Some Sherwin-Williams paint stores are using ultraviolet light wands made by Apache SafeSpace Solutions to decontaminate surfaces during the coronavirus pandemic.
"Our mission is to get people back to work and back to life," said Stelio Flamos, vice president of operations for the Apache SafeSpace Solutions operations and distribution center in Canton, Ohio.
UVC lighting has been around for more than 50 years and is used in the health care industry, Flamos said.
Early this year, Apache SafeSpace Solutions, a unit of Apache Industrial Services in Houston pivoted its ultraviolet C (UVC) light technologies to target the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, he said.
In addition to handheld units, Apache's technology includes a four-bulb Tomahawk tower that can sanitize a 200-square-foot room in about eight minutes to an AIRrowSwift air treatment system that plugs into a building's existing air conditioning and filtration system to filter and inactivate coronaviruses and other pathogens.
The techology is manufactured in Houston and sold and distributed in Ohio and some nearby states from Canton, where the company employs about 125 people, Flamos said.
"While there is more research to do, ultraviolet C, a special type of ultraviolet light, has been shown to kill the virus that causes Covid-19 in laboratory-controlled experiments," Mark Cameron, an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, told the PopSugar fitness blog in October.
UVC is a short-wave version of the more familiar ultraviolet A and B lights, which can cause sunburns.
"UVC works by degrading proteins on the surface of the virus, effectively killing it outright or destroying its ability to infect our cells and grow within," Cameron said.
Some stores of Cleveland-based Sherwin-Williams use hand-held Tomahawk UVC light wand to sanitize counters, paint swatch displays or supply shelves after several customers have touched them, Flamos said.
A store manager and a store clerk at two Sherwin-Williams stores contacted about the UVC technology are using germicidal cleaners on surfaces instead.
Apache SafeSpace Solutions has been approved as one of the vendors of UVC technology for Ohio's public school systems, Flamos said.
"We're excited about that," Flamos said.
"But our systems have been used or are presently being used in churches. Ferrari purchased them," he said. "We did all of Rice University. We have Marathon Petroleum, Shell, Citco. I can go on and on and on."