BSI Cleaning: not so clean after all

BSI Cleaning has existed since October 2014. Simon Tritz, the CEO, is a former Ceratizit employee who started his own business. Since 2017, the company has been housed in hall 3B of the Technoport in Foetz. In order to benefit from rents below the market price, around 6,000 euros per month, as well as from the Technoport's ecosystem, a four-month long process must be validated and passed before an evaluation committee. Subsequently, according to Diego De Biasio, site director, the team is mainly concerned with verifying that the entities have an activity and a substance, which is the case for BSI Cleaning. The latter is part of Luxinnovation's Materials & Manufacturing cluster, which mentions working ‘regularly’ with the company.

The clients displayed on the website are big names (Oberweis, Renault, Ceratizit, ArcelorMittal), nothing that could arouse the slightest suspicion. During our visit to the workshop, everything is quiet. We barely see two employees who quickly scurry off into the offices. Simon Tritz explains to us then that the company went from 7 to 3 employees in January, “with regret”, the fault of the crisis and customers who don't pay, according to the boss. He shows his two flagship processes, the production of dry ice on a pelletizer (he declares that another machine is in maintenance), but also a ‘cryo 3D’ disinfection process by fumigation. A bit of dry ice, disinfectant and you are good to go, according to Simon Tritz who leases his machines to about fifty customers abroad and half a dozen in Luxembourg.

No patents, no certified solutions

Regarding ‘cryo 3D’, his website mentions “a patented system” and proven effectiveness: “The elimination of bacteria, fungicides and viruses has been verified and validated by analysis in a specialised laboratory”. Two problems, however: Simon Tritz explains that he has not filed a patent, at most an ‘e-depo’ (a kind of safe for depositing concepts and ideas) on a part of the machine. Concerning the laboratory, it gets a little tricky too. The LLuCS (Laboratoire luxembourgeois de contrôle sanitaire) ended up dissociating itself from the company during an exchange of emails: “Concerning the publication mentioning the LLuCS laboratory as having certified the effectiveness of their disinfection system: This statement is erroneous and implies a misinterpretation of the tests we carried out before and after disinfection. We are not a certification laboratory, but we carry out samples and analysis”, writes Cyrille Blettner, Manager and Technical Director of LLuCS. The next day, BSI Cleaning effectively removed all references to LLuCS from its site. Deemed to have been deceived by BSI Cleaning's statements, a leasing operator in Luxembourg has since terminated its contract with the company.