Sustainability key topic at press event in Copenhagen - one week before the COP 15 Conference
At the Hilton Copenhagen Airport, Tennant hosted a press event for the Scandinavian media on 1 December to present ec-H2O’s environmental footprint reduction capabilities and a sneak preview of the electrical Green Machines street sweeper.
After a short introduction, Karel Huijser, VP International, took the audience through the first part of the presentation entitled “Does water have the power to change the world?” What if we could clean with less water, less chemicals, less emissions and less noise?
Starting with the first challenge: imagine we could clean with less chemicals and less water? The water scarcity and chemical use facts and figures paint a worrying picture: Beijing’s ground water level is dropping 1.29m each year; every day the inhabitants of Copenhagen will use 200,504,000 litres for showering; typical cleaning products used in schools release no less than 457 distinct chemicals into the air causing health hazards for children, faculty and cleaning professionals.
Tennant’s ec-H2O technology provides a solution by using less water and no chemicals. It is a category-changing innovation. And customers love it: the IKEA video testimonial clearly supported Karel’s message. Using ec-H2O is totally in line with IKEA’s own sustainability policy. As with other large retailers, the pull from the market is clear to Tennant.
The ec-H2O technology has not only received several awards worldwide, but has also been endorsed by third party institutions such as ecoform, the company that carried out the lifecycle analysis study. Jack Geibig, president and founder of ecoform explained how the evaluation of ec-H2O was set up and explained the results with some very impressive examples that talked about the equivalent of water and energy savings and emission prevention if ec-H2O was used more in schools and hospitals. On top of those benefits, there is of course also the fact that human health is less at hazard in those environments.
From a customer point of view, Tapio Keränen, Managing Director of L&T Sweden then explained that L&T, a Finnish environment management and property and plant support services provider has chosen ec-H2O to clean a large shopping center in Stockholm. By not using chemicals the operators don’t run any health hazards and ec-H2O also allows them to run the machine double of the time than they would before. Tapio Karänen, who said he normally doesn’t do testimonials but for ec-H2O he willingly provided his view and was even surprised that ec-H2O is not more widely spread. In fact, it is totally in line with the ecocleaning concept of L&T.
Karel Huijser then took the floor again to move to another question: what if we cold clean with less noise and carbon dioxide emissions? It was then that the sneak preview of the Green Machines 500ze was revealed: using the 500ze is equal to the effect of removing the CO2 emission of 40 cars. The fact that it also has a very low noise level, makes it perfect for use in city centers, even during busy daytime and in sound-sensitive environments such as near hospitals and schools.
Both the ec-H2O technology on scrubber-dryers and in hand-held spray devices from Activeion and the 500ze were in operation during the COP 15 conference in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December at the conference venue and the airport.
