Issue Date: 24 October 2019
Ref: DIV18/72
A Surer Way To Promote Sustainability
Sustainability can often present a complex set of choices to cleaning teams and businesses that want to reduce the environmental impact of the products they use. Assessing the various merits of one perceived benefit against another can be difficult: sometimes a product that offers an advantage in one area offers significantly poorer performance when judged against a different benchmark.
All Diversey products are designed and manufactured to support improvements in sustainability. This includes making the product safer and simpler to use, reducing the amount of energy or water it consumes, reducing associated CO2 emissions, better packaging design and reduced raw materials use, and the ability to recycle more easily after use. All of these can also save costs.
When Diversey conducted customer research into what constitutes a “green” product, almost one-in-three said that it should be based on natural ingredients. At the same time over one-in-four said it should be eco-certified and one-in-seven said it must be fully biodegradable. Given that all cleaning products are already required to be biodegradable by law this is perhaps less relevant to the argument, but it could suggest some knowledge gap in the market.
Although its products already fulfil demanding sustainability criteria Diversey recognised from its research that there are times when customers want to demonstrate the very highest levels of environmental responsibility. The company responded with SURE, its innovative range of plant-based, 100 per cent biodegradable cleaning products.
The 18 products in the SURE range cover all routine and daily cleaning requirements in kitchens and washrooms including personal care. Each has been formulated to deliver superior professional results while maximising safety and gentleness for people and the environment. They meet typical eco-certification criteria and where applicable are all EU Ecolabel certified or have approval pending.
The entire SURE range is manufactured from environmentally-responsible plant-based ingredients from renewable resources. These ingredients are typically derived from by-products of the agri-food industry, originating from sugar beet, maize, straw bran, wheat bran and coconut. The products contain no artificial dyes, perfumes, quats, chlorine, phosphates or oxide compounds. This means they generally have lower safety classifications than conventional alternatives.
The kitchen range comprises eight products covering all routine tasks including hand dishwashing, general surface cleaning, appliance and surface degreasing and descaling, glass and grill cleaning, and surface sanitising and disinfection. The washroom range comprises four products covering daily cleaning, descaling, toilet cleaning, and floor cleaning. The personal care range comprises six antibacterial and conventional hand care products including soaps, washes and sanitisers.
The SURE range meet a particular requirement from the market. Diversey enhances the sustainability credentials of the range by offering many of the products in its ultra-concentrate platforms including SmartDose and QuattroSelect. With these, water is only added at the point of use which means smaller packs are required to support the same cleaning operation. This reduces packaging requirements as well as minimising transport, handling, storage and recycling burdens. Moreover, because these platforms enable accurate and consistent preparation of high-performance solutions there is less wastage or need for repeat cleaning, all of which improves productivity and saves time and money.