A Mobile Waterless Car-Washing Franchise Takes Off

Early this year, when Craig Boyko ran across the website for Greenshine, a mobile, waterless car-washing franchise, he didn’t take the concept seriously. He thought the fact that it sold itself as a premium service, charging more than the typical wash, seemed strange.

Boyko, who is vice president of a recycling company near Baltimore that processes 72 million pounds of scrap metal per year, was searching for a business that he and his wife could eventually pass on to their children. «We were looking for something low-cost that we could do together,» he says. «And car washes have always interested both of us. But traditional car washes are really expensive to start up.»

Despite his doubts, Craig looked deeper into Greenshine. The process was created by Juan Pablo Sagastume, a Miami-based inventor who spent years perfecting an environmentally friendly proprietary cleaning fluid he calls Protec Smart Liquid.

As Boyko learned more about the Greenshine process, he was blown away.

«I was completely skeptical [at first],» he says. «I thought, How can you get a car clean without water and by just spraying a solution? How do you do the interior?

Well, there are different solutions for the wheels and for the interior carpet. You spray on the liquid and wipe it off with one rag to collect the dirt and wipe with another to get off the residual solution. All the dirt ends up on the rags. You go through lots of rags, especially if you get your car as dirty as my wife does. But the process is a couple steps above a regular car wash.»

The demo was enough to convince Boyko to buy into Greenshine in early 2012, and now he’s making a go of the business with a territory that covers central Maryland. We checked in with him to see how the green-clean revolution is catching on.