Clean Room Shoe Covers

What is a Clean Room?

A clean room is a controlled environment that requires strict control of pollutants, particles, and debris such as dust and airborne microbes. Clean rooms often have different levels (1-10) to denote the volume of particles per cubic foot. Clean rooms are for the testing, production, and manufacture of various products, such as electronics, pharmaceuticals, and medical equipment.

Industries that Use Clean Rooms

Here are some of the major industries in which you’ll commonly find clean rooms.

Aerospace

Clean rooms are common in companies delivering science and engineering for aerospace products such as jet engines, fuselage design, and cockpit technology.

Electronics

The production of electronics, such as semiconductors, cell phone circuit boards, and computer motherboards requires minimal particles and static control.

Pharmaceutical

During the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, a clean, safe and contaminant-free environment is imperative to producing and distributing a compliant and commercially viable product.

Military

Like the electronics industry, military environments, especially weapons production and testing facilities, maintain the highest standards of contamination, particle, and pollutant control.

Medical

Medical facilities, such as hospitals, outpatient clinics, scientific laboratories, and surgery rooms receive thousands of visitors each year, all while requiring a high degree of cleanliness.

Common Clean Room Problems

Though the most pressing problem facing clean rooms might be obvious (pollutants and contaminants), it’s actually how these particles are introduced that are most important. Often, it’s clean room personnel that represent one of the biggest sources for foreign particles.

Human beings naturally emit particles and microbes, mostly unknowingly, even during simple activities like walking and moving. Sneezing, coughing—oils, hair, and skin—these can all release particles into the air, too. Many of these particles collect on the floor, or at a person’s feet.

That’s why you’ll almost always see clean room visitors wearing some kind of clean room shoe cover.

What is a Clean Room Shoe Cover?

A clean room shoe cover is a piece of cloth or plastic that can be fitted over the bottom half of a shoe. Shoe covers have a variety of applications, clean rooms among the most common. Today, automatic shoe covers are quickly becoming one of the most viable clean room solutions.

Why Use Clean Rooms Shoe Covers?

First and foremost, shoe covers help keep clean rooms clean. Shoe covers are often part of a full suit of wearable protective garments that limit the introduction of unwanted particles into an environment.

But cleanliness also helps limit cost and time inefficiencies that prevent work from getting done. Indeed, disposable clean room shoe covers help reduce the time it takes visitors to put on shoe covers, and the creeping cost of repairing and replacing traditional shoe covers when they inevitably tear.

This kind of cost adds to already considerable operational costs in clean room facilities. These rising costs inhibit a facility’s ability to operate normally and efficiently. Clean room shoe covers, among other preventative wearables, help prevent particles and pollutants in a cost- and time-efficient way.

Clean Room Shoe Covers Help Reduce Cost

Yes, maintaining cleanliness is a key way that clean room facilities of all kinds can help keep costs down. But inefficiencies in the products we use to maintain cleanliness can also be quite costly.

Traditional shoe covers—sometimes called “blue booties”—are a good example. Not only is it expensive to regularly reorder these shoe covers; but they require users to bend down or sit down to put them on manually. This is frustrating for visitors and, most importantly, it takes time.

Those extra seconds count!

“Customer” booties can be very expensive and the necessary cleaning for reuse can be expensive as well. Using a recyclable and disposable automated shoe cover film eliminates and the cost and maintain custom booties streamlines the shoe cover process.

The Advantage of Automatic Shoe Covers

Automatic shoe covers, on the other hand, reduce time and labor costs by automating the process completely. The process is far more convenient: users just need to put their feet into the dispenser and let the machine wrap their shoes in biodegradable PVC film—automatically.

It’s an intelligent way to reduce operating costs in facilities that require covered shoes in the common area (in addition to the clean room).

Automatic Clean Room Shoe Covers vs. Traditional Blue Booties

Traditionally, clean room facilities have utilized blue booties, such as Bootie Butler products, to ensure that all visitors cover their shoes. However, not all shoe covers were created equal, and many industries that rely on clean rooms are now turning to automatic shoe covers.

Here’s a brief comparison that helps explain why:

SM-76C Automatic Shoe Cover Machine

Ease of use – Just step in, wait a few seconds, and let the machine do the rest.
Environmentally friendly – Our thermo shrink film is 100% biodegradable. It has passed the RoHS certificate.
Cost-effective – One roll of our film can cover up to 500 pairs of shoes.
Durable – Our thermo shrink wrap film has 28 micron thickness, allowing guests and employees to walk around and keep clean.
Fits any shoe type and size
Available in three colors

Traditional Shoe Covers

Inconvenient – Guests and employees have to stoop down or sit to put booties on.
Wasteful – Single-use cloth wraps create a lot of potentially harmful waste.
Reorder, reorder, reorder – Only 50-100 pairs of shoes can be covered per box or order..
Prone to tearing and rips
Expensive