Cleaning

Avoid A Disinfection Horror Story

It might be spooky season, but we like to keep our scares in books, movies, and haunted house attractions. Definitely not in the form of doorknobs that look like they belong in a haunted house attraction.

What’s Your Damage?

One of the worst experiences that any cleaning professional can have is doing their job and having it result in damage to surfaces, equipment, or fixtures. This damage occurs when chemical reactions occur between the cleaning or disinfecting product and the surface. Some cosmetic flaws, such as milky residue, can be cleaned away with a low-residue cleaning product such as EnvirOx H2Orange2 117 or 112. However, some damage can’t be fixed, meaning costly replacement of fixtures, electronics, or whole surfaces.

This doorknob was a part of our extensive testing of OxiGenesis for surface compatibility. This picture represents the effects, after only 30 days, of the application of a leading disinfectant that was allowed to air-dry. This is a problem because one of the guidelines for disinfection is to regularly clean “high touch points” like, you guessed it, doorknobs.

NOTE: Whenever you use any cleaning or disinfecting product for the first time in a facility, it’s a good rule of thumb to test it on the surface. That’s because the variety of materials that are used in the construction and fabrication of these things can vary a great deal. Every manufacturer balances the possible damaging effects of the ingredients in their formulas with the killing power they need to eliminate pathogens.

The EnvirOx difference, however, is that we worked years and years to get that balance right with OxiGenesis. Of course, we still recommend testing OxiGenesis on a discrete part of a surface before using it more widely. However, we did exhaustive testing on a variety of materials to check surface compatibility and were pleased with the results, especially in comparison with other leading disinfectants. One of the reasons OxiGenesis works as well as it does is that we started with the goal of getting a Design for the Environment¹ certification from the EPA. That meant relying on the list of CleanGredients.

What are CleanGredients?

We’ll let its creators explain:

CleanGredients (a project of GreenBlue) has partnered with the EPA Safer Choice program since we launched in 2006. Safer Choice was developed to make it easier for consumers and commercial buyers to identify products with safer chemical ingredients. Ingredients listed in CleanGredients are evaluated against standards set by Safer Choice, ensuring they can be used by formulators in products meeting the Safer Choice criteria. By simplifying the Safer Choice certification process, we enable our subscribers to bring safer and more sustainable products to the market." - From the CleanGredients website

We strove to make a powerful disinfectant that used CleanGredients, and we did it. We ended up with a powerful disinfectant that is safer for your surfaces and doesn’t require PPE. But, as they say, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words:

Click image to enlarge in new window. These images represent a door knob, after 30 days of disinfectants being applied and allowed to airdry. Although the effects can be subtle, you can see the effects of residue (cloudiness / warping of surfaces) and some surface damange (pitting or striations worn into the surface of the doorknob.)

Designed for the Environment as certified by the EPA. EPA/DfE recognition does not constitute endorsement of this product. The DfE label signifies that the product’s formula, as EnvirOx, LLC has represented it to the EPA, contains ingredients with more positive human health and environmental characteristics than conventional products of the same type. EPA/DfE relies solely on EnvirOx, LLC, its integrity and good faith, for information on the product’s composition, ingredients and attributes. EPA/DfE has not independently identified, that is, via chemical analysis, the ingredients in the product formula, nor evaluated any of EnvirOx, LLC’s non-ingredient claims. EPA/DfE provides its evaluation only as to the product’s human health and environmental characteristics, as specified in the Safer Choice Standard and based on currently available information and scientific understanding.