Estonian start-up UpSteam is gathering fame with offering environmentally friendly car washing service.
In their activity UpSteam points out two aspects how the car washing service is more environmentally friendly than others who offer the same service. Firstly, UpSteam uses technology that helps them use much less water than regular car washes. For instance. Regular car washes use about 150-200 litres of water for one washing cycle, but with technology that UpSteam uses you need about 4 litres of water for one cycle depending on how dirty the car is.
Another aspect that reduces their impact to the environment is that they use high pressured steam to wash the cars. Steam has access to places which are difficult to access with regular washing methods. Using steam instead of water gives company opportunity to use much less chemicals. Some chemicals are still needed for removing the pitch from cars.
Although UpSteam offers nearly chemical free service they still think how to reduce their impact to environment by substituting few chemicals they still use.
With help of project LIFE Fit for REACH company analyses which chemicals are possible to substitute.
Another field where UpSteam wants to reduce using chemicals is operating the steam machine. As heating the water is needed for generating steam the pipes collect limescale and that reduces passage of water, so descaler is needed to maintain machinery. In one month one steam machine uses about six litres of descaler.
Solution for using less descaler is buying filter that softens the water, so they can reduce the usage of this chemical from six to two litres a month.
Thirdly company plans to change electric generators to batteries that have much longer lifespan. Furthermore with using batteries the process of washing cars is not that noisy and it also reduces substances flying to the atmosphere because burning fossil fuels is not necessary.
UpSteams CTO Aleksis Anijärv pointed out that during market research they found out that environmentally friendly car washes are not common and they saw opportunity to fill the blank segment. “Before starting the company UpSteam tried to focus on finding out how to offer environmentally friendly way to wash cars. With consulting regular car washes we found out that it is not a focus point in this business. Our aim is to change the way people wash their cars with automating all the steps. Like booking the time for car wash, waiting in the queue, driving to car wash and waiting during the procedure. Cars will be cleaner with using less water and chemicals,” Anijärv commented their goals.
