Reduce Labor, Chemicals & Costs with Sustainable Floor Cleaning

Due to increasing utility costs, staff shortages and sanitary regulations, performing high-quality floor cleaning in healthcare and educational facilities can be expensive and labor-intensive. With the growing focus on green initiatives targeted at reducing environment and health impacts, these industries are encouraged to adopt sustainable floor cleaning practices that protect facility occupants while maintaining or reducing labor expenses

Recent advancements in floor cleaning technology deliver machines with greater versatility, increased efficiency and reduced environmental impacts. Replacing traditional cleaning procedures with environmentally-preferable cleaning technology requires an understanding of three basic components: chemical solution usage, equipment options, and cleaning procedures/policies. Sustainable floor cleaning combines these factors to reduce overall cleaning expenses, time and adverse effects associated with conventional cleaning methods, while producing a "greener" result .

Floor cleaning equipment with flexible cleaning capabilities
enables operators to tackle diverse cleaning requirements.

Sustainable floor cleaning programs vary for each facility, providing the tools and resources that allow facility managers to craft solutions to meet their unique cleaning challenges. Understanding individual facility cleaning standards and requirements enables healthcare and education industries to apply the appropriate sustainable cleaning practices to lower costs, energy and labor.

What is Sustainable Cleaning?
Sustainable cleaning not only reduces environmental and human-health impacts, but also increases energy-efficiency, reduces laborious scrubbing and decreases equipment maintenance. With Leadership in Engineering and Environmental Design (LEED) certifications and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) Green Building Rating System defining sustainability standards, all industries, including healthcare and education, are provided with resources regarding greening existing buildings and floor cleaning techniques that minimize water consumption and chemical dependency.

Sustainable cleaning provides quantifiable impacts on gas, water and energy use by accurately monitoring water and chemical waste, and reliably measuring cost reduction successes. In contrast, conventional cleaning does not allow facilities to easily calculate the amount of utilities and labor expended during floor cleaning.

In addition to experiencing cost benefits through sustainable floor cleaning, these industries create healthier atmospheres for employees and other facility occupants, improving productivity, promoting continued health, and reducing potential health and safety risks.

Implementing Sustainable Cleaning
Sustainable cleaning practices are not a "one size fits all" approach. In order to utilize the appropriate equipment and procedures, it is important for facility managers to understand the exact cleaning requirements associated with their industry and building. After an initial assessment, facility managers in the healthcare and education industries can then determine the appropriate chemical solution, equipment and procedures for their sustainable floor cleaning program.

Chemical Solution
Cleaning chemicals can have harmful effects on building occupants, resulting in many facilities adopting floor cleaning procedures that significantly reduce chemical waste without compromising cleaning results. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), excessive exposure to highly-concentrated cleaning solvents can lead to skin, eye and even respiratory irritation, and frequent use can lower indoor air quality, subjecting facility occupants to potentially serious health risks, such as asthma or cancer. To combat such consequences, organizations such as Green Seal, EcoLogo™ and EPA Design for the Environment provide certified chemicals that reduce the health risks associated with traditional cleaning products.

Though lower-concentrated chemicals offer environmentally-preferable alternatives, these less caustic cleaning agents are not appropriate for all applications. For instance, the healthcare industry must adhere to a higher cleaning standard due to specific industry regulations, requiring the use of strong disinfectants to eliminate harmful bacteria and prevent product or patient contamination. To do this, while still achieving the desired cleaning results, healthcare facilities can use floor cleaning equipment that enables operators to monitor detergent use, thus minimizing chemical exposure.

Equipment
Utilizing the proper floor cleaning equipment creates a substantial impact on overall building sustainability by reducing energy, water and chemical consumption. Advancements in hard-flooring cleaning equipment are designed to improve efficiency, offer greater flexibility and minimize waste—meeting LEED-EBOM standards for sustainable cleaning equipment. Containing features such as extended runtimes, maintenancefree battery operation, multiple pressure settings and water/detergent dispensing controls, floor cleaning machines provide enhanced cleaning capabilities for diverse floor cleaning applications.

Advanced floor scrubbers offer versatile cleaning features, such as machines equipped with controls that allow the operator to seamlessly switch between chemical-free, water-only cleaning and varying degrees of detergent to prevent unnecessary product waste. Alternatively, other types of floor scrubbers offer multiple down pressures and flow rates, effectively cleaning soils of various strengths and concentrations. By using quick bursts of intense scrubbing power, these floor scrubbers eliminate harsh soils and avoid time-consuming double or triple scrubbing. Lower scrub pressure is ideal for everyday cleaning challenges— reducing maintenance, solution and water expenses with faster, more efficient cleaning results.

For facilities with multiple cleaning requirements, such as hard floors and carpeted areas, using multi-purpose floor cleaning equipment enables a single machine to perform diverse cleaning procedures. By quickly adjusting from scrubbing applications for high-traffic areas and high-quality dust and debris control to powerful and efficient carpet extraction, multi-purpose floor cleaning machines eliminate laborious machine swapping. Consolidating various cleaning machines or scrubbing applications into one compact floor cleaner enables faster cleaning with less downtime— preventing excess labor and equipment costs.


Procedures
Sustainable floor cleaning policies and procedures, such as LEED-EBOM and GS-42, specify when and how cleaning activities should be performed. For facilities seeking LEED certifications, LEED-EBOM (Existing Building: Operation and Management) outlines stipulations for achieving sustainable cleaning throughout existing buildings. However, while this certification may be adhered to for these requirements, this approval process can be costly, resulting in facility owners seeking alternative sustainable cleaning initiatives. One option, the GS-42 (Green Seal™ Environmental Leadership Standard for Commercial Cleaning Standards) provides a standard for commercial cleaning in education and healthcare facilities. This standard is also promoted by IEHA (International Executive Housekeepers Association) for in-house service providers, including education, healthcare and hospitality facilities. Resources such as LEEDEBOM and GS-42 define equipment attributes and address standard operating procedures for managing and measuring sustainable cleaning practices. This assists facility managers in implementing sustainable cleaning practices and provides guidelines for starting and maintaining a properly designed sustainable floor cleaning program.

In the Field
Sustainable cleaning programs vary between facilities and industries to accommodate diverse sanitation regulations, cost limitations, cleaning requirements and labor constraints. To integrate sustainable floor cleaning practices for education and healthcare industries, individual facility managers must understand their specific needs and utilize the appropriate equipment, chemicals and procedures.

Healthcare
Healthcare facilities are held to the highest level of sanitation. According to the Occupational Health and Safety Association, contaminated work surfaces must be decontaminated with an appropriate disinfectant. Therefore, hospitals and long-term care institutions must use caustic disinfectants in patient rooms, restrooms and operating rooms to eliminate harmful bacteria and prevent the spread of contagious diseases—protecting patients and staff alike. However, disinfectants have potentially harmful health and environmental consequences, which can lower indoor air quality and put vulnerable patients at an increased risk for further health issues. Therefore, healthcare facilities must provide superior cleaning results without impacting the health of facility residents.

The Centers for Disease Control requires healthcare facilities to disinfect patient care equipment and environmental surfaces, minimizing the amount of caustic chemicals released while still achieving regulation standard cleaning results. To do this, healthcare facilities can utilize floor scrubbers with flexible detergent dispensing, or employ varying flow rates to effectively match detergent distribution to soil level. This provides operators with the flexibility to control the type and amount of chemicals used by applying disinfectants to high-risk contamination areas and utilizing a less intense cleanser for low-risk sections— avoiding the need to buy multiple cleaning machines and ensuring minimal exposure to disinfectants.

Education
Educational facilities present diverse cleaning challenges. With reduced maintenance staffs, schools must find a way to keep high traffic areas, especially hallways, clean of dirt and debris in addition to eliminating soils that accumulate in cafeterias and bathrooms.

Floor cleaning equipment with flexible cleaning capabilities enables operators to tackle diverse cleaning requirements in a single, cost-effective and labor-efficient machine. By using machines with the ability to switch between multiple scrub pressure intensities with push-button ease, operators can select the scrub pressure based on corresponding soil levels. These flexible machines easily tackle diverse cleaning challenges, using extreme scrub pressure to efficiently scrub high-traffic entryways and cafeterias, while lower scrub pressures clean light soils and dust in hallways or classrooms. Floor cleaning equipment today is designed with features that drive down the equipment owner's cost to clean.

Conclusion
Sustainable cleaning programs offer a cost-effective solution that reduces environmental and health impacts. Implementing floor cleaning equipment with diverse cleaning settings or applying a single machine to perform multiple cleaning tasks allows facilities to use less water, energy and chemicals.

Brian Simmons, Commercial Product Manager, Nilfisk-Advance.

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