Brothers sanitize sports equipment, want to help with N95 masks
Adam and Mark Rice could literally smell the need for the company they started 3½ years ago.
BroZone, which initially specialized in deodorizing and sanitizing sports equipment and has since begun disinfecting indoor spaces, started because the Rice brothers heard the same complaint from other sports parents: their kids’ equipment reeked, and somebody had to do something about it.
“We saw a void in the market,” Mark Rice said. “We thought, ‘Well, if someone’s not going to try and solve this problem, we need to get out in front of it.’”
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread — stressing doctors, nurses and other hospital employees and, in some places, causing a shortage in supplies — the two Brentwood natives and Jefferson Hills residents are eyeing another opportunity. They want to employ their ozone-based process to sanitize N95 face masks and safely allow for their reuse, then potentially take on a greater volume of work.
To do that, Mark Rice — a certified athletic trainer — said he has been contacting people he knows with the federal Food and
Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Small Business Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. He also has emailed a few health care providers, advertising BroZone’s services, although only Excela Health has responded, expressing a moderate amount of curiosity.
“That’s the frustrating part,” Mark Rice said. “We may potentially have a solution here, but we need to have it verified. Until I hear back from somebody, it’s just a waiting game.”
The process will work, insisted Adam Rice, who obtained his doctorate of pharmacy from Pitt and has coowned Spartan Pharmacy — which has grown to include three stores in the South Hills — since 2003.
“The ozone kills everything,” Adam Rice said. “It will work. The problem is we don’t have data on this specific virus [meaning the coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 illness]. But it’s a virus. It will work.” How does it work? Ozone is not a chemical or a drug, Adam Rice explained; it’s a gas molecule. The oxygen we breathe includes two oxygen atoms, expressed as O2. Ozone (O3) has three, with the extra atom considered a “free radical.” As an atom with a charge, it’s looking to “hop off.”
“It wants to mate up with something that will cancel its charge and make it neutral,” Adam Rice said.
To do that, it looks for bacteria, a virus, mold, fungus or anything with biological properties, he said. Essentially, it electrocutes whatever it contacts.
“It will absolutely work,” Adam Rice repeated. “The only question is how concentrated does [the ozone gas] have to be? And how long does it have to bake?”
When BroZone started, the Rice brothers purchased a box truck and installed an industrial-grade ozone generator inside it.
The generator, which itself looks like a big trunk, works by drawing in ambient air and employing an oxygen concentrator similar to those used by people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Once hit by an electrical current — ironically called a corona — the ozone gas is nearly ready, although proper concentration levels must be achieved.
Because ozone is an unstable molecule, the more heat that it’s exposed to, the more it wants to break apart. That’s why, on a hot summer day when the Rice brothers are sanitizing football equipment with their truck parked on hot asphalt, it may take 30 minutes of “baking” to get to 5 or 8 parts per million. In December, outside a hockey rink, the same result can be achieved in 10-12 minutes because the ozone is concentrated at 15 parts per million.
“It’s an inverse relationship,” Adam Rice explained.
The bonus is that the ozone gas doesn’t leave any sort of chemical residue. There’s no drying or chance for an allergic reaction.
“It is just a gas that electrocutes the microorganisms,” Adam Rice said.
And in this case, as the Rice brothers wait and hope for an opportunity to prove this on N95 masks — they would also like to try scrubs or other personal protective equipment — they don’t expect the result to change.
“We want to use the truck to prove the efficacy,” Adam Rice said. “But it isn’t proving the effectiveness [of ozone gas] against viruses.
It’s proving it against COVID-19. It’s a virus. It will die from electrocution just like every other virus.”
The Rice brothers aren’t alone, as this has become a trend around the United States, especially in Ohio and Michigan.
On March 29, the FDA approved the decontamination and reuse of N95 masks after requests from several states, including Ohio, where Gov. Mike DeWine used leverage from President Donald Trump to gain further authorization for Columbusbased Battelle Critical Care Decontamination System.
The FDA ultimately upgraded Battelle’s emergency-use authorization from partial to full. Now, by using vaporized hydrogen peroxide, Battelle can decontaminate up to 80,000 masks per day, up from an initial bar that was set at 10,000. Battelle will soon expand to Long Island, N.Y., and New York City, as well as Seattle and Washington D.C.
In the Bronson Hospital System along Michigan’s western border, ultraviolet light is being used to decontaminate masks.
“UV-C light has been demonstrated to kill both bacteria and viruses,” Bronson’s director of pharmacy, Troy Shirely, told WWMT-TV, the CBS affiliate in Kalamazoo, Mich. “The UV-C light process we are initiating at
Bronson will expose the masks to enough energy to destroy both bacteria and viruses, allowing us to reuse those masks and stretch our supply of this scarce resource.”
The technology BroZone uses differs from that of Battelle or Bronson, but it doesn’t appear to be any less effective.
While Adam and Mark Rice started out sanitizing sports equipment, that part of the business has slowed.
It has evolved to focus more on personal care and nursing homes, where Mark Rice will spray a liquid version of the disinfectant — the Environmental Protection Agency and CDC dictate concentrations there, too — on handrails, arm rests, light switches, wheelchairs and walkers, as well inside showers and restrooms.
By Mark Rice’s estimate, BroZone is already halfway toward matching the work it performed in all of 2019, with plenty more still to come.
“We’ve never been busier,” he said. “It’s crazy.”
Of course, the Rice brothers obviously wouldn’t mind if things got a little crazier.
“We really hope that, just using some simple common sense, that we could maybe work together with somebody to use this stuff,” Adam Rice said. “All we have to do is line it up and make it happen.”