Have a beautiful day.

The Maquilishuat is one of the national flowers of El Salvador. The pale blush of their flowers is exquisite. They flourished in February this year.

Today we will continue with our most odious and regular daily activities: cleaning. Human life is simply as attached to clean and/or cleanse, as much as we breathe or sleep. Why? Well, because our healthy survival depends on the level of tidiness that our physical inner structures and our immediate surroundings hold. It is popular to say: “The cleaner you are, the healthier you become”. Or ”The cleaner a city is, the most beautiful it is to attract citizens to stay”.  It is pleasurable to walk in a clean village, where streets are immaculate neat, the fresh air hits our cheeks with pleasant natural aromas from the trees, and where everyone is involved to make this village a speck-less daily experience.  I don´t know if you have traveled to the land of the Sprunglis, but one of the reasons why I adored living in Switzerland, was its wholesome lakes and rivers, the impeccable nature and not contaminated surroundings.

Global Cleaning. Cleaning it is not limited to our own self, our homes or our cities. It has a global scope nowadays. As I mentioned in my last publication, once we decided to globalize our businesses 40 years ago, and we started to share global value chains, everything good and bad is also shared between countries, regions, and continents. The internet is one of the key power factors for globalization, and many technologies serve globalization as a civil servant assists its community.

With globalization, we all are connected. Including our cleaning activities. Don´t believe that your own self-cleaning activities like taking a daily shower, a bath, wash your teeth, clean cooking inputs and cuisine tools, remove the dust from home, scrubbing, mopping or vacuuming is an independent activity of yourself only. By performing all the cleaning daily activities at a consumer individual level,  we share them with our family, our neighborhood, communities, villages, cities, countries, regions, continents and the world. Whatever you clean, goes to the garbage or the residuals. Which then travels through non-treated water (rivers and the oceans) or contaminated air to everywhere.

Clean vs Cleanse. We tend to confuse the words clean and cleanse, and we use them as synonyms. But both words evolved to become a bit contrasting around 500 years ago. Even though both words share the same general circumstances as to wash or remove filth/germs. Clean is used when we directly remove dirt and blemishes from the surfaces of an object; meanwhile to cleanse is to make something seem brand new again (getting rid of any impurities). Clean is related to make something tidy, meanwhile, cleanse is related to remove impurities from something as a whole. That is why cleanse is used in the medical context, and when we speak about removing toxins or sick parts of our body through a surgical treatment or alternative care.

This article is not about waste management systems or sanitation. Even though I would love to dedicate in this saga, at least a week to waste management systems, I have no time to dig deeper on them, but to at least mention the issue in this paragraph. It is up to you to find out more if you wish to be informed for the time being. In this category, the colossal challenge at the moment is to transform our garbage and rubbish in energy. We have to evolve from the landfill solutions to waste energy production under the circular economy concept or maybe a new evolved philosophy based on the circular economy, which will arise as a result of the recycling-reusing system’s implementation in the future. I just wish to share a little watercolor brush of where are some countries in relation to their waste- management efforts. Just know that every country in the world is a producer of garbage. Some more than others.

Comparison and Projections of Regional Waste Generation in tonnes m. Source. The World Bank. The Economist.

Any new technology that helps us to solve the problem of garbage and residuals (sewerage waters, garbage collection, and air pollution) is welcome. Nevertheless, this is a global issue. Which needs to be solved globally. Any newest cleaning technologies regardless of the place where we are currently living has to be offered to help everywhere. Globalization, the air, and the ocean connect us inevitably.

NAIQI technologies applied to clean activities.  I would like to offer you certain strategy philosophical guidelines in relation to how to use these NAIQI technologies properly for cleaning activities, including some considerations about a global regulatory framework. As you already know, strategists’ duties occur to provide at least general counseling and thinking mental frames to these concerns.

• I have no issues at all when it comes to search for good bioethical practices, methodologies and NAIQI technologies applied to the waste management systems and our daily cleaning. Probably the first type of NAIQI inventions should have started in the cleaning activities industries. Why? because I know how painful, difficult and expensive it is for individuals, municipalities and the private sector to try to clean the mess we all do. For those who are reading to me for the first time, I have defined NAIQI as the combo tech of Nanotechnologies, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Processing, and the Internet.
• From the point of view of the individual level, we all clean our own dirtiness: we all pee (at least 8 times per day) and we all do pupu at least daily. In consequence, we use the bathroom. We all consume food, either we prepare it at our home´s kitchens or buy it from others who prepare it for us. We all have to deal with at least washing dishes by hand, even if we have a dishwasher. We all take a shower, wash our hands, our teeth. We all use paper towels, napkins, soap, shampoo, detergents, and solvents. We all use at least a deodorant, and finally, we all change our clothes daily, which puts pressure to wash our apparel, either by hand or using a washing machine.  In addition, we also are entitled to take out the trash, compost and recycle.  We all have accepted to buy things with packages (plastic bags and plastic containers, metal cans, aluminum recipients, cellulose pulp and paper bags and so on). Everything we buy has a package that ends up in the garbage and is polluting the environment.  And the same happens beyond our households, bureaus, factories, public transportation and everywhere we go. In summary,  we all consume something and we all unpack things and throw garbage. Even what we eat is transformed into poo or pee.  All the latter to conclude: We were, are and will continue producing garbage. We inevitably must clean it. 
• Beyond our cleaning inventions since the conception of the soap, humans need to be always clean. Beyond the soap and detergents, the brooms, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners or the smart vacuuming robotic prototypes as the iRobot Vacuum or the Dyson Spin Vacuum, or the digital waste bins; or the Lysol disposable cleaning wipes, or the multicolored sponges, or the bleach discovery or the green-cleaning products to avoid chemical hazardous elixirs or solvents that promise to leave your surfaces sanitized; it is our aim to think strategically about the future of all these products and services, before proceeding further. The more garbage we dispose of, the more we must clean off. 
• Cleaning happens because we are simply filthy. It is part of our nature. Once we understand this premise, we start to be compassionate with ourselves. And also we comprehend that each of us is responsible to clean its own dirtiness. We have hired the municipalities to help us to collect the household garbages, to do waste management and the sanitation of our households and surroundings. But also, let´s recognize that waste management is another business or industry that is searching for optimization and solutions.
• What about finding new assumptions and paradigms to:
  1.  Stop using insane amounts of petrochemical packaging and other sources of garbage that are making this planet an awful place, and triggering the garbage collection procedures more expensive and complicated.
  2.  Encourage new bio-ethical technologies (beyond NAIQI) that can help the circular economy model to be properly established, and reducing climate change future disasters caused by pollution.
  3. Stop using cleaning materials or cleansing inputs which also contaminate the environment.  Look at it with this example: we use solvents and chemicals to clean surfaces or for manufacturing. But those poisons contaminate our water, which then has to be cleaned by water treatment plants; or in countries like mine, the sewage waters are thrown to our rivers which are totally corrupted.

In my next publication, I will share the framework mentioned above. In addition, I just urge you to think about two parallel directions when it comes to clean: Reduction of garbage (in terms of volume or by not using the products that contaminate our surroundings), and new non-contamination techniques or non-pollution methods of cleaning-collecting waste-converting it into energy.  To be continued…

We are here:

Sources of reference utilized to write this article:

To be posted on my next publication.

Disclaimer: Illustrations in Watercolor are painted by Eleonora Escalante. Other types of illustrations or videos (which are not mine) are used for educational purposes ONLY.  Nevertheless, the majority of the pictures, images or videos shown on this blog are not mine.  I do not own any of the lovely photos or images posted unless otherwise stated.

Thank you for reading to me.

Published by eleonoraescalantestrategy

Corporate Strategy Artist, San Salvador, El Salvador View all posts by eleonoraescalantestrategy