EXPERT OPINION: Green clean with Richard Mickus
What’s the best new thing in cleaning? One of the best innovations at Skidmore has been our autoscrubbers. They use just water to polish our terrazzo floors, and the results look better than when we used detergents. Plus, we don’t have to apply finish anymore, which also means we never need to strip the finish with solvents. It’s especially good for our sci- ence labs, where any fumes or chemical exposure could cause problems. For carpets also, we don’t use deter- gents. We use a truck-mounted steam cleaner with water at 180 degrees, which is hot enough to sanitize without chemicals. We sometimes use stain re- movers for small spots, but steam clean- ing on a regular basis keeps those to a minimum. And I think the polished-concrete
floors in the Northwoods apartment complex are working wonderfully. After they get 30 weeks— that’s one semester— of heavy use,
we can come in, scrub them right up, apply a very thin coat of polish, and they look terrific again. I bet we’re using 80 or 90 percent less products there than we need on some of our tile and other floors.
Do “green” products work well enough? We started using a wider range of green cleaners back in 2000, after the govern- ment issued new regulations about housekeeping products. Back then, it’s true, a lot of those alternatives weren’t as effective, but over the past decade there have been huge improvements, not just for institutional use but for consumers too. Clorox, for example, has a line of green cleaners with no chlorine bleach in them, and I think they’re very good. At my house, I don’t think we use any cleaners that aren’t green. At Skidmore we recently
switched our glass and all- purpose cleaners to a perox- ide-based alternative. For many applications, we need to use certified disinfec- tants, and our peroxide cleaner is starting the process of getting certified. We’d love it if that succeeds and we could use it in place of the harsher disinfectants. As it is, we don’t use bleach or am- monia—they’re just too po- tent, and no longer neces- sary. The green products are better for the environment, the employees, and the oc- cupants. Same for the interi- or paints we use now: they’re not just low-VOC, but certified green. The fumes are so minimal and so harmless that we can paint while people are still
in their offices right down the hall and they don’t even notice an odor.
What about cloth vs. paper? A great new product is microfiber wipes and mops. Unlike paper towels, they’re reusable—we can put them through the laundry 500 times! And unlike cloth, they rinse and wring out so clean that they don’t hold dirt and germs, and they dry quickly. For mopping, they’re much better than cotton string mops, which are heavy to handle, need bleach to dis- infect them, and take a lot of drying to prevent mildew. We love the microfiber.
What’s the toughest cleaning job? Showers and tubs, definitely. Like all of Saratoga, Skidmore has pretty hard water. But even in the bathrooms we use green products. (If a mineral de- posit has built up a lot, first we try a scrubbing pad and elbow grease to scrape it off. We rarely use solvents like Lime Away—they’re dangerous and can erode the metal faucets and fixtures.) If we use our peroxide cleaner regularly— and if we make sure to dry off the sur- faces right afterward—we don’t have much trouble with mineral buildups. In fact, this cleans better than our previous bathroom products.
Do you do spring cleanings? The best method is to keep on top of cleaning year-round. If you maintain things regularly, you don’t need to schedule any special big cleaning. But it’s nice, after a stuffy winter, even if it’s still a little chilly, to open up the win- dows and air out the house.
Richard Mickus kept Union College clean before moving to Skidmore as supervisor of custodial operations in 2000; he now manages both housekeeping and painting.
SPRING 2013 SCOPE 7
MARK BOLLES
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