OBSERVATION: High contact areas such as escalator handrail belts are groped by millions daily and are a breeding ground for germs; in Hong Kong armies of cleaners have been deployed in an ad hoc manner to manually clean select escalators with suspect rags and buckets of watery disinfectant.
SOLUTION: Install automatic sterilization devices to more reliably disinfect existing escalator hand rails and minimize labor costs. Better yet, invent a rubberized material that completely repels microorganisms.
There are over 10,000 escalators in use throughout Hong Kong, which are groped by millions on a daily basis. Do the hordes of escalator cleaners who stand motionless at one end, mindlessly manually wiping escalator handrails with a suspect rag and bucket of watery “disinfectant,” actually do an effective job of cleaning these handrails? Or might this even result in a more even distribution of germs along the entire length of the handrail belt?
Could these cleaners be put to more productive use in our society? Could automatic disinfecting machines save labor costs and more effectively sanitize high contact surfaces in an era of widespread infectious diseases in highly-populated environments? Provided that the efficacy of these devices can be proven, could the Government subsidize building owners and management companies in mandating the installation of automatic disinfection units on all of the city’s escalators to ensure a consistent and higher level of hygiene?
Going one step further, could new escalator handrail belts simply be manufactured using a new rubberized antimicrobial material that would be incapable of harboring microorganisms in the first place? Could public and private funding be allocated to the research and development of such a material, which could potentially have a global impact on disease prevention and highlight Hong Kong as a center for innovation?