While Michigan restaurants this week finally obtained the green light to resume indoor dining, albeit at a dramatically reduced 25-percent capacity, a long time St. Joe manufacturer is working around the clock to produce a completely different type of light that could someday preclude the hospitality industry from ever having to close down indoor dining again.
Bill Carle, Jr. is working to gain government support and safety guidelines for the unique lighting products his team has developed for the restaurant and hotel industry employing special virus-killing UV sterilization technology that could revolutionize the safety and protection of hospitality patrons everywhere, among many other practical applications in public settings.
Carle, who was the third-generation leader of Lakeshore Studios, a high-end domestic lighting manufacturer founded in Chicago back in 1954 and relocated to St. Joseph, later launched Stonegate Designs in 1998 to challenge industry standards, much as he is doing today. Stonegate quickly earned the 20th Annual Arts Award for the leading lighting fixture manufacturer in the industry, crafting those designs in the Stonegate Park business and medical complex off the intersection of Maiden Lane and Hollywood Road.
Carle and Stonegate gained a significant foothold in the hospitality industry by becoming a build-to-spec lighting source for major hoteliers, restaurateurs and others in the industry. Now, he’s working to save that industry and others from the scourge of the coronavirus pandemic by developing lighting that actually destroys the virus.
He tells me that over the past seven months, his new commercial lighting company, Illume Global, has been vetting, and is now partnering with a company called Sterilray which holds the patents and makes whey they feel is “the best technology for killing airborne pathogens on contact.” It kills airborne viruses, including coronaviruses, by breaking down their molecular structure.
Carle says, “As studies have shown, coronaviruses are transmitted primarily through the air, moreso than on surfaces. The technology is called ‘Safe-UV’ or ‘Far-UV,’ and was invented more than 10-years ago by Sterilray.” He adds, “It was introduced to us by our science advisor and renowned airborne infectious disease specialist, Dr. Ed Nardell of the Harvard School of Public Health, which is part of the Harvard Medical School.”
Carle contends, “Our technology is the only technology that is safe for human exposure and kills the virus in 1/8th of one second by line of sight. So to give you an example, if you were to put one in your office there, I could sit almost on top of you and we can cough on each other, sneeze on each other, it doesn’t matter, it’s killed instantly.” He explains, “The base technology is really pretty sophisticated, but essentially what we do is we take two chloride and Krypton gases and we fill a tube and then we charge it with a lot of power and create photons out of the gases that emit out of a quartz tube, and essentially anywhere that is within a line of sight becomes safe.”
Saying “Everybody recognizes, this is going to be essentially a major ticket to controlling the virus and moving on,” Carle’s team at Illume Global will be the original equipment manufacturer for decorative lighting fixtures and retrofit applications, and will also help scale and get the word out to the real estate, hospitality and development worlds.
The St. Joe entrepreneur says, “We recently met with Hilton’s top corporate engineers, who think this might be their ‘silver bullet.” He adds, “Fidelity Investments has already awarded Sterilray a contract to create a safer environment for the firm’s 12-million square foot portfolio, and we are also introducing the technology on an original equipment manufacturing basis to companies such as Big Ass Fans, Whirlpool, Stryker, Hillrom, and DaVinci Robotics to name a few.”
The excitement for Carle and his partners in the project, Jeff Kovacs from Lighting Enterprises LED of Detroit, and Steve Machiorlette, founder and managing partner of Worth Home Products of Houston, is palpable, as Carle suggests, “We are at the forefront of a transformation in the hospitality industry, and quite frankly will be one of the main platforms that not only saves the industry, but provides a platform that will allow businesses to operate during inevitable events like this (the pandemic) in the future.”
With new coronavirus variants bursting onto the scene, Carle says the technology is gaining the eye of the medical community, and says, “After talking to DaVinci Robotics and Stryker Medical we all are going to converge technology and create flexible platforms that don’t get us in this position (of extended shutdowns and restrictions) ever again, and that’s the goal.”
While Carle has been pretty quiet on the local scene in recent years, he says he wants people to know that help is on the way. He tells me, “Even when I go into Airwae Barbershop in downtown St. Joe when I’m in town and sit down, everybody always asks, “What’s going on in the lighting world and when I tell my barber about this technology, he’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, we’ve got to have that now!’” Carle cautions, however, “The sad thing about it is the big guys are going to get it first. The Whirlpool’s and Hilton corporates.”
He wonders, rhetorically, “How clean is clean enough and what is your responsibility as a corporation to make sure the small independents are able to gain access to this and that’s a big challenge. How do we get Airwae Barbershop, or the local restaurants a unit?” He goes on to say, “I mean literally they could be at full capacity for occupancy with these UV lighting devices, and it’s so exciting. It’s at the very beginning of the bubble.”
Illume Global continues to go through all of the due diligence to assure safe operations, and Carle admits, “We’d love to see Michigan government embrace this, especially given Governor Whitmer’s constraints on restaurants as a huge hurdle. If she knew about this technology, she’d be like ‘Get it in and let’s open everybody up tomorrow,’ I mean that it would be that quick.”
Regarding the ongoing vetting process, Carle says, We’re looking probably at about two to three months before a safety statement can be made. Anybody can buy the product right now, but it’s expensive, and liability is somewhat of an issue even though it will come out as being deemed safer than sitting in front of your window, at your computer, but it’s going to be about three months before that safety statement is made.”
Once the safety clearance issue is resolved, the process is expected to gain traction quickly, with the Illume team looking at implementation from an infrastructure standpoint, starting to take hold pretty quickly in 2021. In fact, Carle says, “We’re actually, as we speak, making prototypes in the factory off of Hollywood Road there at the Stonegate factory site, the first round of what we call the 100-watt sconce version, but there will be several different sizes depending on the area of coverage desired by the establishment deploying the special lighting fixtures for a safe environment all around.”
Illume Global is a full-service manufacturer of high quality, made-to-spec lighting fixtures designed to meet any need from a large and complicated lobby chandelier to a simple guest room table lamp. Their clientele has ranged from major brands like Hilton, Marriott, Double Tree, Hyatt, and Harrah’s to Disney, Starbucks, Einstein Noodles and such major properties as the MGM, Mandalay Bay, Mirage, Golden Nugget and Wynn in Las Vegas.
Interested parties can reach Bill Carle, Jr. by email at bcarle@illumeglobal.com.
Stay tuned for more as Illume and Sterilray move the ball down the field.
