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tracking of oil into office building and retail
establishments is a perennial problem which has
become more of a problem with the advent of black
top parking lots as opposed to cement ones, and
to a certain degree with the growing number of
older cars on the road, which is a function of
the economic conditions and of the relative ease
or difficulty to finance new car buying.
The
more old cars that are around will mean more dripping
of oil there will be, which will affect the soil
control problem cleaning companies and in-house
maintenance personelll will encounter. People
are going to keep cars longer and take care of
them less than they should be, which will mean
more-and-more oil dripping on parking lots, more
pedestrians walking through those oil spills and
then mopre of that oil being tracked in to buildings
where it ends up as a mixture of oil and tar,
which is what occurs when the oil lays on and
reacts with the blacktop, which is also a petrochemical
based substance.
In short, "it ain't good" because the
usual approaches to standard soil control problems
will not be sufficient to arrest the growing oil
residue. In fact, oil can actually be absorbed
by certain mats only to be "picked up"
off those mats by other pedestrians and then tracked
into the facility in a similar way that a rubber
stamp pad works. The mat plays the part of the
stamp pad and the user's shoe bottoms play the
part of the rubber stamp.
Oil
is absorbed differently than water in different
materials. In factories and situations where oil
is part of the working environment and where containing
it is a constant requirement, some of the old
fashioned matting products are becoming more popular
and depended upon to do the job.
There
is also an approach that focuses more on the prevention
of slip and fall accidents rather than on trapping
the oil . This usually employs a grease resistant
or grease proof mat that is configured to scrape
off oil from shoe bottoms and allows that oil
to seep below the points on the mat surface that
touches the shoe bottoms thus limiting the amount
of oil that can be "picked up" and tracked
into the facility. It would then be the cleaners'
task to capture the oil from the hollows of the
mat or, in the case of mats that are perforated,
to also evacuate the oil gathered under the mat.
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