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

Green Cleaning - Alphabet soup

While there are 100's of certifications for commercial cleaning chemicals, here are some the primary ones:

1) ASTM = American Society for Testing and Materials. This has nothing per se to do with green cleaning. Rather it is the standards for effectiveness of cleaning agents. Various green cleaning certifications will however reference it as one of several ways to verify that their green certified cleaning agents actually work. Their standards predate green cleaning, but are incorporated in various green certifications. This is relevant only in that in the early days of green chemicals 15 years ago we couldn't get the darn stuff to clean. Modern certification requires efficacy as well as environmental friendliness.

2) CGSB = Same concept - the Canadian General Standards Board awards CGSB certifications of effectiveness that are also generally acceptable as demonstrating the efficacy of green certified cleaners.

3) DfE = Design for the the Environment. This is the Environmental Protection Agency's green certification. Probably the gold standard of certifications - more so than Ecologic or Green Seal (below). Will require one of the above certifications of efficacy in addition to requiring low environmental impact.

4) Ecologic CCD's = Usually people will refer to Ecologic directly but the underlying standards are "Certification Criteria Documents" issued by the Canadian Government since 1988. We are usually 20 years behind the Europeans and 15 years behind the Canadians in many areas of culture (ex TV and Hollywood) and this has been around since 1988. Europe - in particular Germany - have been aggressively "green" for decades - we are only now catching up.

5) GS37, GS40, etc = Green Seal. Probably the most common currently. GS37 is pretty innocuous stuff - not quite drinkable, but pretty harmless to the environment. GS40 are a little harsher - disinfectants can be certified as GS40 - but still a much less environmentally active formulation than the stuff from 20 years ago.

6) CCR = California Code of Regulations certifications. Also acceptable in lieu of GS## certification in LEED certification applications. Our P and G partner products are CCR certified but not - last time I looked - Green Seal or Ecologic certified.

7) CRI = Carpet and Rug Institute certification for vacuum cleaners and carpet cleaning chemicals. Generally under 70 decibels with hepa filters. Out Pro -Team partner vacuums meet these standards.

Bob

Green Cleaning - proliferation of certifying entities

Linked (I hope) is an article from Cleaning and Maintenance Management's web magazine re the proliferation and credibility or lack thereof of.

link

To quote - "There are roughly 600 environmental certifications worldwide - 80 alone in the United States ........"

And goes on to say, among other things that 98% of products making green claims do not meet any reasonable definition of at least substantiating that they are in fact green.

We standardize on products that have verified that they meet standards like Green Seal 37, Green Seal 40, California Code of Regulations, etc from reputable companies like P and G - and can provide back up to interested customers - but the signal to noise ratio in "Green" is a bit overwhelming in the rest of the cleaning world.

Bob

Productivity in commercial janitorial - Peter Sheldon

Here's Peter Sheldon on commercial cleaning productivity.

He's our corporate VP of operations and our chief technical officer.

article

Covers briefly several things that have become mainstream (at least with Coverall janitorial franchisees) that provide both higher productivities and superior soil removal - a rare win - win.

Bob

Microfiber - recent health based cleaning implementation

We standardized on micro fiber mops, along with much of the commercial cleaning industry, for medical cleaning several years ago. Micro fiber's superior soil pickup re the objective of disinfecting and having the disinfectant effect persist longer because of less residual soil for pathogens to "eat" / live in is widely documented.

We also rolled it out to most non medical accounts and virtually all new accounts as well as part of our "cleaning for health" strategic thrust.

We started a relatively large medical facility recently. They'd been cleaned for years by an independent janitorial service who had been given passing grades and had been cleaning with conventional dust mops and mops.

We were amazed at the amount of dust pickup in the first day. Had the laundries going full blast - re laundered a weeks worth of micro fiber. This is a high needs customer that stated an at least modest level of satisfaction with the incumbent janitor service - and yet .......... Pretty good proof of concept - a little more dramatic feedback than we usually get.

Bob.

Carpet Cleaning - How to deal with Wicking - # 2

Was doing some research on wicking and ran across a carpet cleaning process I hadn't seen.

Basically the manufacturer of this product (Ban - Clene - a very well known carpet cleaning chemicals vendor) claims that they have an encapsulation product that will dissolve the soils still resident in the carpet underlayers to a powder that will eventually come out with repeated vacuuming.

Haven't tried it - but if you have a wicking problem and it works as advertised it would be a heck of a lot easier than the "total war" per my prior post on the subject.

Let's see if I am mastering the art of linking - else the search criteria follow also.

Bane-Clene® Pro’s Choice ARA Anti-Resoiling Anti Wicking Agent

www.baneclene.com/articles/wicking.html

Bob