How is R-Zero responding to the ever-changing needs of the FM world?

R-Zero is the first biosafety technology company dedicated to making the spaces we inhabit safer and clinically clean. Founded to help organizations protect the health of the people they serve, R-Zero is committed to empowering facility managers to create safe, pathogen-free spaces for human occupants. R-Zero’s suite of thoughtfully designed solutions combines the power of hospital-grade UV-C devices with an IoT platform and advanced sensor capabilities to create the world’s first continuous, autonomous disinfection ecosystem. This intelligent system is designed to revolutionize how society deals with indoor environments and the risks they pose to human health while enabling facility managers to address those risks in the spaces they steward. With R-Zero’s disinfection ecosystem, facility managers can automatically measure and manage their disinfection protocols while also demonstrating the efficacy of their stewardship. R-Zero’s flagship product, Arc, enables a higher level of health and safety for hundreds of thousands of people across both public and private sector organizations without the use of chemicals.

What is R-Zero working on that will help FMs be more successful in their roles?

Researchers have found that humans spend at least 90 percent of their lives in indoor environments. Consequently, FMs play a significant role in facilitating human health through the ways that they oversee those environments. FMs, more than anyone, understand the challenges of keeping indoor spaces clean and healthy. R-Zero’s connected ecosystem of biosafety technologies combines best-in-class efficacy with data science, sensor technology, and modern software. The R-Zero ecosystem automatically disinfects indoor air and surfaces in real time, effectively mitigating risk without the use of chemicals. Furthermore, R-Zero’s sensor technology allows FMs to better understand space utilization and to make recommendations based on that utilization intelligence. When these sensors combine with R-Zero’s UV disinfection solutions, they form the first system designed to actively keep building occupants safe and more productive while delivering measurable ROI. R-Zero’s software platform, R-Zero Connect, provides a holistic view of all disinfection activity in your buildings from anywhere in the world. The connected nature of R-Zero’s solutions and the back-end dashboard facilitate transparency for FMs by making the invisible disinfection process visible and auditable. With R-Zero solutions, FMs can credibly communicate the care they are taking to render spaces safe.

How is R-Zero improving the FM industry?

R-Zero drives environmental and social responsibility by democratizing, decarbonizing, and de-risking disinfection in pursuit of a new disinfection standard that promotes better indoor environmental health through disinfected air and surfaces. In contrast to chemical disinfection, R-Zero’s disinfection ecosystem leverages UV-C light to successfully inactivate surface-borne and airborne pathogens in indoor spaces. For example, R-Zero’s flagship device, Arc, can disinfect the air and surfaces in a 1,000 square foot room in just seven minutes. This efficient disinfection solution enables significant time savings when incorporated into existing janitorial protocols. In addition to ease of use and implementation, Arc generates far less waste than traditional disinfection techniques such as manual chemical disinfection. Disinfecting a 1,000 square foot space for one year using Arc produces just 2 kg of waste, whereas manual disinfection of the same space over one year would yield almost 700 kg of waste. The inherent sustainability of R-Zero’s UV-C disinfection solutions enables less carbon pollution, less acute hazard risk, and less waste overall compared to other disinfection options such as electrostatic spraying and manual chemical disinfection.

Tell us your “why” in the FM world.

R-Zero was born out of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the world went into lockdown, hospitals went into overdrive, and entire economies shut down, R-Zero’s co-founders spent a lot of time contemplating why the world was grinding to a halt. They asked themselves, “How, in this day and age, has a microscopic pathogen been able to impact virtually every individual, community, and government across the globe?” It was clear that our global society was woefully unprepared for COVID-19.  When faced with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we were still using the same antiquated, harmful chemicals that we had used to fight the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918.  In the ensuing century, humans had walked on the moon and invented everything from antibiotics to the internet. Yet somehow, the industry standard for disinfection was still labor-intensive, often ineffective chemical protocols harmful to human health and the environment. Although pathogens had evolved, the tools we were using to fight them had not. At R-Zero, we recognized that combining the proven, hospital-grade efficacy of UV-C with IoT capabilities and modern software could deliver a powerful tool for any organization to fight COVID-19 and other illness-related threats that may come.