Why Do We Need to Keep the Playground Clean?

April 23, 2019 Leave a Comment

Playgrounds are everywhere. There are indoor and outdoor playgrounds, playgrounds at fast food restaurants, playgrounds at schools, daycares, and parks, playgrounds with metal slides and swings, and playgrounds with plastic play equipment. Playgrounds are a part of our landscape. This is because kids love playgrounds. They are fun. For parents, playgrounds are a good, inexpensive way to occupy the children. The trouble with playgrounds, however, is that they are a mecca for germs and bacteria. In fact, a study by HomeAdvisor states that "high-traffic areas on playgrounds like rock walls, baby swings, and seesaws each have 9 million colony-forming units (CFUs) per square inch." That amounts to 52,000 times more bacteria than you will find on the toilet seat in your home. Why do we need to keep the playground clean? The statistics speak for themselves.


The statistics are easy to find and they are alarming. Just spend a couple of hours reading about the germs and bacteria you will find on public playgrounds and you will start thinking about keeping your kids away from them. Playgrounds in daycares have been described regularly as a petri dish due to the spread of many different microbes. Part of the problem is that kids are not good at the little things that help prevent the spread of disease. While adults are likely to cover their mouths when they cough, children often don't. Children are not as concerned with washing their hands either, and if they do, it typically isn't done properly. For this reason, children spread germs easier. This means the playground will have a variety of coliform present. According to the Centers for Disease Control, other germs and pathogens your likely to find include Staphylococcus aureus for the skin, Klebsiella pneumonia, streptococcus pygenes, and E. coli.

It isn't just the big things you play on like swings and slides. Many indoor playgrounds have smaller toys. These toys are also covered with germs and bacteria. Ideally, playgrounds would be cleaned in public areas as frequently, or even more so, as bathrooms and other areas in public settings. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Playgrounds are often looked over during the cleaning process. Especially outdoor playgrounds. Not only are outdoor playgrounds cleaned infrequently in parks and other public settings, sometimes they are overlooked entirely. Why? Maybe it's too difficult to get to them, or maybe the assumption is that they are outside and can be cleaned by Mother Nature, Whatever the reason, public playgrounds are often neglected.


There are, of course, a myriad of cleaning products that could be used to clean playgrounds. These products come in both residential consumer strength for home use and commercial strength for schools, parks, and other business establishments that require a "stronger" product. These products require a lot of squirting, wiping, scrubbing, and other labor-intensive processes. These products also typically contain bleach and other chemicals that are harsh. The mistaken belief is that it takes potentially harmful chemicals to wipe out germs and bacteria. These chemicals, as it has been shown in numerous studies, are not only potential health hazards for consumers, they wreak havoc on our environment, causing potentially more harm than the good they do.

Fortunately, there is an alternative solution that makes keeping playgrounds and play equipment easy, safer for consumers and the environment, and more cost effective too.

GenEon has been in the business of creating better, safer, less toxic cleaning products for a long time. Our cleaning, sanitizing, and disinfecting products are made as needed by consumers in a process called On-Site Generation (OSG). This process produces extremely powerful and efficient cleaning, degreasing, and sanitizing products using nothing more than minerals, water, and electricity. The process is called electrochemical activation (ECA). Here's how it works. One of the natural minerals that GenEon uses as a catalyst is salt. Salt is a compound comprised of sodium and chloride. Sodium ions are positively charged and chloride ions are negatively charged. GenEon Onsite Generators expose these ions to a low electrical charge. The positive side of the charge electrochemically converts the chloride ion (Cl) to hypochlorous acid (HOCl), which is a powerful sanitizer. The negative side of the charge electrochemically converts the sodium ion (Na) into sodium hydroxide (NaOH), which is a cleaning compound commonly found in soaps and detergents. Unlike many other OSG systems, GenEon's system is a Blended Stream System that uses both versions in the same solution. The hypochlorous solution is represented as Free Available Chlorine (FAC) that has 80-200 times the sanitizing power of chlorine bleach. Since it is produced at a near neutral pH, it won't bleach out furniture or clothes. This is called electrolyzed water for cleaning, and GenEon is the leader in ton-site generation of Electrolyzed Water.


At GenEon, we have a wide range of on-site generators that are perfect for many settings. These include our Instaflow sytem, which is perfect for creating a large amounts of our cleaning and sanitizing products when needed for large jobs. We also have the portable, convenient Immersa-A-Clean Wand. This is a handheld device that lets you generate our all-natural, sustainable cleaning and sanitizing products on demand, in any situation where you need them.

In addition to on-site generating technology, we offer a line of advanced delivery systems that make it easy to disperse our cleaning products in all settings, from large, commercial areas to residential homes. These include our Mist delivery systems and our compact Mist2.5. These advanced delivery systems, when used with our cleaning, sanitizing, and disinfecting solutions, give you the perfect tools and methods for keeping playgrounds clean and sanitized easily.

At GenEon, we are proud to bring you the best solutions for health. We continue to develop products that are better for the environment, safer for consumers, more effective at combating illness, and more cost effective as well. That's because we believe the cleaning and sanitizing solutions consumers use should be not only effective, but beneficial to use. With GenEon products, you can be sure you're using a safer, less-toxic, and equally-effective alternative to industrial strength cleaning products.

If you want to learn more about the dangers of playground equipment or how GenEon products can help you keep your playground clean and sanitized, call us at 866.217.0205. We will be more than happy to introduce you to a better, safer way to keep our playgrounds cleaner and safer for children.


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