You can’t have a discussion about jan/san industry product trends without the topic of “green” coming up. Yet, maybe you’re one of those distributors who’s looking at your customers and thinking, “These guys don’t want so-called green products. I’ve never heard a peep from them about green.” Sound familiar?

The trend has affected many jan/san distributors, but many more are ignoring green — until a customer approaches them with a question or request, that is. Then, they fall all over themselves to get with the program.

This article will look at four end-user organizations that are making green cleaning products and practices a priority. Their approaches are also serving as referential blueprints as other organizations seek to adopt green principles.

City of Santa Monica
Santa Monica, Calif., is a city of 84,000 people. Like other southern California cities, its attractions include its pier, beaches and parks in addition to the shops and restaurants located within its popular Third Street Promenade. Nearly 70 cleaning professionals attend to all public areas.

Almost 10 years ago, a group of research students inventoried and assessed the chemicals and cleaning products used by city custodians and maintenance people. What they found eventually altered the way the city approached cleaning and maintenance.

“They were blown away by all the different types of products, many of them known to cause cancer,” explains Karl Bruskotter, environmental programs analyst for the city. “They said ‘we have to be able to do a better job at this’ and they started looking at the alternatives.”

At that point, there wasn’t a lot of precedent established on the subject. The city’s staff researched the options (there weren’t many) and settled on two products that fit inexact criteria.

“Once we did the training and worked to implement the programs and transition the maintenance staff and custodians, we had a lot of success,” Bruskotter says.

Getting those first green products wasn’t easy. They were shipped in from far-away Missouri. And the training for custodians: virtually none. The Missouri-based representatives of the manufacturer occasionally had to fly in to carry out any needed training or instruction.

Still, it was a start. Santa Monica was one of the first cities in the nation to recognize and adopt green cleaning practices as part of its purchasing criteria.

The Best Bidder
About three years ago, the city’s janitorial products were again put out for bid. By then, Bruskotter says, a number of other cities and municipalities had implemented green buying programs of their own.

“We all said we should come up with a common set of specifications,” explains Bruskotter. “If we all agreed on one standard, manufacturers could work with it.”

The peer group adopted the Green Seal standard as part of its purchasing criteria. Green Seal is one standard that includes criteria that products must meet to be considered environmentally preferable.

The most interesting element of Santa Monica’s bid criteria: it addressed one aspect that its previous contract was sorely lacking — distributor service.

The result was a contract that took distributor training and service into consideration, as well as green product availability.

Bruskotter first narrowed the field to four distributor/manufacturer pairs that had products that met the Green Seal standard and exhibited the ability to provide reliable service. Bruskotter then examined cost, service, delivery, labeling and training. Performance was also an issue; Bruskotter sent the products out onto the field, and the city’s custodians weighed in on the final verdict.

“They were the ones that weighed in about how they liked the performance, how knowledgeable the rep was, and made the ultimate decision,” says Bruskotter.

The contract was eventually awarded to one distributor/manufacturer team that fit the bill. They were able to provide products and service at an affordable price.

Currently, the transition to the new contract requirements is underway, but Bruskotter is already pleased with the results — and so are the city’s custodians.

“More than anything, if I’m pushing these green cleaning products and there are complaints, it becomes my problem. If I can make the custodians and maintenance people happy, then I don’t have to deal with it.”

Bruskotter says his organization now gets two to three calls per week from others seeking advice on greening their own organizations. Interested parties include the city of Bend, Ore., the city and county of Denver, Warner Bros., and Santa Clara County in California.

King County, Seattle
Eric Nelson’s position as environmental purchasing program manager for King County, Seattle, is a unique one. His organization’s sole purpose is, in essence, to persuade the county’s 13,000 employees, spread among hundreds of agencies, to adopt environmentally preferable products and practices, including those related to cleaning.

The County uses decentralized purchasing, so the people in the field — the staff that run the jail, the custodians who clean the courthouse, and the workers building roads — are ultimately responsible for purchasing decisions.

Nelson’s agency is charged with researching alternatives that fit the environmentally preferable purchasing goals made policy in 1990, then presenting those findings to the county’s agencies.

“All of the agencies of the county must designate appropriate personnel to serve as liaisons in our program,” Nelson explains. “We assemble information and furnish it to the liaison. These appropriately appointed personnel take the information and bring it to colleagues in that agency and together they look at these ideas and figure out what they want to try, as well as what they can afford.”

The program’s staff stays on the pulse of what’s happening among other environmentally minded purchasers as well as non-profit organization that work for environmental causes, such as the cleaning-oriented Center For a New American Dream.

Because it is advocated by the Center, King County has also adopted the Green Seal standard for environmentally preferable cleaning products.

King County’s many agencies communicate with their janitorial supply distributors on a regular basis and have requested that distributors work to find green options. The biggest problem, Nelson says, has been the lack of a concrete definition of what green means:

“We are optimistic that by the next time we go out to bid, our agencies will have had sufficient conversations with their distributors that they will achieve the confidence that this can be done.”

Healthy Schools Campaign
The goal of the Chicago-based Healthy Schools Campaign is to help Illinois school administrators create healthier environments for children and teachers by making improvements to air quality. This includes using green-cleaning products and equipment.

Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley, has made green purchasing a priority, and instructed the city’s facilities to adopt green practices. The city’s jan/san distributors have responded in kind. Many have tweaked and expanded product lines to address the increased green-product demand.

“Distributors see customers moving in that direction,” says Rochelle Davis, executive director of the 2-year-old organization. “There were some distributors who had already moved in that direction and there was the sense that others needed to keep up.”

Davis’ organization is committed to helping schools achieve the goals the campaign has outlined as being preferable. Because asthma is such a pervasive problem at Chicago schools, good indoor air quality (IAQ) is key.

“Our general approach is to bring all of the key stakeholders together in a particular school district to talk about their issues and concerns,” says Davis. “It’s not often that people in the cleaning profession talk to a pediatrician [about cleaning’s affect on health]. We foster a conversation about the problems they’re seeing in terms of asthma in relation to IAQ.”

The group put together a task force that sought to identify standards within the community to which they could aspire. The task force adopted the Green Seal standard, and its findings are published in a new report.

“These products were readily available and reasonably priced,” says Davis. “The question of staff training was critical. We found a wide range of willingness by distributors to help [school custodians] effectively use products and equipment.”

Following its recent success, the Healthy Schools Campaign’s next goal is to reach out to other school districts in Illinois to educate them about what the program can accomplish.

National Geographics Society
The National Geographics Society (NGS), based in Washington, D.C., was one of the original eight pilot projects in the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED-EB program (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Existing Buildings). The facility received silver certification in November 2003.

Upon making the corporate decision to promote environmental sustainability, NGS approached its cleaning contractor, UNICCO Service Co., with the LEED objectives. The contractor took NGS’s request to its manufacturers, which prompted new scrutiny about how the manufacturers should approach the green market.

Luckily, equipment-wise, the timing with the contract worked out well and a number of pieces of equipment needed to be replaced anyway. After about three to four months — and much research and testing — the contractors’ cleaning crew was using green products and cleaning methods with great success, according to Robert Cline, director, general services, for NGS.

“As a result, the [contractor] is going to take this to their other contracts throughout the country, not just on a local basis,” he adds.

NGS and its contractor also found the costs involved comparable to other products.

“We have found that, from the cleaning perspective, the costs are not any more significant — maybe a little more initially with equipment, but with supplies we’ve found the costs to be comparable,” says Cline.

Like many organizations, NGS’s main struggle initially was to find information on green-cleaning products. It enlisted the help of a LEED-certified consultant and Green Seal representatives. The organization is now a model for others who wish to achieve the same goals.

NGS is fielding requests for information from architects, facilities management professionals, and government agencies. The staff is also giving presentations and tours, and working with the U.S. Green Building Council to provide more education in the future.

Learning Curve
These vignettes illustrate a mounting interest among purchasing personnel and facility managers to incorporate green practices into their operations. No longer impeded by excessive costs and product ineffectiveness, their stories offer insight into what green buyers look for from their distributors: namely, knowledge, or at least the willingness to seek it.

Programs similar to the ones profiled here are everywhere, and because of the networking and communication among similar organizations with similar goals, the rate of buildings going green is increasing exponentially. The organizations interviewed are constantly asked to help other building operators follow suit.




POSTED ON: 6/1/2004