Information about the cleaning products that we use
Most of our products we currently use are sourced from renewable and harvested citrus crops and other plantation by products. We love using them as they are natural and are the most highly biodegradable cleaning products ever produced for commercial use.
What are Citrus By - Products?
There are over 40 different materials extracted from waste orange peel, pip and pulp as well as fresh juices. We use the magical deodorizing effect of limes, the incredible solvent degreasing effect of D-Limonene (a solvent extracted from orange oil) to give you a standard of product purity, biodegradability and performance that cannot be synthesized or matched by petroleum base. Combined with citrus crop by-products; we have used malt, castor oil and coconut or palm oil soap and detergents and sugar alcohols to provide cleaning benefits with little or no impact on our precious environment and they are highly biodegradability.
No Phosphates, Sulphates, Petroleum Solvents or Benzene Detergent Bases.
The phosphates in detergents are helpful in suspending soil, softening water and boosting detergency. Their side effect is they are natural fertilizers which boost the growth of marine and weed to threaten marine and higher aquatic life.
Sulphates are detergent fillers that serve no active purpose in detergents except to make them cheaper. Sulphates give problems in water way and sewerage lines because they are converted to sulphuric acid and hydrogen sulphide gas when in contact with acidic food and body wastes. This destroys the cement in pipe joints and puts further pressure on our treatment works.
No SILICATE or caustics are used, our only alkali source coming from ammonia, a substance that evaporates away after its job is done.
Biodegradable - what does it mean?
Biodegradable means simply “degraded by natural bacteria”. If referred to a cleaning product, it means that each part of that product will be divided and converted into more simple and smaller parts which are more environmentally acceptable than when they are one. Biodegradation is nature’s mechanism for self-preservation.
The main thing that assists the biodegradation process is bacteria and to a lesser extent enzymes. These non-dangerous bacteria live in the earth, the sea, in sewerage treatment plants and in septic tanks.
Isn’t everything Biodegradable?
A brick is biodegradable! It may take 500 to 1,000 years to break down. Clearly, we need to look at how long things take to degrade.
Our product partners are working towards ultimate biodegradability where all ingredients used in the cleaning products are biodegradable. For instance, our CITRUS solvents biodegradability is faster than petroleum solvents. We are not using Phosphate substitutes such as NTA or EDTA’s, because they do not biodegrade fast enough.
We use natural non-petroleum based ingredients because they are more easily broken down in our environment and ease the pressure on sewerage and septic systems.
Predominantly the products we use to clean our clients assets provide for the safest, high performance and highly biodegradable alternative products for cleaning.