GOING GREEN

Green cleaning protects your employees' health without harming the environment

Who’s going Green?

• All federal agencies are mandated to green their cleaning programs.
• Many states have begun mandating the use of green cleaning chemicals, paper, and liners in their buildings.
• Various counties and municipalities are also initiating green cleaning requirements for their facilities.
• In the private sector, the U.S. Green Building Council leads the movement for certifying green buildings.
• In the nonprofit advocacy sector are working with building sectors to encourage green cleaning.

Implementing a Green Cleaning Program

1. Get everyone on board. Make sure the stakeholders agree they want a green program.
2. Getting an agreement as to what a green cleaning program is. (Expectation of Management)
3. Build a plan.
4. Develop green cleaning procedures and training plan.
5. Create communication and stewardship plans. Occupants need to know what is happening, how it affects them, what their roles and responsibilities are, and when and how they are supposed to carry them out.

Why is Green Important?

• Improve indoor air quality. Indoor air pollutants include dirt, dust, and other contaminants people bring in from the outside. This also includes the products used to clean the building.
• Impact on office buildings. The most common impact of cleaning in an office building is to improve or maintain acceptable appearance levels.
• Productivity: Improving indoor environmental quality fights both Building Related Illness (BRI) and Sick Building Syndrome (SBS). Many experts agree that a 2 percent increase in worker productivity is about average when a building implements effective improvements to indoor environment.
• Marketing: Although cleaning has often been looked at as simply an expense, and effective green cleaning program can be used as a powerful tool in this competitive market place.
• Cleaning’s impact on the environment: A well-designed and well-implemented cleaning program addresses improving the quality of our indoor environment while minimizing potential adverse effects on health and the environment as a whole.
• Recycle:An effective recycling program can reduce solid waste disposal volume between 50 to 90 percent, which can have significant impacts on reducing the cost of waste disposal.
• Encourage two-sided coping as much as possible.
• Bio fuels for Hope Network’s fleet

List of Facts

• Cleaning is a $140 billion business annually
• 6 billion pounds of chemicals are used a year
• 4.5 billion pounds of janitorial paper is used yearly that’s 27 million trees a year
• A recycling program can generate thousands of dollars, creating a new profit center in the facility, possibly a new workshop for our consumers 
• See the benefits of Going Green vs. Chemical Cleaning