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Chemical-free cleaning in a raygun-like package

By Rain Noe - April 19, 2010

in Tech | Object Culture

Those crazy-looking devices are not bottles, though they hold bottles inside; the photo is deceptive in that the objects are around a foot tall, about the size of some power drills.

So what are they? Those are ActiveIon's Ionator product, which uses a proprietary technology to turn simple tap water into a chemical-free antibacterial spray cleaner.

Developed from advanced high-cost technology used in food-processing plants and four-star restaurants, the Ionator EXP uses ionization to convert tap water into a powerful sanitizer that's been tested and confirmed to kill 99.9 percent of common bacteria with a simple six-second spray of nontoxic ionized water.

The things are not cheap--the household version on the left starts at $169 and the professional-grade version at right goes for $329--but they'll supposedly last for 3-5 years, during which time you won't have to buy Windex, Fantastik and what have you. Check out the video below, where it's kind of shocking to see that you can spray the same stuff you use to clean a stovetop onto your toothbrush--after all, it's just water.

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Berkana

15 years ago

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It really pisses me off when companies like this smugly and repeatedly claim to use no chemicals. The abuse of the term 'chemical' is not without consequence. It is one of the effects and contributors to scientific illiteracy and ignorance in the US. ActiveIon should not be contributing to this problem, nor should they be appealing to chemophobia in their marketing.

I came across an article that explains very clearly some of the problems associated with chemophobia. This point of view is worth considering:

http://tinyurl.com/chemophobia

Marketing of innovations born of science (such as ActiveIon's product) ought to educate the target market about the benefits of their approach and the actual residues of other cleaning solvents, not appeal to the target market's ignorance and fear of "chemicals". They really ought to know better than to do this, especially if they're going to use an image of Bill Nye on their web site to promote their product as something based on a scientific principle.
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