Cleanzine: your weekly cleaning and hygiene industry newsletter 18th April 2024 Issue no. 1110
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As part of COP26, NCH Europe releases sustainability guide
As part of COP26, NCH Europe has released a sustainability guide to industrial products, highlighting the company's continuing drive towards better products for a healthier planet.
Across industrial operations, there are many products and processes that contribute to ecological decline. Whether it's the type of waste they create, the energy and resources that they use or the suboptimal performance of a product that creates waste, industrial products have an associated ecological cost.
Realistically, no product of human industry can be truly sustainable in the natural sense, NCH's chemists are committed to the continual optimisation of products to minimise their ecological cost. Whether it's optimisation to remove harmful components from formulations, or finding better formats for those formulations, continual improvements made by industry leaders such as NCH allow customers to make more sustainable choices.
The guide examines several common industrial products and highlights the dangerous components to be avoided that pose a threat to workers and the ecology such as:
* Dichloromethane (DCM) in paint removal processes
* Harsh acids used for the removal of rust from parts
* Lithium in lubrication products
* Corrosive components used to clear blockages in water treatment
* The need to move away from solvents to water-based parts cleaning
The guide also addresses how changes in format, such a concentrating water treatment products to be smaller solids, can be an effective way of reducing production and transport pollution as well as more responsible with the use of global resources like water.
"A number of the goals for this year’s COP26 conference are collaboration, adaptation and mitigation as a means to reducing climate change with a core rooted in sustainability," notes John Paul Surdo, chief operating officer at NCH Europe.
"Collaboration, adaptation and mitigation are reflected in NCH Europe's work to constantly develop what we do to make the incremental sustainable changes that are needed to address the ecological threats our planet faces.
"Our team of over 40 chemists collaborate to ensure that changes in one product can feed into the formulation of another. When we adjust a lubricant used for parts, we work to make sure our detergents are effective at removing that lubricant, without an unacceptable ecological cost.
"This process of continually adapting the products we sell and those we develop don't just mitigate our impact on resources and the environment, but those of our customers too. Whether it's corporate procurement, or supermarket consumers, better products create better, more sustainable choices."
NCH Europe is one of the largest divisions of NCH Corporation; a US based multinational company. With a European presence in 22 countries, it delivers water and maintenance solutions with a focus on the industrial, infrastructural and hospitality sectors of Europe.
The NCH guide to industrial products is available for download from:
11th November 2021