The Janitors' Closet

Unsustainable recycling

Tucson, our neighbor down the freeway, is having issues with its residential recycling program.  It can no longer sell newspaper and glass it collects from its residents (more fallout from China's discontinuance of accepting most recycled trash), so the prospect is to dump it in the landfill.  Tucson already charges residents for recycling (not an optional program, by the way); they're looking at roughly doubling the fees.  Or cutting the pick-up schedule. The City is losing three-plus million annually on the program.  (I served a few years on the City of Phoenix Environmental Quality Commission, and we involve ourselves in commercial recycling in providing commercial janitorial service, so I am a bit attuned to recycling issues.)

Seems to me the rational for recycling is to save money, by re-using stuff, or to avoid depletion of  scarce resources.  Glass is made from silica, hardly a scarce resource, and paper is mostly made from farmed trees - not majestic centuries-old oaks.  So if it costs more in resources (think energy and manpower for both, bleach and water for recycling paper) than the recycled stuff is worth, it is more sustainable to just dump it.

About the only "benefit" I see, in many cases, to residential trash recycling is that it makes folks feel virtuous - they think they are doing good for the planet, or for posterity.  Perhaps better that efforts be directed toward something meaningful: say, limiting topsoil erosion, or global overfishing, or junk going into the ocean. Or Brazilian rainforest currently being razed to provide farmland for soybeans, to export to China, because our current trade war with same has caused them to stop buying American.  Should we want to recycle something that has great economic value, and benefits the planet, maybe we ought to join the rest of the developed world and recycle nuclear fuel.  More nukes might mean less coal.  And we would not just keep the stuff sitting there.

Is yours really a "Green" cleaning program?

 

"Green Cleaning" programs should involve not only reducing your facility's environmental footprint (things like energy efficiency, recycling materials, product packaging efficiency) but also protecting the health of the humans involved.  Makes sense; essentially, what protects people tends to also protect the fish downstream.  We've been protecting human health, and our environment, for some 30 years.  Here's how:

We're certified in Greenguard Environment Institute's cleaning program, originally developed for cleaning schools, hence incorporating an emphasis on indoor air quality, dust control and touch-point sanitation.  Using Greenguard's specifications, we keep you healthy via Green Seal certified chemicals, reduced chemical usage, avoiding aerosols and air fresheners, and proper application and disposal methodology (we won't dump our mop water in your planter...or storm sewer...or parking lot).

We use concentrated chemicals to reduce packaging and shipping fuel usage, and emphasize fuel and energy efficiencies in our day-to-day operations.

We provide Green Seal certified restroom paper goods, made of 100% recycled material.  We can assist you in recycling programs (we belong to the Arizona Recycling Coalition), and can advise you in LEED certification through our U S Green Building Council membership.

Take a glance in your janitor's closet.  See an unfiltered vacuum?  See a feather duster or a dust-mop, which will just move the fine particle around (wouldn't it be nice to remove those fine particles instead?)  Ready-to-use, or residential level, chemicals?  Outdated, or unlabeled, chemicals?  Scouring powder, or bleach (neither are particularly people or environmentally friendly)?  (By the way - did they give you a Safety Data Sheet book for those chemicals? - if not, it could be that the folks you contracted with don't know what chemicals their crews are using, a common situation with franchise operations)

It takes a bit more than a few "Green" chemicals to make a "Green Cleaning" program.

"Green Cleaning" programs should involve not only reducing your facility's environmental footprint (things like energy efficiency, recycling materials, product packaging efficiency) but also protecting the health of the humans involved.  Makes sense; essentially, what protects people tends to also protect the fish downstream.  We've been protecting human health, and our environment, for some 30 years.  Here's how:

We're certified in Greenguard Environment Institute's cleaning program, originally developed for cleaning schools, hence incorporating an emphasis on indoor air quality, dust control and touch-point sanitation.  Using Greenguard's specifications, we keep you healthy via Green Seal certified chemicals, reduced chemical usage, avoiding aerosols and air fresheners, and proper application and disposal methodology (we won't dump our mop water in your planter...or storm sewer...or parking lot).

We use concentrated chemicals to reduce packaging and shipping fuel usage, and emphasize fuel and energy efficiencies in our day-to-day operations.

We provide Green Seal certified restroom paper goods, made of 100% recycled material.  We can assist you in recycling programs (we belong to the Arizona Recycling Coalition), and can advise you in LEED certification through our U S Green Building Council membership.

Take a glance in your janitor's closet.  See an unfiltered vacuum?  See a feather duster or a dust-mop, which will just move the fine particle around (wouldn't it be nice to remove those fine particles instead?)  Ready-to-use, or residential level, chemicals?  Outdated, or unlabeled, chemicals?  Scouring powder, or bleach (neither are particularly people or environmentally friendly)?  (By the way - did they give you a Safety Data Sheet book for those chemicals? - if not, it could be that the folks you contracted with don't know what chemicals their crews are using, a common situation with franchise operations)

It takes a bit more than a few "Green" chemicals to make a "Green Cleaning" program.

Mild or effective - your choice

It seems that the dome of the Washington state capital is covered with lichen, a periodic problem (one of the many advantages of our hot, dry Sonoran Desert climate in the Phoenix area - not much lichen).

The dome authorities have to clean the dome every few years, but face an extra challenge this time; from the article:

"It’s about the darkest the stains I’ve ever seen,” said Gizzi.  He said that might be attributed to how the dome was last cleaned in 2012. Gizzi said the state chose not to use the traditional chemical cleaner, which was thought to have damaged the capitol’s sandstone."

In the commercial janitorial industry, we face similar (if not quite as visible) issues every day.  The ":really good" stripper, or all purpose cleaner, or disinfectant, turns out to be damaging to the surface, or dangerous to the cleaning person, or bad for the water treatment plant downstream (don't even think about pouring it into the planter or the storm drain), or to air quality.  It all takes research, and often responsible compromise.

As Frederic Hayek noted, there are few perfect solutions, only trade-offs. 

Lots of folks are not set up for touchpoint sanitation

Quoted a string of health care clinics the other day; a concern at several of them was the constant irritation of grubby handprints on doors, door jambs, and so on - never addressed by the janitorial service.  It occurred to me that if the touch-points were not being cleaned, they certainly could not be sanitized.

I'm always surprised, looking in my competitor's janitor closets (I run a janitorial service in Phoenix AZ), how seldom I see proper equipment for touch-point cleaning and sanitation.  (Touch-points would include door jambs, knobs and push plates; elevator buttons; stair rails; counters; interior glass - not restroom or lunchroom surfaces.)

It's pretty simple.  We start with a microfiber cloth.  Microfiber scrubs better than cotton or paper, and absorbs more - both dirt and germs.  We apply Alpha-HP, a Diversey hydrogen peroxide based cleaner/sanitizer, to the cloth (to minimize both over-wetting or surfaces and over-spray) and wipe the touch-point with the moistened cloth.

The Alpha-HP is a quite effective cleaner, as is a moistened microfiber cloth; combined, they're hard to beat.  Similarly, most pathogens are removed along with the dirt (thanks to the microfiber); what's left is killed by the Alpha-HP - it gives us 30 to 60 second sanitation, depending on the particular germ, which is achievable with a quick wipe.  30 to 60 seconds is feasible on a touch-point; the 10 minutes required with a disinfectant is impractical, except in restrooms where one has a bit more freedom to apply solution liberally.  (Think trying to keep a door jam wet for 10 minutes, let alone a light switch.)  Finally, the germs picked up by the cloth promptly die, thanks to the cloth being loaded up with the sanitizer - so cross contamination is minimized.

Change out the microfiber cloths frequently (and avoid using the same cloth in critical areas, like restrooms) and launder them often, and one has an effective system; further, a system that takes no longer to use than the traditional damp-wipe to "clean" the touch-point.

No market for our plastic

China has announced that it will no longer take in much of the world's recyclable waste - 24 categories thereof - including plastic.  It had been taking a bit over half of the world's plastic.  Where do we send it now?

In doing commercial janitorial in the greater Phoenix area, we do our best to "clean green": emergency efficiency, chemical selection and use and, naturally, recycling programs.

Unfortunately, environmental initiatives often involve unintended consequences.  Think Ethanol production over drafting the Oglala aquifer in the western great plains, and incidentally driving up corn prices world-wide - particularly onerous for low income folks.  Or folks here in the hot southwest ripping out perfectly good windows to put in dual pain windows, whose energy savings will never quite pay back the cost - and generally doing so instead of lower cost, and often more effective, solutions such as more attic insulation, or exterior window sunshades, or even shade trees.

Back to recycling.  I served a few years on Phoenix's Environmental Quality Commission.  Got to know some of the people involved in our recycling centers (and took a tour of one - quite an impressive facility).  The economics (monetary and material) of recycling many products are a bit "iffy".  Up until fairly recently, for instance, recycled product paper could be more expensive than that from farmed trees, give the high amounts of energy and water, not to mention bleach, required.  There also tends to be both environmental and human costs in much recycling: Think air and water pollution, and third world (usually) people sorting metal bits by hand.  That, in passing, is why we ship much recycling abroad - let the third world deal with the problems.  And why China doesn't want our stuff, anymore.

Mechanization may help.  Back in the '60's, America had serious concerns about the rusting car bodies dumped all over the countryside; it was uneconomical to recycle them until the block-long car crusher was developed.  You pretty much never see a rusting car in the countryside anymore.

But, in the meantime, it might do us all good to pause, take a deep breath, and consider all ramifications of a given proposal, whether on recycling or on a broader environmental issue.  Lets put the thought in, and do it right.

Hacking, coughing, scratchy eyes - and odd odors?

 

Formaldehyde is a flammable, colorless gas that you might remember from high school biology.  To my mind, anything that preserves frogs is likely something that you do not want to ingest much of.

Besides frogs, the stuff is used extensively in building construction and furnishings, for instance in the resin used to bond pressed wood (I have real wood in the antique furniture at home and office, but mostly see the fake stuff everywhere else).  Normally, a few days ventilation will let your new furniture off-gas enough to solve the problem, but with poor ventilation ongoing it can accumulate.  So, a bit ironically, formaldehyde often becomes an issue in tightly sealed "green" structures.  What's environmentally friendly is not necessarily people friendly.  That said, should you notice the symptoms in the headline....

As they say, be careful what you wish for.

 

And again into the storm drain

Got to ruminating about my note the other day on storm drains and a really good example of the mindset of much of society.

I happened to be asked to prepare a janitorial service quote for a prominent downtown Phoenix church; one of the church's employees was doing the cleaning, and they were exploring outsourcing janitorial to free their employee up for other duties.  Said employee was asked to show me through the campus.  He gave me a good and detailed walk-through, explaining procedures, areas of concern, time frames and so on.

A major concern was keeping clean the grand entry exterior staircase (we have pigeons in Phoenix).  The approved procedure was to sprinkle tri-sodium phosphate (TSP) on the staircase, wet it down with a hose, scrub it with a deck brush, thoroughly rinse, and hose off the solution into the gutter, and the storm drain.  He suggested doing the stairs at the tail end of the shift, shortly after dawn, to both be able to see the job in daylight and to have it clean for early morning services.

The church sat across a wide plaza from Phoenix's convention center, several blocks from the city's administrative complex and city hall, on a street that a good many city functionaries might well take on their way to work.

So, they had, for years, been hosing a pretty effective, and pretty harsh, cleaning chemical into the city's storm drain, and thus into our local ground water - in a city that depends heavily on pumping ground water.  In front of (as the phrase goes) God and everybody.  And nobody, at least at the city level, had noticed.

(We're pretty careful about chemical safety, and about environmental concerns.  Here's a bit on safety. And a bit on environment)

I kind of decided that the business might not be worth the likely fines.

Greenguard "goes the extra mile"

Caught an article in Cleanlink comparing Greenseal, Ecologo and Greenguard as certifiers of environmentally preferable products, specific to the janitorial service industry.  We feature (and have for years) Greenseal certified products; we also carry a certification from Greenguard Environmental Institute; I talk about both programs in presenting our cleaning program to potential clients.

The article pretty much follows my system of covering the similarities of the programs (I won't bore you - or me - with those details), then outlines the differences, as follows:

 • Green Seal puts greater emphasis on cleaning products, the jan/san industry, and that products are sold in concentrated form.
 • ECOLOGO takes a much broader approach and certifies more products used in more industries.
 • GREENGUARD puts most of its focus on ensuring products protect indoor air quality.  "While there are similarities," says the author, "because GREENGUARD goes the extra mile when it comes to protecting indoor air quality, it can be of special importance in industry sectors such as education and healthcare." 

That follows my thoughts.  Greenguard looks at our entire program - chemicals (Greenseal certification required), equipment (microfiber dust wipes, damp wipes and mops, plus HEPA filtered backpack vacuums), methods employed, and training (both initial and periodic refresher).  It was originally developed for cleaning schools, hence an emphasis on indoor air quality and sanitation; a few years back, in partnership with Diversey, the program was tweaked to better apply to commercial cleaning.

Thus, Greenguard concerns itself with what we're doing, ongoing, to protect health and environment.  Even the U S Green Building Council's LEED program does not do that.  (We're a member of USGBC as well).

 

Cleaning air ducts - not so much

I've noticed a bit of conversation of late about air duct cleaning.  We do list duct cleaning as one of a good number of services we offer through our Phoenix building maintenance firm (Arizona is a dusty area), but we don't push it.

Generally, if there is dust in the duct-work, it will either blow out, or not.  If it blows out, it is no longer in the duct, so one doesn't need to clean the duct; if it doesn't blow out, it doesn't enter the room, so it's not a problem.  In fact, various studies show an increase in indoor airborne dust after duct cleaning, given that cleaning stirs up the particles that were not bothering us beforehand.

The only exceptions I see are in a really bad situation - the contractor left a lot of debris during installation - or if the particles are being created ongoing within the duct, as in mold growing due to a moisture problem.  In that case, you rather need to deal with the moisture first.

The occasional call I get from a client involves dust buildup around vents.  A certain amount of dust is normal; much greater air flow adjacent to a vent gives particles already in the air stream a chance to hit, say, acoustical ceiling tile.  If I see excessive dust, I assume dust must be entering the duct-work from somewhere, either above the false ceiling or in the attic, or exterior to the building (both dusty environments).  Dust - and air - will only enter the duct if sucked in, so we need only inspect the (low pressure) air return side of the system.  Look for a leak in the return.  That might be an old and deteriorated joint in the duct-work, or one that's been jostled during some kind of service visit (plumbers, electricians), or - most commonly, in my experience - the coupling between the AC unit and the duct-work (sometimes disconnected during a service visit, and not re-connected properly).  In each case, you need to fix the problem - re-seal the duct - and the dust will stop entering.

What we do stress in offering Phoenix commercial janitorial services, as far as dust control is involved, is HEPA filtration on our vacuums, a lot of microfiber technology, treated entry mats, lot sweeping, and ongoing monitoring of indoor air quality.  As we say, "breath easy".

Jetting viruses around the restroom

We've seen significant changes in commercial restrooms over the last few years: water-less urinals, tank-less toilets, no-touch fixtures and towel dispensers and, dare I say, paperless hand-towels - all with benefits to human health and our environment, at least in theory.  Occasionally, however, we take a couple steps back for each step forward.

I wrote some time back on the recent urine odor permeating the City of Chicago Council chambers, caused by pipe corrosion in the adjoining restroom, itself caused by undiluted urine sent south (although I guess in Chicago it would be north) by the new water-less urinals.  In my historic downtown Phoenix neighborhood, when forced by modern building codes to install low water use toilets during a remodel, we've been advised to flush twice or thrice because the old sewer system needs substantial water flow to accomplish its purpose.

Unintended consequences are  marvelous things, is one is stuck for writing material.  And, writing on Phoenix commercial cleaning services (I grant, a somewhat non-romantic subject), I am occasionally stuck.

Now comes the "jet" restroom hand-dryer, a great improvement over the warm air hand-dryer, itself a great improvement over the humble paper towel.  Recent research reported in the "Journal of Applied Microbiology" address those restroom users (most of us, I fear) who wash hands, but imperfectly (not enough time under the water, or skipping the soap).  Thus germs are still on our hands when approaching the hand dryer.  The white coat fellows set up plates at six heights (including the face level of an adult and of a small child) and up to three meters away. 

No surprise.  In total, across the various distances, the jet dryer spread some 60 times more viruses than the warm air dryer, and 1300 times more than paper towels.   And, evocatively, 70% of those viruses were at small child head height. What studies have been done in the past, on air dryers and pathogen spread, have focused on whether the dryer added germs to the hands being dried.  Rather seems that the other question would be the more pertinent.

Should have thought of the above myself.  Anyway, I'm changing what I recommend to clients (we provide commercial cleaning Phoenix metro area) in their restroom layout.  I hate to have to choose between health and green cleaning (all those paper towels), but I come down on the side of health.  Or maybe I'll just dry my hands on my pants (like when we forget to fill the towel dispenser....)