Hygienic high traffic washrooms
December 1st 2007

With high numbers of visitors passing through every day, airport and service station washrooms have the potential to quickly turn into unhygienic and poorly maintained environments. Emma Nourry, trade marketing manager at Lotus Professional, discusses how paper disposables and dispensers can play a vital role in keeping washrooms pleasant for all.

The onslaught of low cost air travel has meant that airports across the UK are busier than ever. In 2006, more than 235 million passengers passed through the UK's terminals, an increase of 25 per cent from 2002. On the roads, the story is similar with 31 million cars placing a huge demand on the road network and the country's 100 service stations.

Many people stopping at service stations do so purely to use the washroom facilities.Visitors are oblivious to what goes on behind the scenes and the pressures placed on cleaning staff working in high traffic areas. Instead, visitors expect to arrive at a washroom and find clean, fully stocked facilities every time.

Similarly, the high numbers of people passing through airport terminals expect to see well maintained washrooms, no matter what hour of the day. Keeping these high traffic washrooms clean and maintained can seem like an endless task for cleaners and facilities managers.Dispensers must be re-stocked, bins emptied and cubicles cleaned.What is more, budget restraints can lead to even more pressures, resulting in staffing shortages and insufficient washroom products.

Lotus Professional understands the needs of premises with high traffic washrooms and has a range of products that are reliable, hygienic and cost-effective while at the same time help to minimise waste.

Lotus Professional's toilet tissue system, SmartOne is suitable for high traffic washrooms.The technology offers businesses increased hygiene with savings on sheet usage of up to 42 per cent.The sleek single sheet dispensing system controls the amount of toilet roll taken by the user, reducing waste, time spent refilling the dispenser and the risk of unused paper being left on the floor.The toilet tissue is also fully enclosed within the dispenser ensuring that the user can only touch the single sheet 2-ply tissue that is taken.

To ensure that hygiene is maximised,many washrooms today incorporate touchless devices so that users have to touch as few surfaces as possible. Sensors can be used to open doors, flush toilets, turn on taps and dispense hand towels.

Lotus Professional's touchless hand towel dispenser, enMotion, has a range of benefits that make it a suitable option for high capacity washrooms. enMotion incorporates a sensor that distributes a paper towel when a hand is waved in front of the dispenser. This helps to increase hygiene by reducing the spread of germs between the user and the dispenser.

enMotion can also control the amount of paper that is dispensed, meaning that both waste and maintenance time is reduced.The adjustable dispenser settings allow you to adjust the sheet length, time delay and sensor range to optimise the settings for each individual washrooms. Consequently, users are discouraged from taking more paper towels than they need.

Lotus Professional would always recommend installing hand towel dispensers over warm air dryers as they provide a more hygienic and time efficient option for users.Warm air dryers create queues as it can take a number of minutes for hands to be dried sufficiently.They also use recycled air which disperses bacteria from hands into the air and deposits microbes onto wet hands from the air streams. In contrast, using a hand towel is quick and easy. It also creates friction helping to remove bacteria during the drying process.

Studies have shown that drying hands with a hand towel gives optimum bacteria removal, of around 98-99 per cent of transient bacteria and 50-59 per cent of resident bacteria compared to washing alone which only removes 88 per cent of transient bacteria and 24-36 per cent residual bacteria.

It is clear that areas with high traffic washrooms have very specific needs.

Products that can reduce wastage and maintenance time provide a vital helping hand to the staff tasked with keeping these areas maintained. On top of this, hygiene is always a crucial consideration and with many people passing through the doors every day, high capacity facilities need to ensure that hygiene is promoted at every opportunity. Lotus Professional's SmartOne and enMotion can help maintain hygiene levels while incorporating features that can result in cost-in-use savings for businesses.

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