Sustainable Cleaning
Spotlight on ‘green’ public procurement
The UK Cleaning Products Industry Association (UKCPI) looks at progress in green public procurement and argues that purchasing decisions need to be based on scientifically-supported assessments and on whole lifecycle thinking.
Greening public purchasingmakes sense, to ensure that taxpayers’money is spent on products and services that help improve sustainability. It’s one very tangible way government can not only provide a lead, but also provide the financial driver tomake change happen. Green public procurement (GPP) has also been given realmomentum as part of the EU SCP Initiative. But when it comes to the details, it needs
careful thought and coordinated action to avoid a lot of chasing around and change for little or no real benefit. All toomany ‘green’ consumer offerings aremore about lifestyle choices and feel-good factors than improved sustainability or even real envi- ronmental benefit. You just have to look at the boundless enthusiasmfor things that are ‘natural’ when it’s often hard to show any tangible benefit, and the end result can easily be reduced sustainability across the whole lifecycle rather than improvement. If GPP is to deliver real improvements in
sustainability, and yet still provide the qual- ity, value-for-money cleaning that the pay- ing public rightly expects, the criteria that guide purchasing decisions need to be sound, based on scientifically supported as- sessments and on whole lifecycle thinking. Another important aspect of sustainable
cleaning is that sustainabilitymust ulti- mately be improved across the whole cleaning process. Inmany professional cleaning processes, the lifecycle impact of the cleaning products isminor compared to other impacts in the process such as en- ergy and water use.
Shaky start
Unfortunately, at the practical level, GPP for cleaning products has had a shaky start. Initial public sector efforts in this direction began to emergemore than 10 years ago fromlocal authorities. They commendably adopted green procurement policies as a way of contributing to national and interna- tional efforts to improve sustainability. Sadly, the detail of devising the crucially- important purchasing criteria was too often left to general environmental consultants who had little understanding of cleaning products and processes. The result was a rash of disparate tender requirements for ‘green cleaning products’ focusing almost exclusively on ingredients and which had little rational or scientific foundation. Trying to supply products tomeet all these differ- ent requirements, where the criteria some-
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www.cleaninghub.net
“If GPP is to deliver real improvements in sustainability, the criteria that guide purchasing decisions need to be sound, based on scientifically supported assessments and onwhole life-cycle thinking.”
times conflicted with themselves as well as each other, would have been amodel of unsustainability. An EU initiative on GPP produced a toolkit
addressing cleaning products and services in 2008. Unfortunately, the criteria were largely based on the EU eco-label criteria which had actually been developed for con- sumer products. Professional cleaning on all but the smallest scalemakes extensive use ofmachines and of concentrate sys- tems with controlled dosing: eco-efficiency is generally well ahead of consumer clean- ing. Formany users, the GPP criteria - if followed - would have driven sustainability backwards. As they come fromthe eco- label, the EU GPP criteria still work on the crude and outdated hazard-based ap- proach to ingredient safety. Few national governments have chosen to formally adopt these criteria.
Significant steps forward
The chaos that arose fromthe early ill-con- ceived, ingredient-focused tenders prompted a joint initiative between UKCPI and BACS working with Defra committees and advisory
groups.Much-needed guid- ance on ingredient selection rooted in sci- entific risk assessment was produced in 2006. The scope of the guidance was then expanded in 2008, encouraged by Defra and the UK Chemicals Stakeholder Forum, to cover the whole cleaning product lifecycle in which impacts fromingredients are rela- tivelyminor. The guidance, available at
www.sustainablecleaning.org.uk, stresses that sustainable cleaning is aboutmuch more than buying cleaning products that claimto be ‘green’. It sets out three key steps: • Choose products that are designed for sustainability as well as safety. •Work with suppliers so that they respon- siblymanage theirmanufacturing impacts.
•Minimise the environmental impacts that arise during your cleaning operations. The third step challenges the purchaser
and user to ensure products are not just properly chosen but are properly used. The stark reality is thatmost of the impact of the whole cleaning lifecycle is determined by the user at the point of use. National UK government has also
markedly improved its own purchasing cri- teria now known as Government Buying Standards. Themandatory criteria are nec- essarily limited in scope, but provisions now include dosing information and pack- aging requirements, and ingredient re- quirements dovetail with the Sustainable Cleaning guidance. Best practice highlights the importance of cleaning at low tempera- tures. Meanwhile, the EU eco-label is develop-
ing criteria for professional cleaning prod- ucts. Unfortunately, the emerging criteria still place unjustifiable emphasis on reduc- ing ingredient hazard, which does nothing to reduce environmental impact. The whole eco-label approach to criteria development, which pays too little attention to the sci- ence,makes it ill-suited as a basis for pub- lic procurement. Greening public procurement should be about solid, value- for-money progress for themainstream.
Prospects
Making professional cleaningmore sus- tainable is complex enough, given that products, equipment, packaging, energy and water usemust ultimately all be opti- mised together. Driving improvement through ‘green procurement’ is a real chal- lenge as improvement needs to be deliv- ered by a teamapproach involving both suppliers and users. You can’t simply buy a sustainable option. Ultimately, we need ap- proaches that look at the whole process.
www.ukcpi.org
Chemical-free floor cleaning for a green future
The importance of using products andmethods thatminimise adverse impacts on health and the environment grows stronger every
day.More andmore companies worldwide are basing their decisions on life cycle informa- tion, in effort to gain themost fromtheir actions without unintentionally jeopardising their ability to thrive in the future. Twister is a daily floor cleaning system, developed by HTC Sweden AB, consisting of a floor pad prepared with
billions ofmicroscopic diamonds which cleans and polishes the floormechanically. Twister cleans, polishes and preserves the floor brilliance - without time con- suming effort, and without polish, wax or other chemicals. Twister is the ecologically friendly jani- torial systemthat leaves a cleaned surface with- out any requirement for chemicals or special competence. Today’s society includes a large variation of floor
materials and products andmethods for keeping floors clean. Twister brings out the qualities of most common floors including terrazzo,marble, natural stone, concrete, vinyl and epoxy. The dia- mond prepared pads fit all types of auto scrub- bers and polishingmachines.
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