The New Normal in Facility Maintenance: Antimicrobial Flooring

May 8, 2020

With the increased attention on sanitation in all facilities, due to the COVID-19 virus, now may be the time to consider seamless, antimicrobial epoxy flooring.

Your floor is the largest single surface in your facility, and has the most significant exposure to microbial contamination of any part of your facility – tracked in by staff and visitors, on the wheels of carts and tow motors, by rodents or insects crawling through small cracks in your doors, or blown in by the wind through open loading dock bays. Designers and facility planners need to understand what it will take to sanitize, disinfect, and decontaminate various surfaces. A healthy building must address air-, water-, and fluid-borne sources of contamination, as well as those which can spread through physical contact.

Various industries regularly specify antimicrobial or antibacterial flooring and wall solutions, including hospitals, food and beverage processing facilities, and pharmaceutical manufacturing. These facilities need durable, high-performance flooring, wall, and lining systems that meet or exceed strict USDA and FDA standards.

Other industries can also benefit from a facility that is easy to clean and maintain, and which will help address issues related to the control of bacteria, mold, and other microbial growth. These sectors can include:

Cannabis Growing Facilities: antimicrobial surfaces are necessary to protect plant and human health, and to meet FDA and USDA regulations.
Packaging and Warehousing Facilities: especially those that process consumable products or perishable goods such as food, beverage, medications, and more.
Electronics Manufacturing: including those developing products for hospitals, clean rooms, avionics, and sensitive computer assembly.
Chemical Processing: biochemical manufacturing, fertilizer and herbicide manufacturing, and wastewater treatment plants.

Educational Institutions: cafeterias, commercial kitchens, locker rooms, showers, restrooms, and healthcare offices.
Animal Facilities: boarding kennels, veterinary offices, and research operations.
Hospitality: commercial kitchens, public dining areas, restrooms, and large public venues.
Other Sectors: military barracks, laundry operations, assisted living facilities, health clubs, and much more.

What is Antimicrobial Flooring?

Our antimicrobial epoxy flooring provides the highest-possible contamination-fighting properties not only across the surface of your floor but throughout the polymer material used to make it, giving you the additional anti-pathogen safeguards you need inside and out. Flooring systems can be installed with an integral cove base which can be seamlessly transitioned to the wall system.

Here is a list of some of the microorganisms controlled by our antimicrobial components in our flooring systems:

Fungi:

Aureobasidium pullulans (Black Yeast)
Aspergillus flavus (causes mold on stored grains)
Aspergillus niger (Black Mold)
Aspergillus terreus (a fungal pathogen)
Penicillium pinophilum (a food contaminate)
Rhizopus nigricans (Bread Mold)

Yeasts:

Candida pelliculosa (causes yeast infections)

Bacteria:

Aerobacter aerogenes (produces gas that sours milk)
Bacillus subtilis (Hay Bacillus)
Desulfovibrio desulfuricans (a cause of gastrointestinal disorder)
Escherichia coli (E. coli)
Klebsiella pneumoniae (produces lung pathology)
Pseudomonas aeruginosa (an opportunistic human pathogen)
Salmonella typhosa (Salmonella)
Staphlococcus aureus (Staph)

Actinomycetes:

Streptoverticillium reticulum (Pink Stain)

The Surface Technology Difference

Like any high-performance epoxy flooring system, the installation of an antimicrobial floor coating requires the most experienced technicians. Our highly skilled epoxy techs average more than 20 years of experience installing resinous floor systems – the highest in the industry.

We have successfully installed antimicrobial flooring and related coatings in many industry-leading companies’ facilities:

Food & Beverage: The Hershey Company, Tyson Foods, Nestle, Kellogg’s, General Mills, Bimbo Bakeries, and many others.
Pharmaceutical: Merck, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Astra Zeneca, Amphastar Pharmaceuticals, West Pharmaceuticals, and many others.
Cannabis Cultivation: Blum, MariMed Advisors, Terra Tech, Kind, and many others.

We can complete projects anywhere in the United States and the southern Canadian provinces. We work with facility owners, design-build firms, construction management firms, and general contractors to provide industrial flooring solutions for projects ranging in size from 1,000 to more than 1 million square feet.

We are fully qualified to handle industrial floor coatings in Divisions 7 and 9 of the CSI MasterFormat® list. Surface Technology is bonded up to $2 million.

Are you ready to explore antimicrobial industrial flooring solutions for your facility? Schedule a free consultation now. Facility managers like you might find yourself in a scheduling conflict during a push to return our economy to normal levels. Now is the time to prepare your estimates and rough in some dates for resurfacing and installation of industrial flooring, coating, and lining systems.

Assemble a small team of your maintenance and plant management professionals at your idle facility – ensuring you follow social distancing best-practices, of course. This downtime is the ideal opportunity to perform a thorough review of your flooring conditions throughout your manufacturing plant, food and beverage operation, warehouses, packaging facilities, and so on. Create a detailed scope of work for your epoxy flooring projects and submit your requirements to us. While it’s always best for our team members to visit your facility in person when developing our free quotes, we can remotely create a Rough Order of Magnitude (R.O.M.) estimate for you. Drawings (or dimensions), photos and a general description of operations is helpful.

Click here to email Michael Greenblatt, president of S.T.I., to discuss your projects. Or call us toll-free at 1-800-PROJECT.

Get in Touch

We know you’re busy. We’re here to get you the information you need as quickly as possible. Whether you just want a quick estimation on your project specifications or want to talk to an expert about your project, we are here to help you.