Asking More From Cleaning Textiles known and unknown — of the products they were being exposed to every day. Green cleaning initiatives were introduced and the cleaning chemical products began to change. Instead of spraying a disinfectant with chlorine on a toilet and then an ammonia-based glass cleaner on a mirror a few feet away, we began to look for more healthful alternatives. There is no shortage of these alternatives on the market. Methods changed as well; instead of at-omizing chemicals, and thus inhaling them, cleaning workers began to apply them di-rectly to a cleaning cloth. Chemicals also became more job-specific. Cleaning pros also made an effort to re-duce the use of chemicals. The reasons for this are both for health and economics. The need arose for textiles that would make these new methods more effective. They needed a textile that would help the green cleaning chemicals lift and remove soil, attract dust without treating the duster and leave a streak-free finish on glass. Microfiber is that textile. Microfiber was already being used exten-sively in Europe, but wasn’t readily available, or cheap, in this country. I remember reading a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) study from 2002 that listed the cost of a microfiber wet mop pad, not a looped end mop or a tube mop, at over $17. Since then the price of microfiber has dropped significantly. Now microfiber mops are comparable in price to high quality looped end mops. Microfiber towel prices have gone down, while the cost of cotton has increased. When you factor in the longevity of micro-fiber cleaning products, microfiber can actu-ally be cheaper than other cleaning textiles. We have a restaurant chain that tested our microfiber tube mop. They used the mop for their daily mainte-nance as well as for cleaning up spills. At the end of the day, they would clean the mop with a pressure washer. This went on for eight months before they happily sent us the mop to show us how well it performed. Can you image a cotton cut end mop or even a high quality synthetic looped end mop lasting that long under those con-ditions? They would have used a dozen cotton mops in that amount of time, especially if they cleaned it with a pressure washer. Facilities Managers and Building Owners Your Sources for Indoor Air Quality Answers are A Training com IAQ Training Institute LLC TRAINING • MEDIA • CONSULTING Call 866-427-4727 or visit www.iaqtraining.com & The Voice of the IAQ Industry Disaster Restoration • Indoor Air Quality • Building Sciences FREE education with industry experts at www.iaqradio.com By clicking the episode number on our home page or by following the link that says “go to show” you can listen live or download any of our 260+ shows. IICRC, ACAC, ABIH continuing education credits available. E-mail: [email protected] IAQ Radio is live, Friday’s at Noon (ET) with co-hosts Joe (Radio Joe) Hughes and Cliff (Z-Man) Zlotnik with engineer Valerie (Roxy V) Bender. Under A Microscope As its name implies, microfiber is made up of tiny fibers. Microfiber is defined as any fiber that is less than one denier (a measure for the linear mass density of fibers). Typically, microfiber used in cleaning products is .4 to .1 denier. By comparison, silk is typically 1 denier. The fineness of microfiber is important to understand because it helps us visualize how many individual fibers are in a microfi-Visit us at: www.iaqradio.com FREE INFO: Reader Service 251 or CMMOnline.com/freeinfo 26 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • May 2013
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