Sustainable Business of the Year 2026 - Portsmouth Business Awards
Our Story
Founded in 2010. Sustainability by Design from the very first day. Commercial cleaning since 2012, starting with one building at Lakeside North Harbour.
Founded in 2010. Sustainability by Design from the very first day. Commercial cleaning since 2012, starting with one building at Lakeside North Harbour.
In 2012, Highcross appointed a Portsmouth company called Eco Drift to run a car valeting service at Lakeside North Harbour. They chose Eco Drift specifically for its quality and for its products that significantly reduced water waste on site. That appointment, on sustainability grounds, was the beginning of a relationship with Lakeside that has now lasted over a decade through three different ownerships.
When a client at Lakeside suffered a flood that same year, Eco Drift applied the same approach to cleaning their commercial building. The results were good enough to pivot the business entirely. Eco Drift Commercial Cleaning was born from that moment, with the same sustainability-first principle that had attracted Highcross in the first place.
"Our environmentally-friendly, biodegradable car cleaning products dissolve the dirt, providing safe and scratch-free car cleaning and polishing, using no more than 7oz of water. Our service is ideal for this location, providing a quick, efficient and high quality car cleaning and polishing service, for people working at the Lakeside offices as well as visitors to the Park."
Antoni Dimitrov, Director, Eco Drift. As quoted in Lakeside North Harbour, Highcross property publication, circa 2012.
Antoni arrived in the UK and founded Eco Drift in 2010 with a waterless car wash service, and Sustainability by Design has been the operating principle from that point. Today the company serves 90+ client sites across Hampshire, Berkshire and West Sussex, delivered 46,000+ service hours and 22,500 shifts in 2025, and was named Sustainable Business of the Year 2026 at the Portsmouth Business Awards.
We are Curators of Clean Spaces. We do not employ cleaners and we do not hire supervisors: our team members take ownership of their environments and our Team Leaders have real authority. We built our own technology, Shiftomate® for real-time field management and Proximetrix for sensor-driven cleaning, because no existing tool gave clients genuine accountability.
As a triathlete who trains daily, Antoni applies the same philosophy to business that drives his performance in sport. He measures heart rate, power output, lactate threshold, recovery scores, and CO2 during training because he knows that marginal gains, the small and consistent improvements that compound over time, are the difference between good and exceptional. That obsession with measurable performance and actionable data is what inspired Proximetrix, and it is the same thinking that sits behind Shiftomate's real-time monitoring. You cannot improve what you cannot measure. That principle runs through everything Eco Drift does.
Antoni is a triathlete who trains daily. In 2025 he cycled London to Brighton for the British Heart Foundation and abseiled the Spinnaker Tower for the Royal Navy and Royal Marines Charity. These are not corporate activities. They reflect the same values Eco Drift is built on: showing up, doing the difficult thing, and supporting the people who need it.