Astral Hygiene Blog | Commercial Cleaning & Hygiene Advice UK

  Revolutionary New Sustainable Products  7th January 2025  | By Anna Armstrong   |  Sustainability Unlike blogs where they are talking about this sort of subject where they describe sustainable catering products – this blog is different. We have stocked sustainable toilet rolls for a long time, including  mini jumbo ,   3 Ply , to  2 ply  to  Coreless , but we have taken it even further now! If you have a look at our website, every single paper product we stock is now EU Ecolabel, and we are incredibly proud of this.   We are always pushing boundaries here at Astral, and we are delighted to introduce a toilet roll with a difference. Dependent on supplier, our paper products are packaged differently. Some are wrapped in cardboard, others are wrapped in recycled plastic, and some handtowels (for example), are wrapped in both recycled plastic (the bundles of 250 towels), and then wrapped in cardboard.   Most of our toilet rolls a...

  Unmasking the True Cost of the Cleaning and Fast-Moving Consumer Goods Industries  30th July 2024  | By Yewan Armstrong It costs the NHS £387 million to treat patients with lung cancer each year. There is a clear link between lung cancer and smoking, however, a little-known and understood contributor to this disease is also lurking in household cleaning products. These products, which churn out harmful toxins (VOCs) into the air, are causing breathing problems, skin irritation and lung damage, putting strain on our already underfunded healthcare system.    This is an example of understanding the True Cost behind not only the products we procure and sell but also the ongoing costs of repairing the damage they are causing to our health, our community, and the environment.    In 2019 The World Bank stated that by 2030, we would need to spend $90 trillion globally to fix the environmental damage we have so far accrued. To put that into perspective this i...

  Part 2 - Environmental Health - Are you doing it right?  23rd May 2024  | By Anna Armstrong   |  Environmental Health To follow on from what we learned about visits from your Environmental Health Officer; how they are not the mortal enemy, more a source of knowledge and experience to make sure you are maintaining your hygiene by taking the right approach; we will be talking about how your EHO wants you to wash your dishes. The last time I blogged about the benefits of a colour coding system, and how having all areas assigned a colour ensures  clarity in terms of which mop is to be used where just makes maintaining hygiene standards a lot easier.  Just recapping really quickly these are the colours and the zones which they should be attributed to.   This blog is about an equally important and quite a contentious issue how to wash your dishes the correct way (yes there is a correct way)!  Simple right? Well no it’s not really that simple so p...

  What should I do with my compostable cup?  21st February 2024  | By Anna Armstrong You go to a cafe to buy your lunch, and the container looks like plastic, but the staff tell you it’s made from compostable materials. This is great news, and it makes you feel good right. This little cafe is supplying you with sustainable materials, which must be good for the environment - great. Unfortunatly it is a little more complex than that.  So the business owner is paying more than £20 a case extra for these containers (at the very least), and they think they are doing their bit for the environment, but they've not thought about the journey that cup will take and where it will end up. The harsh reality is that it will likely end up in land fill, where it will not compost, it will just leak methane like all the other rubbish in that big pile, because compostable packaging only composts in industrial composting sites provided by the council. Unfortunately, no town/city centres...

  Eco friendly cleaning myths debunked......  18th July 2022  | By Anna Armstrong   |  Cleaning Tips ,  Environmental Health ,  Hygiene ,  Sustainability ,  Coronovirus As a company that put the environment at the heart of every thing we do, we take quality control very seriously. We sample every product, test it thoroughly, but importantly with the eco friendly range we ensure that this product has been tested by the relevant organisations to confirm the ingredients in these chemicals are not toxic. We do this by making sure that our  Eco Friendly Range  is approved by the EU Ecolabel Council, and this certifies that this product which carries this label has a guaranteed, independently verified low environmental impact.  As a family friendly, and environmentally conscious business we choose to stock  Eco Friendly Products , because they benefit both the earth and our families.  What does “Eco-Friendly” Mean? This ter...