Greening Floor Care There is more to it than just a green finish product. By: Mike Gunderson W While there has been a definite surge in the mar-keting and use of green floor finishing and clean-ing products in recent years, it can be argued that many of the products and techniques being used are not environmentally friendly or sustainable. What is common among most floor finishing technologies is that they require multiple coats of chemical finish, annual stripping of the finish, quarterly scrubbing and recoating treatments and weekly — sometimes daily — buffing or bur-nishing. It All Adds Up The Office of the Federal Environmental Executive (OFEE) has a calculator available on its website to help facilities estimate the amount of chemical products used for floor care and cleaning meas-ured in pounds. It also helps to estimate the percentage of haz-ardous material associated with those pounds of product. According to the data provided by this calcula-tor, the average building uses more than 1,000 pounds of chemical products annually for every 50,000 square feet of hard surface flooring. Of those 1,000 pounds, an estimated 18 percent is considered hazardous to human and environ-mental health. It would take a sophisticated calculator to compute the total amount of waste resulting from conventional floor care in the United States alone. Mike Gunderson is vice president of sales and marketing for Ultra Durable Floors, a Minnesota company that provides products, training and support for hard surface floor care with a focus on ultra-durable floor finish technology. For more information, visit www.udfloors.com or send your request to [email protected]. Significant Waste Multiple coats of finish applied to the floors, even if it is a green floor finish, results in many pounds of chemical, water and packaging waste each year. When the finish degrades — sometimes even much more quickly than the non-green products previously used — the finish must be stripped from the floors often to be dumped down the drain. Some states have seen the potential harm in this and now require special procedures for dis-posal of this waste. Between annual stripping and recoating proce-dures, floors are often scrubbed and recoated with more coats of finish on a quarterly schedule. In cases like dialysis clinics and laboratories where harsh chemicals are often spilled on floors, stripping and refinishing may be required four or five times each year. The resulting water, chemical and packaging waste is quite substantial for even a small building. Additionally wasteful is the amount of energy used to run the machines necessary for stripping, top-scrubbing, buffing and burnishing. Also, when the pads used for these tasks become worn, they are thrown in the trash, creat-ing additional solid waste. for more info Visit www.cmmonline.com and type in search keyword: Floor Care . For more information on related products, visit www.cmmonline.com , select SUPPLIER SEARCH from the main navigation bar, and enter keyword: Floor . Most conventional or green floor finish products simply do not retain a shiny appearance without frequent buffing or burnishing. 30 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • July 2009
CMM – Archives Jul 2009: 30
