What is a Black, Blue, and White Cleanroom?

If your donning room is not color coded this may be something that you want to consider. Dividing up your cleanroom would help your operators to know what garment needs to be on by when. A black area would be where the operators puts on their bouffant cover and cleans their shoes, both need to be done before they can continue into the blue area. The blue area is where they put on their shoecovers and the white is where they finish donning their clothes right before they continue into the cleanroom. While this seems simple in theory, it is very important. If an operator were to contaminate the wrong area they would risk bringing contamination into the cleanroom. To learn more about this method, watch the video below. ​

Transcript:
Hi, I'm Greg Heiland and welcome to my weekly video blog Critical Tips. This week the question is “is your gowning room black blue and white?” Or in more technical terms have you segregated the entrances within your counting room to three principal areas. Let me explain what I mean by the black area. The black areas are before you physically enter into the gown room area. Two things are of concern in the black area. One, the operator should put a bouffant cap on ideally before they go into the gown room to capture all the dandruff hair follicles. The head is a huge source of contamination, it's is preferred not to have operators go into the gown room without a bouffant cap on. Then the second concern is the shoes. What do you do with the footboard contamination? There's a couple of options, one is your operators can either trade their Street shoes for factory shoes which is increasingly more popular or they can clean their Street shoes by going on a series of brushes vacuums mats and then the final path should be an adhesive tacky mat. We recommend a dark blue adhesive tacky mat so that's the black entrance. You've removed the footboard contamination and you've restricted a lot of the headboard contamination. What we mean when we say the blue area of the gown room as you open the door you're physically in the gown room you can't walk all the way through the gown room because there's a bench in the middle. Let's just imagine that I’m sitting on that bench I’m on the blue side and to my side is the white side. So what I'm going to do is well I'm seated on the bench I’m going to put on my shoe covers and after I put on my shoe covers my feet are going too only touch on the white side so that it is between the blue side and the white side of the gowning room is the demarcation is the bench and on this side I have me shoe covers. So once my shoe covers are on I commenced with my garment systems with my gloves in my face mask at that point I walk on one final tacky mat which is most commonly white and I opened the door to the air shower and voila I’m in my clean room. So that's what we mean when we say is your clean room counting system black, blue and white. You should have 3 marked areas to make sure you mitigate the possibility of outside contamination passing through into your critical clean environment.