Cleaning & Building Maintenance
Breaking bad habits
Office Depot’s Stuart Taylor discusses the pitfalls associated with choosing chemical products for your business, and the role of both suppliers and product simplification in developing an efficient and workable cleaning strategy.
Within the world of cleaning and chemical supplies, there is an ever-increasing number of niche products aimed at meeting specialist cleaning needs. This is clearly a positive development for the industry, ensuring that the necessary chemicals exist to deal with the vast array of cleaning requirements faced by individual sectors. Additionally, with health and safety a key part of the business agenda, it is important that the appropriate chemicals are available to respond to specialised cleaning tasks. Unfortunately, there is an inevitable flipside to the coin; this being the potential pitfalls of stocking too many products and over- caution towards health guidelines.
“Procurement can become conflated by an overly- cautious attitude towards guidelines that set out best chemical use.”
The abundance of chemicals on the market can mean making informed
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procurement choices becomes a difficult process, as the sheer volume of options available is overwhelming. Without the time or resources to research all available market options, businesses often opt for a set of products which complicate cleaning solutions. Businesses can find themselves stocking an excessive number of niche cleaning products when, in fact, one or two combined chemicals would do the job to the same high standards. At Office Depot, we have come across businesses using up to eight different chemicals for a set of, essentially, very similar cleaning tasks. While such cases are extreme, it demonstrates what can happen when a flooded chemical market is not approached with balanced consideration about a business’ specific cleaning needs.
This problem can become conflated by an overly-cautious attitude towards guidelines that set out best chemical use. Rather than simply carry out a risk assessment and
draw attention to potential risks associated with a product, hazard labels or safety data sheets can act as a deterrent to businesses, who opt instead to buy a more varied range of products in an attempt to protect staff by stocking as few hazardous products as possible. However, stocking too great a number of chemicals can pose just as much risk to staff safety. Mixing the wrong combination of chemicals can create harmful toxic gases, such as mixing acid-based toilet cleaners with products containing sodium hypochlorite (bleach), and the risk of such mistakes occurring is multiplied when a business has cultivated a build-up of products.
The most effective way to counter these problems is to seek multi-purpose chemicals whenever possible, simplifying the range of cleaning products used and consequently reducing associated health risks and financial implications. This is where the supplier can play a
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