facility focus Green Cleaning By: Beth Bittenbender Continuous improvement is helping the King County Metro Transit embrace cleanliness. Innovation Continuous improvement, innovation and environmental sensitivity are watchwords for the state of Washington’s King County Metro Transit, a philosophy strongly embraced by the power and facilities sec-tion and its custodial workgroup tasked with maintaining the health, safety and overall appearance of Metro’s facilities. When Transit Supervisor of Facilities Maintenance Peggy Meyer and Transit Chief of Facilities Maintenance Lorri Traylor decided to transition to greener ways of cleaning the bus complexes, they did so to stay ahead of the King County mandate that new buildings be certified under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) criteria; but, in fact, more was involved. While much of the two million plus square feet of cleanable space in the 30 bus transit buildings, four parking garages and the downtown Seattle bus tunnel con-sists of older facilities not under the LEED directive, Meyer, Traylor and their manager, Jerry Rutledge, saw it as a chance to grow their shared expertise and transform their processes and personnel. “We wanted to do our part and proactive-ly gain LEED points for new facilities, but we also saw an opportunity to better our-selves and enhance the professionalism of our 54 custodians by becoming educated C and proficient on green, healthy and more productive methods,” says Meyer. After extensive research into green clean-ing processes and disciplines as diverse as Team Cleaning, Zone Cleaning, Day Cleaning, APPA guidelines, ISSA’s Cleaning Industry Management Standard (CIMS), Green Seal’s Environmental Leadership Standard for Cleaning Services (GS-42) and the “systems thinking” of Dr. Edwards Deming and others in the quality movement, Meyer and Traylor grasped that departmen-tal changes and policies must be preventa-tive, well-thought-out, standardized, holistic and system-wide to be effective. In response, the department produced a With microfiber cloths and activated water, workers are able to clean fingerprints and other soils from stainless steel without fear of chemical residue. 40 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • March 2011 Image courtesy of the King County Metro Transit
CMM – Archives Mar 2011: 40
