Rising public concern regarding the environment is an ever-increasing concern for business owners.
- Only 5% of plastics are recycled efficiently.
- 40% of plastics end up in a landfill
- A third of plastics end up in fragile ecosystems.
- 8 million tonnes of plastic leak into our oceans every year.
There’s currently 80,000 known chemicals in use in the worldwide cleaning industry. Chemicals can pollute rivers and can take years to properly break down. They can cause public health problems ranging from skin irritation, all the way to breathing issues. Chemical cleaning adds to the ever-growing problem of damage to the environment.
The Ethical Cleaning Company is proud to be at the forefront of the green revolution that aims to counter these issues. We use Electro-Chemical Activation (ECA) a cleaning and disinfecting technology which can easily be made on the client’s site from tap water and salt.
When people first hear about ECA, they often think it’s magic! ECA uses water, salt and electricity. The result is a natural and highly effective detergent. ECA destabilizes and elevates the water’s electrical charge, creating an environment which kills off microbes. ECA is completely safe to nature, both animals and plants, and it removes the need for plastic containers that traditional, harmful cleaning chemicals are stored in.
We use it to clean carpets as well. It’s incredibly safe, and completely harmless to people. It’s easy and harmless to dispose of – it can go grass or plants. You could actually drink it. It wouldn’t taste great, but it wouldn’t harm you!
Not only that, ECA has been successfully tested against COVID-19. It works!
If you want to read about the science behind ECA, check out the section below.
The Science Of ECA
Let’s go over some basics first. Let’s call normal tap water H2O, and let’s call salt NaCL. These are the chemical symbols the scientists use, you’ve probably heard them both before!
When we pass a small electrical current through a specialised cell in a solution of H2O and NaCL (tap water and salt!), we call that electrochemical activation. That’s ECA!
ECA allows the hydrogen and oxygen in the water to react with the chlorine in the salt to produce free available chlorine (let’s call this FAC). The key active substance here is hypochlorous acid (HCIO). HCIO is a really powerful, but safe disinfectant. The sodium in salt combines with the hydrogen and oxygen in the water and small amounts of chloride in the salt to produce a mild form of sodium hypochlorite. This is a good cleaning agent. This whole process takes a few minutes to happen.
Don’t worry, this was the complicated chemistry bit, the next bit will be easier to get through!
Some disinfectants are better than others. The performance of a disinfectant is measured by its concentration. We measure it in parts per million (ppm), of the active substance. In this case, the active substance is FAC. Most microorganisms (the dangerous things we clean up!) can be destroyed with a concentration of around 20ppm of FAC.
Drinking water actually contains FAC levels of somewhere between 0.2 – 2ppm most of the time. We aim to create somewhere between 65 and 100ppm when we clean.
ECA In Your Business!
There’s a ton more detail that we can go into here, but if you want to know more, you’ll have to reach out and ask us about it!
All of our cleaning team use ECA, so when you hire us, you can be sure that you are playing your part in keeping your business green and socially conscious!
