Cleaning Standards: AMC Commercial Cleaning

In addition to industry-leading management and environmental policies, aspiring to the very highest cleaning standards is at the heart of what we do.

Why Clean for Health and Safety?

The building maintenance industry has historically cleaned buildings to produce a sanitary and aesthetically pleasing environment.

Since the energy crisis of the 1970s, structures have become inclreasingly 'tighter', with more insulation and with windows that do not open. As a side effect of this, these buildings have now become an ideal environment for a vast array of microorganisms, airborne pathogens, and airborne, allergy causing dust and dirt.

Indoor environments are a cause of—or contributor to—thousands of people getting sick each year, as well as the reduced life expectancy of capital assets.

The effects of dust, foreign substances and other particulate circulating are:

• employee and student illness
• lost productivity
• increased health care costs
• malfunctioning electronic equipment
• accelerated replacement of capital assets
• drab appearance of carpet, hard surface floors, furniture, and fixtures.

Facts

Let us look at the facts that impact our lives, and the sensitive equipment that surrounds us in our business life:

• thirty percent (30%) of all of us suffer from allergies
• fifteen percent (15%) are under a doctor's care for allergies
• nine percent (9%) suffer severe allergy attacks
• allergy sufferers, under a doctor's care, spend $3000 per year for treatment (approximately $4.5 million for 10,000 people)
• electronic equipment is damaged by airborne particulates
• carpet and hard surface floors are both damaged by particulates
• furniture, blinds, walls and ceilings are adversely affected and become drab in appearance due to airborne dirt.

The most damaging particulates range in size between 1 and 5 microns (invisible to the naked eye). Particulates need to be about four hundred microns in order for them to be visible to the human eye.

Cleaning Techniques

Cleaning for Health and Safety requires changes in many traditional cleaning methods. The objective is to remove contaminants, rather than redistribute them.

The New Methods involve:

• use of environmentally less damaging cleaning products
• elimination of ammonia, chlorine, aerosols and fine mist trigger spray products
• use of germicidal cleaners
• dusting with cloths that trap and remove particles
• covering hi-dusters and dust mops so that dust is not redistributed
• use of barrier matting at entrances, to reduce outside contaminants entering the building
• changing vacuuming procedures, such as:
  • increased frequency of entry mat vacuuming
  • use of wide area vacuums in common area hallways
  • use of micron filter bags in all vacuum cleaners
• use of equipment that reduces the creation of airborne particles
• changing carpet cleaning chemicals*.

* All carpet cleaning chemicals need to pass the test that determines if they will re-soil the carpet. This test is fully described in our Operations Manual.

Cleaning for Health and Safety Benefits

AMC's Cleaning for Health and Safety Program is designed to improve the overall health of employees, tenants, visitors and customers of your facility.

The full benefits of this program include:

• potential reduction in employee and student absenteeism due to illness
• potential increase in employee productivity due to improved health and better functioning equipment
• opportunities for cost containment on employee health insurance due to reduced claims
• furniture, fixtures and carpets that look cleaner due to better particulate removal
• increased life expectancy of capital assets
• improved overall appearance of facilities.

We fully recognise that some benefits noted here are not easily substantiated. Since employees are not required to say why they are off sick, it would be difficult to prove that a reduction in absenteeism is directly correlated to a cleaner environment. Research shows, however, a marked drop in ambient dust particles in buildings using the Cleaning for Health and Safety system. Also, we have dramatically reduced many of the cleaning frequencies.