The Environmental Preferability Of Polished Concrete Stop renting your floors and take ownership of them with sustainable burnishing and honing processes. By: Whit Beverly T Whit Beverly is the owner and president of Aztec Products Inc., a manu-facturer of high-speed propane-powered floor care equipment. He can be reached at WhitBev@ AztecProducts.com. For more information about the products Aztec has to offer for cleaning and maintain-ing hard surface floors, including vinyl composi-tion tile (VCT) and con-crete, among others, visit www.AztecProducts.com. Taking care of high-traffic floors has always been hard work. Even with the advent of high-speed machines, stripping floors is messy, inconvenient and poten-tially dangerous. Usually, stripping can only be done during after-hours when a store, plant or building is closed. And, stripping solution and finish seemingly stick to everything. The combination also can be incredibly slippery — 10 to 15 times slicker than ice — which can lead to worker injuries. It’s no wonder that strip and finish cycles are often extended, causing facilities to look dirty, dingy and unkempt. The worst part is that, when a facility finally decides they cannot delay maintenance any longer and strips and refinishes their floors, they will have to do it all over again in a year or less. In a sense, the facility is renting its own floor because it will have to pay every year for the same annual maintenance. Just imagine having to reapply roofing mastic and shingles each year or replacing all of your light-ing components annually. If you stop and think about it, it makes no sense financially to “rent” your floor. Now, there is finally a good answer for these high-traffic floors: Polished concrete. for more info Visit www.cmmonline.com and type in search keyword: Hard Floor Care . For more information on related products, visit www.cmmonline.com , select SUPPLIER SEARCH from the main navigation bar, and enter keyword: Floor Machines . Understanding Polished Concrete The Concrete Polishing Association of America (CPAA) defines polishing concrete as, “The act of changing a concrete surface, with or without aggre-gate exposure, to achieve a specified level of gloss.” Depending on the method used, and if done properly, a polished concrete floor can last 20 years with only standard daily maintenance. A properly polished floor is easier to keep clean because a smooth floor has no texture to trap dirt. While daily maintenance is still required, you have no annual maintenance, so it’s more like own-ing your floor than renting it. To understand why this is true, we need to delve a little into the properties of concrete and the pro-cesses that can be used to polish it. Under a microscope, concrete resembles a porous maintain range with a variety of aggregate particles forming peaks and valleys. The process of concrete polishing flattens those peaks and fills the pores to achieve a floor that is very flat, very hard and very resistant to surface staining. With conforming polished concrete floors, the shine is actually generated by how flat the concrete is and the way that flatness reflects the light, not by any topical chemicals. It is important though to understand that not all “polished” concrete floors are the same. According to the CPAA, there are four major categories of polished concrete: 1. Surface coated 2. Burnished 3. Hybrid 4. Bonded abrasive. Each progressive process more aggressively flat-tens those aggregate peaks than the prior one; sur-face coated polished concrete is the least aggres-sive, while bonded abrasive polished concrete is the most aggressive. ■ Surface coated Non-conforming or surface coated concrete does not flatten the floor at all; it is concrete that has had a chemical coating film applied to it in order to achieve a gloss reading. It does not conform to the CPAA’s definition of polished concrete, and the durability will depend on the quality of the chemical used, the rate of foot traffic and maintenance procedures. ■ Burnished Concrete polished through burnishing utilizes a multi-step operation of mechanical friction, rubbing a concrete floor surface with or without waxes or 20 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • March 2013
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