Cleaning supplies complete contamination-control puzzle

04/01/2002

For a full, updated list of cleaning supplies, manufacturers and distributors, go to cleanrooms.com and search "supplies."

by Mark A. DeSorbo

To single out one cleaning product or tool as the be all and end all would be an exercise in futility. Because whether it's wipers or swabs, concentrated detergents, sprays and aerosols, or the mop and bucket, the cleaning supplies almost always share connections in the big contamination-control picture.

"It boils down to either preference or current good manufacturing practices (cGMPs)," says Dennis Lane, vice president of Ultrapure Technology (Suwanee, GA), a supplier of cleaning products for controlled environments. "In the pharmaceutical environment, it's going to be a lot more stringent, but in an assembly facility, it's not as critical."

Wipers

Regardless of the environment type, a big seller at Ultrapure, Lane says, are stainless steel buckets, but the most sought after products are wipers.

That should come as no surprise because wipers are a must when employing ISO 14644-5 "Clean room Operations" and recommended practices from the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology (Mount Prospect, IL).

"Most would agree that the cleanest wiper commercially available today is an ISO Class 4 cleanroom-laundered, sealed-edge, knit-polyester wiper," writes Ken O'Connor. [See "The evolving cleanroom wiper," Clean Rooms, January 2002, page 24.]

O'Connor, a technical sales consultant for Protocol Inc. (Portland, OR), says that type of textured yarn-made wiper is produced by a number of manufacturers and it is widely used by the chip, medical device and pharmaceutical industries for its particle-reducing capabilities.

That is not to say, however, that non-wovens and pre-saturated wipers are not equally valuable.

Non-wovens are made with a variety of chopped fibers and are regarded as a cost-effective alternative. "Because of their more consistent quality, non-woven wipers are rapidly replacing the use of rags in non-cleanroom industrial processes," he says.

Pre-saturated wipers can incorporate both expensive knit and inexpensive non-woven fabric, and are most commonly soaked in a blend of water and isopropyl or ethyl alcohol.

Disinfectants

Eythl and isopropyl alcohols are not the only agents used in cleaning supplies.

The agents themselves are sold in highly concentrated forms, and include varieties of acids and alkaline, many of which are found on frequently updated lists of sterilants and high-level disinfectants maintained by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The FDA most recently cleared a number of sterilants used in hospitals and the medical device industry. Most of the agents contain different levels of germicides, such as glutaradehyde, ortho-phthaldehyde, phenol, phenate, peracetic acid and hydrogen peroxide.

Two sterilants, Endo-spor Plus and Hyprocide, which are manufactured by Cottrell Ltd. (Englewood, CO), contain 7.35 percent hyrdrogen peroxide and 0.23 percent peracetic acid that inactivate cellular metabolic enzymes and transport mechanisms. According to the FDA, a surface or device becomes sterile when it is treated with this agent for 180 minutes at 20 degrees Celsius.

Veltek Associates Inc., an FDA-registered manufacturing facility, uses this same type of classification when describing its Decon-Cycle for pharmaceutical cleanrooms. According to the company, Decon-Cycle is effective within 10 minutes at 20 degrees Celsius in hard water with a five-percent content of blood serum that used to simulate organic soil.

Hardware

Of course wipers and chemicals are not the only thing one needs to get the job done.

Just like Ultrapure's Lane says, one of his hottest selling products is stainless steel buckets. But any vendor or end-user will say that it isn't just any ordinary mop and bucket.

Not your ordinary mop

Micronova Manufacturing Inc. (Torrance, CA) makes several different mops; mop heads and buckets, which are made of different materials for different applications.

Most are equipped with downward-press ringers. Buckets are made from materials as basic as standard industrial plastic to polypropylene, which can be autoclaved. Polished stainless steel buckets can also be treated in an autoclave.

For some sterile and pharmaceutical processes there are apparatuses like the SlimLine 2000 Cart 2 and 3 Bucket System, that include three polypropylene buckets for disinfect, rise and void stages, as well a ringer that slides over the appropriate container.

The same caliber of contamination-control technology is applied to mops.

In pharmaceutical environments where cleaning is mandated by the FDA cGMPs, Micronova offers it MicroMop-NovaLite, a durable floor mop that is made with a latex-rayon blend for absorbency. The company indicates that it is resistant to strong disinfectants and is autoclavable.