CM/Spotlight: hard floor care case study Spartan Chemical Company Inc. Leveraging The Power Of Green To Do More With Less A look at Spartan’s role in shaping the floor care trends of 2013. T The mantra of today’s workplace is, “Do more with less.” Over the last few years, society, as a whole, has cut back on excess. It is now not uncommon to have one individual doing the work of what was once done by two, three or sometimes four people. Concurrently, the demand for prod-ucts with reduced environmental impact continues to rise. “Green” is no longer an isolated platform and a performance sacrifice is not tolerable. Traditionally, most labor-intense floor maintenance — restoring, recoating and stripping — is done during off-hours to ensure the safety of the floor crew, as well as the comfort of the building occu-pants and employees. As working hours in facilities expand and labor budgets are cut, facilities are trending away from off-hours main-tenance. As a result, restorative floor mainte-nance is no longer a segregated activity, and the need to minimize floor down time becomes of paramount importance. Bucking Convention To Remain At The Forefront Spartan Chemical has formulated a revo-lutionary floor care finish that is a dry-bright, environmentally preferred finish offering a robust, high-gloss coating designed to minimize burnishing and extend time between recoats. Spartan floorFront™ represents a complete departure from conven-tional floor finish chemistry. Rather than substituting ingredients into an existing formula, the system was built from the ground up so that the ingredients work synergistically. This unique system enabled Spartan to create a Green Seal-certified finish that performs like a traditional zinc finish. “floorFront dries with a level of gloss traditionally associated with zinc finishes and holds that gloss with an equivalent robust nature in the face of heavy traf-fic,” says Kaufold. “Since reducing floor downtime is so important to our cus-tomers, floorFront was also designed to require minimal to no burnishing with pro-longed recoat and strip out frequency.” The JanSan business is constant-ly evolving and, with this evolution, demands continue to push the limits of “green” product chemistry. Spartan Chemical is at the forefront of such innovation, constantly striving to improve cleaning and sanitation pro-grams so our customers can truly “do more with less” as they work toward a cleaner, healthier environment. CM Product Information no. 152 High Gloss Remains In High Demand While maintenance frequency and man-power have been slashed, and because “green” products are no longer a desire but a requirement for many facilities, stan-dards for the gloss and beauty of the floor remain high. “Traditional ‘non-green’ floor finish-es get their resilience and gloss from zinc crosslinking. In order to be con-sidered ‘green,’ a floor finish must not contain heavy metals like zinc,” explains Rebecca Kaufold, formulating chemist with Spartan Chemical. “Typical ‘green’ floor finishes simply substitute a non-heavy metal for the zinc, resulting in a formulation that just wasn’t designed to work together. The outcome is a sub-par floor finish requiring high maintenance programs like multiple burnishing each week and regular recoating to maintain a high-gloss appearance.” In today’s environment, facilities are looking to reduce their floor care work-load, not increase it. Therefore, facilities managers have been faced with a trade-off whether to uti-lize environmentally preferable products that require higher labor maintenance, accept a lower level of floor appearance and performance or employ “non-green”, low-maintenance floor care solutions. However, this is no longer the case. This content was provided by Spartan Chemical Company Inc. as part of a paid advertisement. For more information, please contact Spartan directly at (800) 537-8990 or www.SpartanChemical.com. 30 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • April 2013
CMM – Archives Apr 2013: 30
