Environmental & Safety Considerations

The Hazardous Waste Screen Bioassay for STARPOWER

This United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) test is performed to determine the toxicity of a given product. In a head-to-head competition with some of the best known cleaning and degreasing products worldwide, conducted by one of the world’s largest multi-national oil companies, this test proved to be the final step in their selection process. The bioassay is done using fathead minnows as the test subjects. The minnows swam in a solution of STARPOWER, at the various predetermined EPA dilution rates, for four days. The objective, of course, is to see how many of them will die. Interestingly, even if 40% of them die, a product could still pass this toxicity test.

There were four different STARPOWER tanks, twenty minnows in each tank. So 32 of the 80 minnows could have died and STARPOWER still would have passed the test. The results? After four days, none of them died! None of the other products in the competition came close to those results. Of course, STARPOWER won the competition and is still in use today by this oil company. They order it by the tanker car load. It is a solid confirmation of STARPOWER’s safety and its strong environmental credentials. Click here to see the results for yourself: Hazardous Waste Screen Bioassay

Surfactant & Emulsifier Free

STARPOWER provides its superior detergency without the use of surfactants or emulsifiers. Today it is common for industrial cleaners to contain surfactants and emulsifiers, which clean by causing oily materials to chemically bind to water. This bonding can be detected by noting the milky-white color of the cleaner’s residue when the residue comes in contact with water.Such products do clean, and some of them do so very effectively. However, the serious problem with the chemical surfactants and emulsifiers they contain is that the milky emulsion they create wreaks havoc on oil-water separators. This is because the oily materials being removed will chemically bind to the water used to rinse away the residue. These oily materials will not separate from the water. This milky emulsion will defeat the action of the separating units.

STARPOWER’s formula is free of surfactants and emulsifiers. This property of the product will be of benefit to you if you use an oil/water separator system to capture your runoff. That is because when an oil-based substance has been cleaned from a surface, and the residue has been rinsed into the separator, that oil-based substance will separate from the STARPOWER while in the unit, and can then be easily removed.

(NOTE: To test this feature of STARPOWER, pour it and some oil into a clear container and shake it vigorously. Let the solution settle for a while. You will observe that the oily phase will completely separate from the water-based STARPOWER phase. “Seeing Is Believing”(TM).)

Safety & Performance

Creating a high performance cleaner/degreaser that would produce outstanding results without causing harm to the environment, and that wouldn’t “cost an arm and a leg”, was a major challenge for Paradigm. STARPOWER’s environmentally responsible users have been deeply satisfied with its potent cleaning and degreasing power, delivered in a formula that withstands the close scrutiny of regulatory agencies.Our corporate and government customers alike have found that, in terms of meeting ever-stricter environmental codes and regulations, the switch to STARPOWER has been well worth it for them. In fact, it has been determined in many cases that the product actually exceeds the strict requirements of the environmental standards they must meet.

Further, no special safety equipment is required when using STARPOWER, an environmentally responsible product.