The coronavirus pandemic has drastically changed the way we go about our daily lives in public. People are concerned about sanitation in public spaces now more than ever before, and commercial building operators are looking at new ways to keep their buildings safe and healthy. One of the ways they’re accomplishing this goal is through the use of commercial shoe sanitizing mats, as COVID-19 can be spread on people’s shoes just as easily as it can be spread on their hands! Here’s three main things to look for when choosing a commercial shoe sanitizing mat.
1. How much sanitizer does it take to work?
Not all shoe sanitizing mat systems are the same! The most common type of sanitizing mat is the open-tray style, which typically is made of an injection-moulded rubber mat with walls a few inches high on all sides to hold liquid sanitizer. While that’s great for specialty environments like agriculture or laboratories with people wearing waterproof footwear, it’s not so ideal for everyday environments with people in street shoes! Open tray mats take a large amount of sanitizer solution to work – typically anywhere from 1 to 5 gallons of solution are required to fill them up!
Nylon sponge-style sanitizing mats make do with a fraction of the sanitizer solution – up to 90% less than the open tray style! Rather than gallons and gallons of sanitizer, sponge-style systems like Grizzly Sanitize only need 2 litres of sanitizer solution to charge. And using less sanitizer per charge consumes your sanitizer supply at a much slower rate – an especially important thing to consider with sanitizer being so difficult to obtain right now.
2. Will it make a mess on my floors?
Yes…if you’re using the wrong system! This is another area where common open-tray style sanitizer mats create problems for everyday environments. Because they’re like very shallow pools, open tray systems are prone to splashing as people step into them, overflowing over the edges and onto the surrounding floor. Open tray systems wet the feet, but make no allowance for keeping those wet feet from becoming a slip-and-fall hazard…imagine how wet and slippery your floors would be after 10 people have walked through a sanitizing mat. Now imagine 50, 100, or even more people – the floor around and after the open tray mat would be a soaking wet mess!
A sponge-style sanitizing mat system like Grizzly Sanitize is designed for use in everyday entrance environments so it eliminates both of these problems. Sponge-style systems don’t use standing pools of liquid that can splash and wave; instead, they hold the sanitizer solution within the nylon fibres to keep the mess contained. And Grizzly Sanitize comes with a second Dry Side mat designed specifically to dry people’s feet after they walk through the sanitizer solution, balancing the need for sanitizer dwell time with preventing the risk of creating a new slip-and-fall safety hazard.
3. What good will it be after the pandemic is over?
As world-changing as the COVID-19 pandemic has been, it won’t last forever – eventually people won’t be lining up to buy toilet paper and hand sanitizer! When life returns to normal, what use will you have for the sanitizing mats that you need right now?
Open tray sanitizer mats are a niche product for special-purpose environments, like laboratory clean rooms and meat processing plants. When they’re not filled with sanitizer, they’re essentially just large, extra-deep rubber boot trays – not very useful!
Sponge style sanitizer mats (like Grizzly Sanitize) are the opposite. After the pandemic is over, you can re-purpose your Grizzly Sanitize and use them as conventional entrance mats! The nylon construction that makes Grizzly Sanitize so good at holding sanitizing liquid as a sanitizer mat also makes it incredibly absorbent for water on rainy or snowy winter days. Grizzly Sanitize is made from the same high-performance entrance matting material as our normal Grizzly FX mats, which means you get the benefits of a sanitizing mat system now when you need it, and a pair of heavy-duty entrance mats for after the pandemic has faded!