EXPERT ADV ICE
COLOUR-CODED CONSCIENCE
Stephen Ashkin, founder of the Green Cleaning Network and commonly known as the ‘Father of Green Cleaning’, tells us how the simple implementation of a colour-coded system can ease the conscience of facilities managers and cleaning operatives wanting to reduce their carbon footprint.
As more and more facilities take steps to become more sustainable, one of the first challenges many often encounter is that they typically have no idea how to start or where they are as they begin their sustainability journey. Nor do they have specific ways to find out how successful they are when moving forward. This actually can be quite a problem. It’s one thing to say a facility is operated in an environmentally responsible and sustainable manner but having the facts and figures to back it up is something else entirely.
To address this need, what are termed sustainability dashboard tools have been developed. The most effective of these are web-based systems that allow users – typically building owners or managers – to impute such things as electrical, water, and natural gas usage along with their related costs, as well as other metrics such as the amount of waste generated by a facility.
These are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of a facility. When it comes to sustainability, they are crucial to knowing where things are now and where they are over time.
To understand how these systems can be put to work, let’s look at the following scenario:
After imputing their electrical bills for two years, a 100,000-square-foot office building finds they are paying on average 99p per square foot on energy, costing them £99,463.18 annually. However, comparable office buildings of this size are only paying 78p per square foot for electricity, £78,385 annually. This means our first building is paying £21,078 more than similarly sized facilities.
Now we know where things stand and this becomes our benchmark. And because we know what other buildings of the same size are paying per square foot, we have our first goal: bring our charges down to 78p per square foot or better.
THE START OF OUR
SUSTAINABILITY JOURNEY Continuing with our scenario, our first building decides one way they can reduce energy costs is to very simply make sure all electrical items used in the facility, from lights to copy machines, are turned ‘completely’ off
18 | Tomorrow’s Cleaning Sustainability Supplement 2015
at the end of the day and on weekends. Because the cleaning crew arrives at the building just as the building users are departing, building management decides to employ the services of their building service contractors (BSCs) to help them ensure the facility is entirely shut down after hours.
What they develop is a sustainability colour-coding system. Colour-coding is certainly not new to the professional cleaning industry. Typically, it is used to identify what type of surfaces should be cleaned with which cleaning cloths and cleaning solutions. This keeps, for instance, washroom cleaning products separate from cleaning tools that might be used to clean desks, kitchen counters, etc.
In many ways, a sustainability colour- coding system works the same way but instead of cleaning, we focus on energy. Here is an example of a sustainability colour-coding system now used by some facilities:
RED dots are placed on those electrical sources and devices
that should be powered off at the end of the workday and on weekends.
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