THE FUTURE Okay, so what other advances can we look forward to over the coming years? A self-sterilizing door handle, which turns into a UV light when not in use, so that all the germs are magicked away? Vacuum cleaners made from recycled cardboard for maximum sustainability? Steam cleaners that work in seconds, not minutes? Apparently all of these products are in development across the country. But Treadgold thinks the most important area for innovation is going to come in the data field. “We need to take better care to monitor where the areas of maximum footfall are.” He said. “What times toilets are most often used. We can prioritise and better organise our rotas. This technology exists but only in simple forms and is very underutilised. This can offer very real value for money. “If we do this not only will we improve efficiency and clean to a higher standard, but we will also be better able to demonstrate due diligence. This sort of thing could have been properly implemented five years ago but data and mapping were unappreciated.” 28 DECEMBER / JANUARY 2016 CLEANING HYGIENE TODAY WRONG Of course people will probably look back in a century or two, floating on their hover boards and taking their food replacement pills, whilst laughing at our feeble attempts at playing Nostradamus. But just for fun, let’s have a go anyway. Chan Yeop Jeong, a Korean from Deagu University, has designed tiny robotic fish that will clean clothes without using detergent. Simply drop laundry into a fish tank and the fish get on with things. Jeong was apparently inspired by the fad for fish eating away at people’s feet to keep them smooth. Meanwhile Dyson are working on the 360 Eye, which isn’t all that dissimilar to Brian. The machine, which is controlled via an app, will learn the layout of your rooms and clean the floors under its own steam. Elsewhere there are people actually working on self emptying cat litter trays. SUSTAINABILITY Of course the buzzword of pretty much every industry is sustainability, or some variant therefore, so it is no surprise to see a plethora of developments aiming to make the cleaning world more green. ECA water is becoming more and more well known. This is basically electrolysed water which, when mixed with salt has properties akin to bleach, but much more green. Apparently. Then there are technologies like liquid ozone which have been around for decades but has never really become standard. Liquid Ozone is several dozen times stronger than bleach, safe to touch and when used reverts to just oxygen and water vapour. Finally there is dry steam vapour, which uses steam to infiltrate cell walls and can remove paint, gum and the like from surfaces as well as disinfecting them. It is also extremely effective when fighting bedbugs. Of course this is all fun to speculate about, but almost certainly the advances that revolutionise the industry will be completely unheralded. Just remember that around the turn of the 20th century the magazine Ladies’ Home Journal said that by now the letters C, X and Q would have been removed from the alphabet as they were so clearly redundant. Or that as recently as 2006 technology journalist David Pogue wrote “when will Apple come out with a cell phone?, Probably never.” Or that the apocalypse has been predicted over 20 times since the Millennium. FEATURE FUTURE “ Thanks to the cheap cost of labour in the cleaning sector many people didn’t grasp the benefits of products like Brian.”
CHT December/January 2016
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