What is the Most Important Cleanroom Consumable?

Do you ever wonder what the most important cleanroom consumable is? Well Greg has an answer for you! They are all important, there is no specific one that is better than another. Each cleanroom consumable works with other consumables to protect your environment and products from contamination. It is really important to note that you will get the best protection when all of your consumables are of the same grade, such as macrotek, microtek, and nanotek. It is also important to note that not all consumables are held to the same standard. For example, a blue nitril glove will not be as clean as a white one. Therefore, it would not be suitable for cleanroom use. To learn more about cleanroom consumable importance, watch the video below! 

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Transcript:
Hi, I'm Greg Heiland and welcome to my weekly video blog, Critical Tips. This week I'll respond to an inquiry that was posed at an onsite Cleanroom and Best Practices seminar that I recently conducted. The inquiry was “what is the most important cleanroom consumable? What consumable should I be most concerned with? Should it be my garments selection? Should it be my gloves selection? Should it be my wiper selection? Give me some insights in terms of what's most important.” Well I'm going to answer that question rather directly, with the response they're all equally important. The reason why they're all equally important is all of your gloves, garments, wipers, they all form a system a system that all interlinked. A good glove with a bad garment will still have a bad outcome. So let me share what I mean by that. Let’s first let's look at a wiper example. This is a polyester wiper and if you look closely at the edge treatment of this wiper this wiper has a pressure heat seal edge. The benefit of a pressure heat seal, alleges no particles can be released from it. So this wiper is clearly a very low particle and a very clean wiper. Let's look at a garment selection this fabric it is what we call an engineered fabric. The reason why we call it an engineered fabric is you'll note right within the fiber there is carbon filament the reason for the carbon filament is to ensure that the garment is ESD safe. Very clean garments ESD-safe garment then. Let's talk briefly about glove choices. Although these gloves both look the same, they're both nitro. This is a lab glove and this is a clean room love this club has a longer cuff so it's going to fit over a garment, but more importantly, there's no dye or pigment in this glove. The dye and pigment in this glove is the weak link in this criteria. In blue dye nitrile gloves are not an uncommon occurrence in a medical device clean rooms. Why do people use them? They just don't know any better. But a blue cleanroom glove is really not compatible in the cleanroom. The reason for that is the blue pigment can and will leach out the blue pigment. This affects the tensile strength, the elasticity in the chemical compatibility, but the biggest concern is blue nitrile is not clean room compatible. So to answer the question what's most important is that the wiper and the glove is that the garment. They're really all equally important because it does little good to be using a great wiper and have a very rigorous garment system when that you have a glove that is going to cause potential contamination. Thank you.