Cleaning Preserves Buildings For The Future

The non-profit YWCA Utah has a mission to improve the lives of women and children in Salt Lake City. It provides leadership development for women in Utah, as well as shelter, transitional housing, quality child care, education, and support services for women who have experienced family violence. The YWCA serves more than 11,000 people annually.

Bill Cramer, facilities manager, is responsible for keeping the campus clean and healthy.

“The facility environment is critical to our services and mission,” he notes, and going green is essential.

The YWCA had been using multiple green cleaning solutions dispensed from concentrates at dilution stations throughout the complex. Then a member told Cramer about a better way: on-site generation of ElectroChemically Activated (ECA) solutions.

Using salt, tap water and electricity, and a single PathoSans ECA system, YWCA Utah now produces all its cleaning and disinfecting solutions on site. The change saves many thousands of dollars annually, while protecting staff from harmful chemical exposures and producing “phenomenal” results.

PathoSans is also green and sustainable, because it eliminates the need for buying, shipping, storing, handling and disposing of most conventional cleaning chemicals and their packaging. It has eliminated 99 percent of conventional cleaning products at the facility.

Making The Transition
Staff was skeptical at first, given the absence of fragrance and dyes, but Cramer understood this to be a strength, not a weakness.

“One of the aspects I like best is that there is no fragrance,” he says. “I’m sensitive to perfumes. Clean does not need a smell.”

Field testing demonstrated that ECA solutions were superior (“It blew us away!”), and led to replacing even specialty items such as stainless steel cleaner/polish and a grout restorer.

Installation was also easy.

“The PathoSans team set up and tested everything,” adds Cramer.

Now, twice weekly, one housekeeper restocks each building’s supply of PathoClean (the Green Seal GS-37 Certified cleaner) and PathoCide (the disinfectant) using 5-gallon and 2.5-gallon containers.