Enzymes and 140 million barrels of oil ...

First - this is not a janitorial post - I rarely editrialize, but this was too tempting.

So,

It looks like the BP oil spill will be yesterdays news in about 8 hours.

Or maybe already ?

A few irreverent observations before it passes into what passes for history.

1) I grew up as a 'conservationist' - a precursor to environmentalists. A conservationist is a rural resident who believes in things like crop rotation (soybeans and alfalfa - we grew both - put nitrogen back into the soil with no help from Monsanto - which produces more corn in subsequent years), contour plowing, terracing etc.

2) My brother used to design refineries for Exxon.

3) A roommate, a best friend from high school, and a best friend from grad school all have run or designed nuclear power plants.

4) I've been doing urban conservationist things (my home heating bill is about $100 per month on a pretty big house up here in the arctic in January) since Popular Science showed us how to fight back to the first Arab attacks on my country in the '70's.

So I'm reasonably "in context" on a lot of environmental issues.

That said - the BP spill is at best, a tempest in a teapot.

Why ?

Well, how much oil is 140,000,000 million gallons, really ? (that's the best guess at the total volume put into the gulf per Google at noon today)

Q: Well how many gallons are there in an Olympic sized swimming pool ?

A: 650,000 - per Google a couple of weeks ago.

Q: How many Olympic sized swimming pools is that ?

A: For those of you with no calculator option on your (pre 1978) computer, about 200.

Q: How many Olympic sized swimming pools big is the gulf, now that we have created a new unit of measure ?

A: A lot.

Q: Stop toying with me !!

A: A square mile would contain about 90 * 30 Olympic swimming pools - 2700 in total.

Q: So the gulf spill is about 1 tenth of 1 square mile ?

A: Kind of.

Q: Que ?

A: Well the spill is in 5000 feet of water - 200 + Olympic swimming pools deep - so if it were contained in a column (which it is not) it would be about 1 Olympic swimming pool wide - top to bottom - which, again, it is not.


Q: When will you get to the enzyme part ?

A: Later.

Q: So .......

A: So, the Gulf is maybe 600 miles by 1000 miles in area - 600,000 square miles - and some very large number of cubic miles. The 'swimming pools' version of the oil spill - 7 feet deep (.001+ miles deep) by .1 miles square is a volume too small to calculate - at least in the context of the Gulf. You will need a calculator with a very large number of decimal places to do the ratio calculation after that.

Q: And ...........

A: Thank you for asking. The light crude coming out (good television that it is) was described by an oil geologist at Columbia University on NPR as having the viscosity of prune juice ( as opposed to Alberta and Venezuela oil which comes out at the viscosity of tapioca).

Q: Why is this relevant ?

A: Because before the enzymes can do their magic the oil is exposed to 90 degree heat in the Gulf - what happens to gasoline if you put a glass full of it out in 90 degree heat ?

Q: I'll bite .........

A: Try it sometime - there will be nothing left if you put a pan of gas out in your driveway in the tropics after about 48 hours. It'll be in the air - a different environmental problem, but it won't mess up your beaches.

Q: But oil is not all gasoline is it ?

A: On average - 55 % - but this is light crude - so maybe 60 % or 70 %.

Q: OK - so we have a percentage of the Gulf too small to be measured - 60 % of it will evaporate, and ..... the rest ...........

A: Hopefully the enzymes will eat it (the Christian Science Monitor has a great article on this today, which triggered this post) -

Remember - the Gulf has 7000 wells already, and lots of space full of oil still to be drilled - and the ground around the wells (remember the Beverly Hillbillies?) has been leaking oil into the Gulf for millions of year - and enzymes have been happily metabolizing the heavier components. The Gulf is an ideal environment for enzyme bacteria - hot and moist.

Q: Finally -

A: Tar balls - if the enzymes can't eat it up in time it turns into the famous tarballs and floats around till it hits a beach. But how much of this has happened yet ? And as the days go by and the enzymes have time to do their work - the problem will continue to diminish.

Cool huh ?

Oh - and

Q: Why was the Exxon Valdez such a big deal ?

Option A - Exxon is evil incarnate ?

Option B - Enzymes need heat to work - the Alaskan fiords have no warm water.

I leave that one to you.

Oh and

Q: postscript # 2 - how much oil is 140 million gallons ?

A: We in the US use 22 million barrels per day - 880,000,000 gallons or so - 140,000,000 gallons is about 4 hours supply.

Bob

8/3/10 - Update.

NPR was talking about the impact on the "dead zone" where the Mississippi River dumps fertilizer runoff into the gulf and drives out or kills ALL aquatic life except the algae and bacteria that like fertilizer.

It's a record this year because of high levels of runoff in the midwest / torrential rains after the fields were fertilized.

It is the size of Massachusetts - it stretches all the way to Galveston Bay.

Massachusetts is 10,500 square miles.

In swimming pools - that's really a lot, to use my unit of measure above.

A mile is about 1500 meters by 1500 meters.

An olympic swimming pool is 15 meters by 50 meters - something like 3000 or so to a square mile.

Times 10,000 square miles is 30,000,000 swimming pools - except that the dead zone goes all the way to the bottom - at which point the math becomes absurd -

Why ?

Beef.

And pork - corn is raised primarily as animal fodder - tho now a lot of it goes (temporarily) into ethanol production as well, and some goes to sweeten Coca Cola, et al.

And liberal fertilizer application maximizes the per acre production of corn (as well as the per swimming pool growth of algae.)

Hence, if you care about the gulf, stop ranting about BP and become a vegetarian.

Sorry guys - but at the end the BP publicity is yet another issue of the urgent preempting the important.

Supposedly, by the way, our Minnesota River is the largest single point source of the runoff hitting the gulf - haven't seen data on this for a few years - but I'm sure it's still in the top 3.

Bob

"No Touch" commercial cleaning in bathrooms.

There are two pieces to "no touch"

The article below discusses both. It's only 2 pages of big type - won't take you long.

The first piece describes architectural features of bathrooms such as air dryers, laser activated no touch faucets, toilets, urinals, and laser activated towel dispensers.

Pretty rare to see a high volume restroom - restaurants and bars for instance - without at least the laser activated hand towels any more.

This is not because they are seeking "green" customers, nor is it because they are particularly concerned about the reducing touchpoints to reduce flu.

Rather these devices cut down paper and water consumption.

If you have a high usage restroom you can get a payback almost immediately on the paper towel holders, pretty quickly on fixtures and hand dryers if it is initial construction, and reasonably soon if it is a retrofit where you have to get rid of existing fixtures and controls.

The economic benefits of "green", like any new technology, are first noticed in niche applications - bathrooms are one of the ones where "green" investments can already be "free" in selected situations.

The second piece, where our Peter Sheldon - VP Operations - Corporate - is quoted, refers to janitors cleaning bathrooms (and other tiled or concrete areas) with a pressure washer and a wet vac instead of mops and wipes.

No matter how high quality your mops and wipes are, and no matter what disinfectants you use, and no matter how disciplined you are at changing water, removing soil with anything but a wet vac allows at least the possibility of moving contaminants around and cross contamination.

We use the Kaivac ( website ) version of this technology - the most established version in the commercial cleaning industry - tho there are imitators now - in high soil areas. It's also appropriate where there are immune compromised occupants of the facility.

It's pretty cool.

Article

Bob

Team Cleaning

Peter Sheldon wrote this one a month ago.

It's been written in various forms many times in my 20 plus years reading the commercial cleaning trade periodicals.

RE: Team Cleaning

Most buildings with an open floor plan and contiguous spaces are more efficiently cleaned by "teams" of janitors.

I figured this out independently while running commercial cleaning crews in 150,000 sq ft and 400,000 sq ft facilities in the '80's.

Hence I have always built my default pricing productivities for team cleaning - and lowered the productivities (raised the prices) where the building footprint did not lend itself to team cleaning.

The industry rarely debates this issue anymore - but there was a fair amount of back and forth in the '90's. Today, however, everybody is pretty much workloading janitors with team cleaning except in unusual layouts or odd security situations - jails, cash rooms, pharmacy storage, etc, when you need to limit access to the fewest number of janitors possible.

Coverall collectively has arrived at team cleaning level productivities in the last 3 or 4 years, so the rest of the system is now more or less at competitive productivities to the national commercial cleaning contractors.

(Apologies in advance if the link loads funny / slow - you can also go to the May issue of Cleaning and Maintenance magazine and pull it up there)

Bob

Biologically and Oxygen based cleaners - 'greenest of the green'

The link below is an article in this months issue of Contracting Profits, one of the several commercial cleaning industry trade journals.

It describes in detail :

- Oxygen based cleaners including :

- Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) based cleaners

- Cavitation based "bubble" technology like Tenant's and Activeion's

- Ozone in water solution.

- Plant derived cleaners including :

- Citrus (D-limolene included)

- Other plant based - primarily soy oil as a substitute for petroleum bases.

Article

The article says it better than I could - but a couple of observations.

Cavitation has been around in specialized applications for 20 years. Electrosonic blind cleaning tubs are the application we in the janitorial industry are most familiar with. However you can't run your ceramic tile floor thru one of these tubs. A few years ago Tennant corporation came up with a chemical free auto scrubber that uses cavitation. In the last 2 years a startup called Activeion has further reduced the size of the bubble chamber to something larger than a Windex sized spray bottle - and it is now portable enough to use to clean a mirror or fixture in a bathroom or an entry door.

We are using the technology - the start up cost is a little higher (about $300 per spray bottle vs $ .60 or so) - but the $ 0 chemical costs can make you whole pretty quickly in a large building with a 4 hour bathroom run.

We're also standardizing our start up janitorial franchisees on H2O2 products - our tests indicate comparable cleaning capability vs regular detergents, and the safety and OSHA MSDS compliance advantages of having one chemical that is so safe as to be almost drinkable are persuasive in our type of operation.

Citrus has been around in specialty products for years also - in particular mastic removers and carpet gum removers. It works. Was never really preferred for general floor cleaning etc as was unnecessary - existing (but less green products) worked fine. We haven't costed it out vs detergent based cleaners for daily commercial cleaning applications like floors and bathrooms, but I'm guessing costs are not so different as to preclude us from using citrus based cleaners.

Bob