Have you ever thought how our lives and our planet would be without clean
When we wake up in the morning, and go to the bathroom to wash our face, we don’t even think that we are using fresh clean and safe water. But, in the past, this action was not so obvious if we consider the health situation of only a century ago. A simple gesture, like drinking a glass of water from the tap, could have been very dangerous for our ancestors as water was not clean. Today, however, in the Western world we take this action for granted and probably many of us have never wondered how we have managed to become so clean.
The journalist and writer Steven Johnson gives a simple but effective explanation in his book “How We Got to Now”, a volume where he explores the six great innovations that changed the modern world and our way of life. The book then became a successful TV series consisting of six episodes divided by topic: Cold, Time, Light, Glass, Sound and Clean.
In the Clean episode, Johnson analyses the main steps of the history of clean, each of which comes from discoveries or conquests made by ordinary people who have done extraordinary things, that often have remained almost completely unknown. During this trip he mentions people like Ellis Chesbrough, the engineer who lifted Chicago on jack screws to build America’s first sewer system, or like John Leal, the doctor with a bacteria obsession who secretly added a potentially lethal chemical substance into Jersey City’s water and made it safe to drink. This substance was nothing but chlorine, later also used by five San Francisco entrepreneurs to create a special industrial bleach. Sales of this product were not good until Annie Murray, wife of one of the investors, had the brilliant idea of creating a less concentrated version for commercial use: the Clorox bleach.
Murray probably did not realize it, but by launching the first household bleach on the market, he invented a completely new industry that led to the creation of many other similar products allowing us to live in extremely clean environments. Thanks to this chain reaction of ideas we have “ultra-clean” places, such as microchip manufacturing plants, where the microchips that operate our microwaves, smartphones, cars and planes are produced, thus enabling the digital revolution.
What made us so clean?
This interesting tour with Steven Johnson allows us to understand that the basis of this clean evolution is water and that, step by step, clean technologies have transformed our world and will continue to do it. Although, it is a revolution that unfortunately has not involved the whole planet as in the poorest areas of the world every year millions of people die needlessly as a result of not having access to clean and safe drinking water.
From here came the reflection of Comac on the element that allowed us to become so clean: water. In fact, water is the most common substance on earth and covers 71% of the earth’s surface, but 97.5% is salty water. Of the remaining 2.5% freshwater, only 1% is usable for human activities, while the remaining is frozen water locked up in glaciers and polar ice caps.
The amount of freshwater available to the world population is decreasing and the causes are different. The main ones are identified in the use of pesticides, fertilizers, human and industrial waste, the immeasurable and unaware use of water in agriculture and the increase in population, a factor that can worsen the impact of the earlier, but which also has a role in increasing consumption.
World population has doubled in 50 years. This rapid growth, together with the economic development and industrialization, has transformed freshwater ecosystems around the world. Moreover, the bad management of wastewater contaminated with chemical substances and other waste, is polluting everywhere the water reserves that are not always constant despite being renewable.
These data make us think and understand that water protection and management play an essential role in modern society. For this reason, countries, states and administrations see water as an increasingly precious resource and regulate its use under specific and strict regulations.
What does all this have to do with the cleaning world?
Water is used in large quantities even during simplest cleaning operations. We see liters and liters of water flowing under our eyes without realizing that although renewable, fresh water is a limited and vulnerable resource that can become unavailable.
Comac has always been sensitive to this theme and for this reason designs and manufactures highly competitive floor cleaning machines with reduced environmental impact. Today, more than ever, thanks to the introduction of more and more innovative technologies, Comac machines can optimize the use of resources by eliminating the waste of water, energy, detergent.
Let’s think, for example, of the floor scrubbing machines equipped with Comac Dosing System: the system that allows to dose the water and the detergent separately. This means that the quantity of solution can be immediately adapted to the specific dirt that has to be cleaned, eliminating the excesses that occur with traditional scrubbers. Or the Stop&Go system which, in the event of temporary machine stops, interrupts the solution flow and stops the brushes in order to optimize consumption and reduce waste.
In addition to these technologies, Comac keeps honing the Non-stop Cleaning System for water recycling, to make floor cleaning even more sustainable. The Comac C85 scrubber-dryer equipped with the NSC system has been designed to clean floors while reducing water consumption. The concept is simple as the system comprises three phases: in the first, the water is used normally and collected by vacuuming; in the second phase, the water is filtered and purified, completing the water recycling phase. In the third phase, water is therefore available for use again. The main goal of the NSC system is to drastically reduce the use of water in scrubbing machines. In fact, with an estimated use of 3 hours a day, C85 NSC can work up to a week with the same water. This is not only a huge economic advantage, but above all it minimizes the environmental impact of floor cleaning operations without affecting the result.
This post is also available in: Italian