Green.org sat down with Robert Slingsby, the founder of Viking Pure, to learn about why he set out to create sustainable and natural cleaning solutions.
Tell us a little bit about you and your background:
After graduating from Fordham Law School with a couple of academic achievements, I became a trial lawyer for approximately two decades where I headed up a firm in NYC. I worked primarily in medical malpractice, personal injury and commercial real estate litigation. It was in medical malpractice that I saw the carnage wreaked by superbugs.
I left the practice of law to pursue business in the medical and real estate fields and ultimately forged a partnership with Joshua Schwartz, easily the most talented and overall decent individual whom I have had the pleasure of knowing and working with. Together we built an extremely successful real estate and medical network. Thereafter we had a “germ” of an idea given what we had seen occurring in our dealings with hospitals and in our own medical business.
The overuse of antibiotics was proving disastrous to society as more than 100,000 people per year were dying from exposure to superbugs and millions more becoming ill. Our own MDs were contracting superbugs! I am extremely lucky to be part of a partnership with Josh, who is leading Viking in a highly humanistic way to new frontiers in sustainable technologies that protect the environment, improve health outcomes, and ultimately save many lives.
During our travels through the medical world, Josh and I have come across many extraordinary people who we have brought in as partners at Viking Pure, including Dan Lawson among others. We are blessed to collaborate with individuals like Dan who share our mission to rid the world of toxic chemicals.
Personally, I am extraordinarily proud of the family my wife of 40 years and I have created. We have two sons, one of whom is a business founder himself, who, with his wonderful wife, has given us four grandchildren. The other, also a law school graduate like myself, has joined the Viking Pure mission, lending his diligence, kindness, moderating influence, and intellect every day to help make this company an industry leader.
What is a fun fact about you?
I play chess blindfolded! My friends tell me I should play golf that way for a better excuse.
Why do you think climate change and sustainability is such an important topic today?
Our species has occupied this planet for a relatively infinitesimal percentage of its existence and for the most part we have lived in the dark concerning threats to ourselves – some self-created and some external. As our knowledge base has grown recently (and exponentially) – with gratitude to the scientific method and enormous strides in technology and medicine – our awareness of the dangers posed by climate change, environmental destruction, carcinogenic substances and instigators, and potentially lethal pathogens has increased simultaneously.
We at Viking Pure have devoted our mission to reducing some of these ubiquitous threats through our patented green, non-corrosive processes that affect everyone’s daily lives with a significantly sustainable environmental impact while at the same time promoting the overall wellbeing of humanity.
How? Every day all of us use or are exposed to chemical cleaners and sanitizers to keep our businesses, institutions, schools, hospitals, homes – just about everything and anything you can think of – clean and free of dangerous germs. Dangerous pathogens are lurking everywhere including the proliferation of superbugs in hospitals and we are now learning of their presence in other facilities and even in the home.
The CDC and WHO have pronounced these pathogens the greatest threat to our species. Even more dangerous ones are on the horizon – like prions which cause human wasting disease, a painful fate to be devoutly avoided. For the most part we combat these pathogens with harsh chemicals. At the end of the day, these chemicals end up in our water supplies and are often of questionable efficacy at best.
Not only do these chemicals impact the quality of water but also negatively impact aquatic life. Further, pathogens can develop adaptive resistance to these chemicals, are unaffected and continue to harm. Moreover, many of these chemicals are carcinogenic and/or toxic. Cancer is the scourge of recent generations. No wonder. Each day in untold quantities these harsh toxins pour into the water we drink and bathe in, expose us to their carcinogenic composition in our own personal and work environments and fail in many cases to accomplish their mission.
Workers and the public should no longer be exposed to these chemicals. The dangers to health are all too apparent and have been highlighted by injury after injury, study after study and lawsuit after lawsuit. Through science and technology, we at Viking Pure are proud to have accomplished the three important and necessary goals to which we all strive through our patented, salt free, and non-corrosive process.
Simply put:
1. The Viking Cleaning and Sanitizing Solutions are EPA approved (even for hospital use), GreenSeal certified, non-toxic and far more powerful than even bleach.
2. Viking Pure Disinfectant can make bactericidal, virucidal, fungicidal and blood borne pathogen claims, thus a microbial clean environment may be created.
3. Sustainability is achieved in multiple ways. Our water supply is improved when our green solutions become part of it.
Moreover, given our equipment construct, one need never worry about running out of the solution during a crisis or pandemic. The machine construct eliminates the need for plastic bottle delivery and permits reuse of a limited bottle supply. The use of electrostatic sprayers for disinfectant application also reduces the need for plastics. Also given on site production, reduced transportation benefits the environment in multiple aspects.
As an aside, hypochlorous acid (HOCl) – the active ingredient in our sanitizing solution – is the killing agent that is produced when our water supply is treated with chlorine. We add more HOCl to the water supply when our product is used while simultaneously replacing toxic cleaners and sanitizers.
What do you envision your industry looking like 10 years from now?
Within a ten-year cycle, populations will be forced to become more educated on how to protect themselves and their environment due to the rapid proliferation of existing and new dangerous pathogens. The virology community predicts the emergence of several “superbugs” that will dwarf the threats posed by COVID – both in scope and severity.
At the same time, a variety of cancers will continue to besiege populations and the causes thereof will be recognized through science. While immunology with genetic therapies will bring us more effective treatment methods, through education again we will seek to eliminate or reduce causes. In both areas, non-toxic and non-carcinogenic solutions will be sought after and embraced.
This cycle has begun through the green revolution and prioritization of sustainability. The processes and materials used for cleaning and disinfecting will migrate to the Viking Pure model, which will impact various markets such as food, agriculture, healthcare, etc. to reduce and even eliminate dangerous pathogens and to reduce cancer causing agents by replacing toxic chemicals used in everyday work and even household environments.
What can the average person do to make a difference?
Caring is the first step to making a better world for the planet. Embracing, in a thoughtful way, solutions to the problems we face is the second. Action is the third and validates the first. We invite you to join us in caring.
Robert, thanks for sharing your passion and success for creating natural cleaning solutions.
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