The Real Cost of a Cleaning Cupboard: What 20 Sites Save By Switching to soluCLEAN

A closer look at the plastic, waste, carbon and safety savings behind concentrate cleaning, put into perspective for a typical multi-site operation.

Most facilities teams know that ready-to-use (RTU) cleaning products are wasteful, you’re mostly paying to ship water. But it’s easy to underestimate just how much that adds up across a multi-site estate. So we ran the numbers for a business with 20 sites, each using 4 RTU trigger sprays and 4 RTU toilet cleaners a month, and compared it to the same sites switching to soluCLEAN’s concentrate system (2 x5L concentrate per site, per month).

The results, over a single year, were bigger than we expected.

What 20 sites save in a year:

  • 430kg of plastic: equivalent to the weight of a Fiat 500
  • 2.5m cubic metres of waste: equivalent to 10 wheelie bins, compacted
  • 2.8 tonnes of CO₂: the equivalent volume of 3 houses

These figures are a direct result of concentrate coming in smaller, lighter, more compact packaging than RTU. Less packaging in means less packaging to store, handle and throw away.

We don’t ship water, so we don’t ship as often

Water is only added once concentrate arrives on site, not before it leaves the factory. That single decision has an outsized effect on logistics:

  • One pallet of RTU = 3 cases of soluCLEAN concentrate
  • One pallet of soluCLEAN = 30 pallets of RTU

In practice, that means far fewer delivery vehicles on the road to supply the same number of sites for the same period, in some cases, a full year’s supply can arrive in a single delivery. Fewer deliveries means a smaller transport carbon footprint, and it means lower delivery costs too, since transportation costs are rising across the board.

Lighter products, lower injury risk

Sustainability isn’t the only benefit of moving away from bulky RTU stock. Manual handling injuries are
a frequent, and frequently overlooked, cost of traditional cleaning supply chains. Consider the weight
difference between a soluCLEAN floor cleaner dose and a standard 5L ready-to-use concentrate: 0.3kg
versus 5kg.

One is a dose a cleaning operative can carry and pour without strain. The other is a container heavy
enough to contribute to lifting injuries when it’s moved, stored and used dozens of times a month, across
dozens of sites. Switching to soluCLEAN doesn’t just reduce waste, it removes a manual handling risk
from the job entirely.

Multiply it out

These figures are based on a 20-site estate. Scale that up to 50, 100 or 500 sites and the plastic, waste,
CO₂ and delivery savings scale with it, while the handling risk per bottle stays exactly the same: lower,
every time.


Want to see what switching to soluCLEAN would save your estate? Get in touch and we’ll put your
own numbers into perspective.

Solupak 18 06 26-78