LEED Certification - What's Next?

Caught an article in MyCleanLink, one of our industry e-mail journals, on U. S. Green Building Council's LEED certification; it asks:

    "...what’s next? Now that you have achieved certification, how are you going to maintain it? ....I have asked these questions to the USGBC and facility managers alike, and am often met with a dead stare. But in reality, certification doesn’t stop with a certificate or plaque.  What’s next?"

I responded with:

    "To go a step further: if a "green" building is not only environmentally friendly, but friendly to the health of its occupants, might you want to look at cleaning procedures?

   "Once the major initial off-gassing from building materials and furnishings (green or not) has occurred, the most significant ongoing impact the building environment will have on its occupants will involve Indoor Air Quality.  One can address air circulation issues (oxygen supply, carbon-dioxide removal) with proper A/C design.  You can only remove respirable particles (allergens, for instance) with appropriate cleaning - HEPA vacuum filters, vacuuming rather than dust mopping hard floors, wiping rather than feather dusting, microfiber technology, allowing better particle removal and sanitation by keeping a coat of finish ("floor wax") on normally porous tile floors, and so forth.

   "Obviously, appropriate entry mats and Green Seal chemicals need to be part of the program as well.

   "Part of our program - we provide janitorial service in Phoenix AZ - also involves monitoring IAQ periodically with a hand-held airborne particle counter, to verify (and quantify) what we're doing."

A bit about us:

My firm, CBN Building Maintenance, provides commercial cleaning services in Phoenix AZ and the wider metro area.  We've been in business since 1974; hold the BBB's A-plus rating; and have long been in the forefront of the industry in environmentally sensitive cleaning for health, safety and security.  Our program can generally improve Indoor Air Quality, in the size range of most allergens, by a factor of 50%, as reflected in our ongoing IAQ sampling.

Comments

[Mike Gunderson]

Bob, I'd be interested in your thoughts on the affects of burnishing on IAQ. Have you checked it with your monitor while performing burnishing?

I've talked to enough people who seem to agree with me that buffing and burnishing floor finishes creates a lot of dust that is almost always containing some level of contaminants. However, I do not have the monitor or evidence to specifically support these claims.

Your opening comments on your web site talk about providing full maintenance on hard-surface flooring. It's correct that if a floor is not regularly maintained, the appearance quickly degrades and time and money has simply been wasted. Regular floor maintenance unfortunately generates a fair amount of waste in terms of water, chemicals, energy and floor pads.

I'm hoping I could interest you in taking a hard look at an ultra-durable coating solution to signficantly minimize hard-surface floor care maintenance. Our coatings are designed so that no buffing, burnishing, stripping or frequent recoating is required to maintain a long-lasting shine. It is a truly sustainable and environmentally friendly way to have shiny floors.

Check us out at www.udfloors.com.

[Bob Croft]

Mike - thanks for the note - good points.

The dust you'll see from an unfiltered burnisher (typically grey, fine and grainy) is a combination of ground-in dirt from the floor, a bit of floor finish, and pieces of the burnishing pad. A filtered burnisher traps the dust under a skirt surrounding pad and block, creates a partial vacuum within the skirt, and exhausts the air through a filter. (Most burnishers use a couple of paper soda can sized filters that set on top of the housing.)

Our LaserX machines use a larger filter, under the rear housing, for better air flow; they seem to do a reasonable job at filtration - not quite up to HEPA levels, but good enough that we've never noticed a substantial increase in airborne particle count that we can attribute to the burnisher. However, we've not studied the question directly. Thinking about doing so.

Any chance of a demonstration of your product?

Thanks,
Bob