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

Hand Sanitizers

Hand sanitizers have become, for want of a better word, epidemic.

OK - there is a better word - pervasive.

Basically there are two kinds - alcohol based and not alcohol based.

Alcohol kills most of the stuff we are interested in killing instantly.

Alcohol will also give you very scaly lizard like skin. Which can also be painful.

If you can use alcohol use it - if you are having trouble with skin reactions to the alcohol go find some of the water based variants. I haven't done the research (yet) - but I doubt they are as effective. Basically the 'instant kill' feature of alcohol means that you don't have to do prolonged hand washing with it. If using a water based sanitizer - read the instructions for how long it has to be on the hands to be effective.

The same cautions apply to sanitizing in commercial cleaning applications as to hand washing (prior post) tho - the minute you touch a contaminated surface, your hands are no longer pathogen free. No point in sanitizing if the next thing you are going to do is wipe your nose or touch a doorknob.

Bob

How to pick the right Ice Melters

We got our first ice storm since I started this blog, so it's time for this one.

First, if you want the whole story I recommend the Peters Chemical website - peterschemical.com. I pulled a great write up down from there.

They list 10 different active ingredients for their various purpose ice melters, as do several of the other manufacturers' web sites. hence they make money no matter what you chose and have no axe to grind re the different formulations.

Morton salt, on the other hand recommends sodium chloride (for obvious reasons).

Most commonly used are sodium chloride (table salt, rock salt, water softener salt, kosher sea salt, etc), calcium chloride and magnesium chloride.

Regular salt has two advantages:

1) It's cheap. (Well - it's cheap on a per pound basis)

2) If you forgot to buy ice melter it's on your table, in your water softener salt bag, etc.

It has two disadvantages -

1) It's expensive - if you are salting a large area some of the other formulations will actually do a better job with less salt - on a per square foot basis or as used basis - then sodium chloride. They are so much more effective that the higher per pound cost is more than offset by the higher productivity.

2) Kills your grass. Some of the other formulations don't.

The local TV station put their gardening guy on the other nite and recommended that you buy magnesium chloride formulations for this reason. Who am I to disagree ?

Not that it matters much but I learned researching this that ice melters don't so much melt ice as they undercut it.

What happens is they melt a small amount of the ice. The melt (salt brine) then spreads out underneath the rest of the ice and melts the layer adjacent to the pavement or sidewalk underneath the ice. It then becomes easy to scrape the ice, now detached from the pavement off to the side.

Cool huh ?

Bob