Month: September 2023

By: Mark Kirchgasser, Vice President of Sales – Away from Home, Sofidel America

A new season is almost here, which means it’s time to refresh your facility’s cleaning program. Finding new ways to implement sustainable hygiene practices can help benefit your facility as well as the planet.

The public is continuing to become more conscious about the brands they purchase from and prefer facilities that prioritize sustainability, it’s now more important than ever that facility managers address their current sustainable practices. Along with incorporating sustainable practices, occupants also prefer facilities that prioritize health and safety through hygienic practices.

Go Touch-Free

When people are out on the go, they want a safe and clean place to go. Providing restrooms that prioritize sustainability and hygiene practices can help improve customer satisfaction. A study found that there are up to 229,000 germs per square inch on high-touch surfaces in restrooms such as handles of frequently used faucets, as well as 83 bacteria per square inch on flush handles. Switching to touch-free appliances such as automatic toilets, faucets and soap and paper towel dispensers is a great way to reduce touchpoints that can allow bacteria to transfer.

This also provides a sustainable alternative as many manufacturers supply soap and paper towels for touchless appliances in bulk. Research has found that 20 companies are the source of 55% of the world’s single-use plastic waste, while the world’s top 100 companies account for more than 90%. Switching to touch-free appliances eliminates the need for plastic soap pumps which reduces the amount of single-use plastic as well as the carbon footprint of frequent product shipment and delivery.

Reevaluate Cleaning Chemicals

Most commonly used cleaning products contain hazardous chemicals that can damage the environment and end users as well as building occupants. Sustainable cleaning products are made with ingredients that contain less harsh chemicals and safer ingredients, resulting in a truly cleaner facility. Green cleaning products have also been proven to improve air quality within facilities as they don’t emit pollutants into the air that are found in common cleaning products.

Hiring professionals to clean your facility allows them to restock hygiene products on a routine basis and saves your employees time. This helps ensures hygiene measures are being met while also reducing the need to frequently re-purchase plastic cleaning supplies, which can be costly and take up inventory space. This results in a regularly maintained facility while benefiting your business and the environment.

Be Transparent

It’s important to be transparent with your customers when reporting your business’ sustainability and cleanliness tactics. With the presence of digital technology, companies can be exposed to bending the truth, or even flat-out deceiving customers. This can result in a negative impression that can be difficult to recover from. Consumers value business transparency now more than ever. Eighty five percent of consumers say a business’ history of being transparent makes them more likely to give it a second chance after a bad experience.

This doesn’t mean that businesses can’t benefit from acknowledging their mistakes. Transparency allows the opportunity to make changes that improve business and exceed customers’ preferences. Share how your business plans to make sustainable changes whether it’s product ingredients, manufacturing processes or packaging and shipment procedures. Transparency allows for business growth that shows customers they are valued.

Set Your Standards 

Consumers aren’t the only ones who prefer a sustainably focused facility. Nearly 80% of employees find sustainable practices in the workplace to be an important focus. When it comes to cleanliness, a clean workplace has been linked to higher office morale and increased productivity. If your facility has a designated cleaning staff, providing routine training sessions will ensure they are up to date on cleaning standards, using equipment and green cleaning products properly and are exceeding your facility’s cleaning standards.

Facility managers can also implement small sustainable efforts in the workplace such as recycling bins, reusable utensils in the office kitchen, utilizing digital documents over paper documents and encouraging employees to unplug electronics when they’re not in use. Offering sustainable alternatives promotes a healthy work environment that reflects positively on employees and the company’s image.

Protect Your Facility and the Planet

Prioritizing the health of occupants who enter your facility while also finding ways to better the planet benefits businesses by showing social responsibility. Implementing changes, big or small, can create a positive impact that shows customers that businesses are paying attention to them and are striving to make a difference in their communities.

Author Bio

Mark Kirchgasser is Vice President of Sales –Away from Home, at Sofidel America. He is a 30-year veteran of the tissue industry. Sofidel is a world leader in the manufacture of paper for hygienic and domestic use, including its Papernet brand of sustainable hygiene solutions. For more information, visit www.papernet.com/am

About The Sofidel Group

The Sofidel Group, a privately held company owned by the Stefani and Lazzareschi families, is a world leader in the manufacture of paper for hygienic and domestic use. Founded in 1966, the Group has subsidiaries in 12 countries – Italy, Spain, the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Greece, Romania, and the USA – with more than 6,400 employees. A member of the UN Global Compact and the international WWF Climate Savers program, the Sofidel Group considers sustainability a strategic imperative and is committed to promoting sustainable development.  For more information, visit www.sofidel.com.

Media Contact:

Brianna Fitzpatrick 

Mulberry Marketing Communications 

bfitzpatrick@mulberrymc.com 

Advanced automated technology prevented more than 17,000 outages during powerful storm

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., September 12, 2023 /3BL/ – Duke Energy’s grid improvements helped customers keep their lights on while Hurricane Idalia crossed Florida.

The smart, self-healing grid used automated technology to avoid more than 17,000 outages, which saved more than 5 million outage minutes for customers.

“Every hurricane season, we consistently see our grid improvements help avoid outages, restore service faster and increase reliability for our customers,” said Melissa Seixas, Duke Energy Florida state president.

Much like the GPS in your car can identify an accident ahead and reroute you around the incident, self-healing technology is like a GPS for the grid. The technology can quickly identify power outages and alternate energy pathways to restore service faster for customers when an outage occurs.

This tool also frees up lineworkers to manually restore power in other locations after a major storm like Idalia.

Last week, the Category 3 hurricane made landfall on the northwest coast of Florida, causing severe flooding, damage and widespread power outages that impacted nearly 200,000 customers in Duke Energy Florida’s service territory.

Duke Energy currently serves more than 60% of customers in Florida with self-healing capabilities on its main power distribution lines, with a goal of serving around 80% over the next few years.

In addition to adding self-healing technology to its system, the company installs stronger poles and upgrades wires, places outage-prone lines underground and trims vegetation near power lines to strengthen the energy grid, make it more resilient and further enhance the company’s storm response.

Self-healing technology video.

Self-healing grid system animation video.

Duke Energy Florida

Duke Energy Florida, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, owns 10,500 megawatts of energy capacity, supplying electricity to 1.9 million residential, commercial and industrial customers across a 13,000-square-mile service area in Florida.

Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK), a Fortune 150 company headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., is one of America’s largest energy holding companies. Its electric utilities serve 8.2 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky, and collectively own 50,000 megawatts of energy capacity. Its natural gas unit serves 1.6 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio and Kentucky. The company employs 27,600 people.

Duke Energy is executing an aggressive clean energy transition to achieve its goals of net-zero methane emissions from its natural gas business by 2030 and net-zero carbon emissions from electricity generation by 2050. The company has interim carbon emission targets of at least 50% reduction from electric generation by 2030, 50% for Scope 2 and certain Scope 3 upstream and downstream emissions by 2035, and 80% from electric generation by 2040. In addition, the company is investing in major electric grid enhancements and energy storage, and exploring zero-emission power generation technologies such as hydrogen and advanced nuclear.

Duke Energy was named to Fortune’s 2023 “World’s Most Admired Companies” list and Forbes’ “World’s Best Employers” list. More information is available at duke-energy.com. The Duke Energy News Center contains news releases, fact sheets, photos and videos. Duke Energy’s illumination features stories about people, innovations, community topics and environmental issues. Follow Duke Energy on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

Contact: Audrey Stasko 
24-Hour: 800.559.3853 
Twitter: @DE_AudreyS

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