Spotlight on Spotting

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December, 2009

SPOTTINGTODAY The crew behind GreenEarth’s spotting video: (top row) Tony Goleb, Roland Dobbins, Donna Freese, Rich Fitzpatrick, Jim Douglas, Josh Frey, (bottom row) Stacy Sopcich, Tim Mzxwell (not shown, Dr. Jim Schreiner).

A round table discussion on spotting with the industry’s brain trust. By Stacy Sopcich

Thanks to a groundbreaking collaboration between GreenEarth and the soap companies used by over 95% of our Affiliates, we recently produced a step-by-step video of stain removal techniques. After the filming, we invited representatives from each company to participate in a 90-minute round table discussion to address a wide range of spotting-related concerns raised by our Affiliates. Here is the full transcript of what Jim Douglas (JD), Technical Director of GreenEarth Cleaning, Roland Dobbins (RD), Technical Sales Representative for Seitz, Rich Fitzpatrick (RF), Vice President of Kreussler, and Dr. Jim Schreiner (JS), Vice President, Research and Development for Adco had to say: Q: The video outlines your recommended protocols for each of the major stain classifications. But what if you don’t know what type of stain you have?

product. Often you can tell stains from where they are located on a garment. Most beverage stains are down the front and on the cuffs. Or you can also determine stains from the type of garment that it is – office worker or garage worker. It’s good to try and determine the type of stain as much as possible – but our whole system is predicated on the same setup – you are starting with Quickol, a neutral lubricant – see how it goes with that and continue on. RP: Kreussler’s protocol system follows what Roland described, I would add to that – working on garments before they’ve been cleaned, on unidentified stains, you have the ability to simply use the spray spotter PreNet CS mixed with solvent and use that as a general all purpose spotter in the pre-spotting application.

There are four fundamental criteria for determining what the stain is: location, color, shape or substance, and also its odor. If you RD: Seitz’s spotting chart always put steam on it you can often smell starts from that assumption. If you what it may be based off of – know what it is, then of course you chocolate, beer, coffee will give off can jump to that particular stain a very noticeable odor.

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A GreenEarth® special issue on spotting

JS: If you are faced with an unknown stain, the location is important. Typically, if you’re seeing something darker on the perimeter – you can assume, if it’s a yellow, yellow/brown stain – you’re working with a tannin stain. Proteins tend to be surface built up stains, and tend in many cases to be more grayish in color. Oils as you look at them, will have a yellow, yellow/brown appearance, somewhat like a tannin stain, but the edges won’t be smooth, they tend to be jagged. It all can vary based on what the customer attempted to do with the stain on his or her own. Q: How do we know which chemicals we can use on the board without flushing or drying and which ones we can’t? Is there a simple rule of thumb? RF: We break spotting into both pre-spotting and post-spotting segments and if you’re prespotting, the idea is that you’re pretreating the stain and you’re using products designed to go into the cleaning fluid – there shouldn’t be a flushing and drying as part of

Copyright, December, 2009. All rights reserved.


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