond when the current COVID crisis ends. Disinfect Group USA in Lee County and Project Pure Life in Collier County have developed sanitizing entryways to disinfect people or objects.

Disinfect Group USA is an offshoot of Victory Marketing Agency, which staged major events around the country before the pandemic impacted business. Vinny Antonio, president of both Disinfect Group USA and Victory Marketing, said a major Hollywood studio canceled an event he was to stage for them in Los Angeles in late February, and then his newly landed three-year contract with one of the world’s major circuses ended when that entertainment company shut down entirely.

“We were like, ‘Uh oh,’ and that’s when I started reaching out to find other solutions,” Mr. Antonio said. “We tossed around a bunch of different ideas of how we could make some money again during this whole thing.”

Since he was already familiar with setting up and staging entryways as part of events, he found Disinfect Group, headquartered in Belgium, and secured the exclusive U.S. license to sell and rent its entry portals. Disinfect Group USA offers different configurations of multi-lane sanitizing tunnels, mobile sanitizing booths and luggage sanitizers, all of which can be business branded. The system creates a dry mist fog of electrolyzed water, which is EPA and FDA approved. The electrolyzed water solution that Disinfect Group sells to supply its portals is produced in a process similar to that used by saltwater pool sanitizing systems. The Disinfect Group USA portals also include options for mask dispensers, electrolyzed water hand sanitizer dispensers and automatic temperature checks.

“We highly recommend that you still wear a mask and that you’re still following social distancing,” Mr. Antonio said. “But this is another layer of protection to give reassurance to the public that they can start taking steps and go back to the places they love to go again, or even go back to work.”

Project Pure Life is an offshoot business of Connor & Gaskins Unlimited, a general contracting firm. Since construction was designated as an essential business, co-owners Craig Gaskins and Barry Connor were looking for ways to increase safety for their own job sites while they continued to run amid the pandemic, as well as help other businesses.

“We always were problem solvers,” Mr. Connor said. “We always say to ourselves, ‘What do we do to identify and stop the problem in the earliest possible cycle of the problem?’ So, that’s where we said, ‘Okay, the problem then needs to be attacked at the entry of the facility, being a stadium, a concert, a football game, our job site, whatever it may be.’”

A Naples native, Mr. Connor drew upon his memory of the fight against the spread of citrus canker, where citrus trucks drove through hoops that sprayed disinfectant before the vehicles went to the next orchard. They developed an aluminum entry portal to spray a fine mist. They selected colloidal silver as the spray solution because it has historical use as a topical antiseptic, and ionic silver appears as an active ingredient in a few EPA-approved disinfectants.

Additional options include adding a thermal temperature check as well as security check-style features, such as metal and concealed object detection. Since Project Pure Life is a spin-off of a construction firm, portals can be branded and construction is highly customizable.

Mr. Gaskins said that they have even received a request to design and build a golf cart sanitizing tunnel.

“How we look at this portal, does the portal 100% stop it (COVID-19)?” Mr. Gaskins said. “No, but does the portal help? Yes, and that was the philosophy behind it, as a device that helps control and reduce the pathogen, same as the required masks today. Out on our job sites, getting people’s thoughts on the process of sanitizing, they said, ‘This is great for today because of COVID, but I could use it every flu season because I’m down so many people every flu season.’ So, it really turned a little bit for us. This is long-term for many uses.” ¦

Cleaning up for COVID 19 home

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Our Hometown DMCA Notices Newspaper web site content management software and services