Green Building Certification
For hundreds of years, the janitorial service has been the forgotten and ignored industry. Suddenly, it has become the legitimate starting point for buildings that want to Go Green. The concept of Green relates primarily to the health and well-being of the people who inhabit our homes, schools, offices, and factories everywhere. The pressure of federal, state, and city mandates will soon force all buildings to transition to Green, and it often starts with the janitorial service.
What will drive this movement is the demand for Green offices and Green buildings. One interesting example is the state of Florida that passed a ruling that withheld state business from any hotel that did not qualify as a Green hotel. The affect was immediate and profound as the state is a significant part of Florida hotel revenue.
Both New York and Illinois have passed similar versions of the Green School Act that required all schools to adopt Green products and Green practices in the daily cleaning of their facilities. New York has now issued notices that all building owners have a time frame in which they must take their buildings Green. Other states are sure follow New York and Illinois, and cities are passing a variety of mandates on local businesses.
Where governments go, business will follow. Right now, we are seeing city after city planning for a complete Green renovation of all city buildings. On the federal level, Presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush have signed executive orders mandating that all federal agency to Go Green by using Green products and Green practices. Therefore, we see the Green pressure at the federal, state, local, and corporate levels. These obvious trends are why many experts are predicting that all businesses will be going green in the next two to three years.
This new economy will bring what I call Green Pretenders who will take only token efforts to be Green but will declare that they are the real Green janitorial service. You see, Green does not come in a bottle but in the service that uses the Green product. When all janitorial services have a few Green products and some HEPA vacuums, we will see what I also call the “Green Equalization.” This means that there will be plenty of look-alike Green firms, but not of them are qualified professionally.
The great separator of pretenders from Green janitorial services is their training and certification. This seems the only way to validate the level of knowledge and the commitment to reputable Green services. Green Clean Institute is now the largest training and certification program in America and Canada. Rather than self-appointment as a Green janitorial firm, it is important that an independent third party organization establishes a standard and required training for true certification. When a company who does the service also sets their own standard for performance, we are all left with arbitrary and conflicting ideas of what to expect.
Green Clean Institute has one of the largest student bodies of any comparable program with over 500 students nationally, as well was several international students. Recently, Green Clean Institute - Canada” has been established to bring the same training and certification to the Canadian janitorial and cleaning firms. If your company plans to “Go Green,” we suggest that you start at the most logical process in your building … the cleaning service.
Remember that Green is not a substitute word for environmentalism. It directly refers to the health quality of a facility and the health impact on the people who inhabit that building. If your company is planning to “Go Green,” the key issues are not energy or water conservation, building materials, or access to public transportation. The whole project is to improve the indoor air quality and the continued good health of all the people in that facility.
What is the effect of the Green Cleaning movement on the janitorial industry? The facts are clean that the cleaning and janitorial world is in transition, and it will be forever changed to what will come to be known as the Green Janitorial era. How people transition to this new status will differ, and there will be those who try to ignore it until the Green practice is literally forced on them by mandate.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Tags: Health
