Cutting Back on Water Usage

Finding ways to reduce water consumption and save money at the same time

by Michael Wilson — For those who may have missed the news, the western half of the United States is about to run dry. According to an article in the February 1, 2014, edition of The New York Times, “With no sign of rain, 17 rural communities [in California] providing water to 40,000 people are in danger of running out [of water] within 60 to 120 days.”

State officials also said that number was likely to rise in the months ahead. This is because the State Water Project, the main municipal water distribution system, recently announced it does not have enough water to supplement the dwindling supplies of local agencies that provide water to an additional 25 million people. It is the first time the project has turned off its spigot in its 54-year history.

This grave situation affects locations beyond California. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, virtually the entire American West is “abnormally dry” or in “extreme” or “exceptional” drought. Adding to these concerns, no significant rainfall is expected soon—certainly not enough to eliminate these extreme drought conditions. (See sidebar: “Rainy Weekend, But a Long Way to Go.”)

It is clear that everyone, including all segments of our industry—manufacturers, distributors, and cleaning contractors alike—must begin to focus on how they use water. The goal must be to move beyond water conservation, which involves only short-term water-usage reduction in response to a temporary shortage, to finding and implementing ways to use water more efficiently over the long term.

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Existing Building Operations and Management—or LEED-EB: O&M—standards specify that facilities must prove they have reduced water consumption by 20 percent as a prerequisite for certification or recertification. Taking steps to use water more efficiently is also part of the Cleaning Industry Management Standard (CIMS) for Green Buildings (GB). “CIMS provides cleaning professionals with guidance in ways to reduce cleaning-related water consumption, and calls for the creation of a resource conservation plan overall, including water,” says David Frank, president of the American Institute for Cleaning Sciences who was instrumental in the creation of CIMS and CIMS-GB.

Water Over Usage

Surprisingly, many cleaning contractors and carpet cleaning technicians are unaware of how much water is used to complete cleaning tasks. For instance, many commercial food-service kitchens use wall-mounted systems that mix water and chemical to clean floors. While these systems can be effective when it comes to removing soils, they can use as much as 10 gallons of water per minute—or 600 gallons an hour. Using this amount of water for just one cleaning task is soon likely to become unsustainable in many parts of the country.

Another area of water-usage concern is carpet cleaning. Older portable carpet extractors use about 1.5 gallons of water per minute or more, amounting to more than 90 gallons for a typical one-hour job. Fortunately, some carpet extractor manufacturers have reduced the amount of water used by portable machines to about one gallon per minute. But this is still a lot of water.

Water-Cutting Techniques

Floor care. While floor stripping and refinishing projects do not use as much water as carpet cleaning, significant amounts of water can still be required during this process, especially for grout cleaning or if a facility schedules frequent refinishing cycles. One option that reduces water usage here is the use of cylindrical brush floor machines, produced by several manufacturers.

These systems use brushes instead of rotary pads and have been found to use as much as 30 percent less water and chemical than standard rotary floor machines. The key benefit here, and the reason they use less water and chemical, is that the counter-rotating brushes on these machines can reach deeper into grout areas and the pores of floors, doing the “leg work.” Meanwhile, according to Frank, we can expect to see more “low moisture” floor machines of all types—rotary and cylindrical—from many manufacturers in the future.

Rainy Weekend, But a Long Way to Go Northern California did see some relief from drought conditions during the second weekend of February. Just north of San Francisco, nearly 21 inches of rain fell on Mount Tamalpais, and parts of Sonoma County received 20 inches. Other areas received up to 48 inches—more rain than some of the lands had seen total in the past two years! While this was good news, it still amounts to less than 50 percent of average rainfall amounts for this time of year and, because the land was so dry and hard, much of the rain ran off, creating flooding rather than sinking in where it was needed. Worse, rainfall has dropped off dramatically south of San Francisco, an area that produces a third of the fruits and vegetables consumed in the United States.

Carpet care. Many cleaning professionals and their distributors are already focusing on low-moisture carpet cleaning as a more environmentally friendly way to clean carpets. Another way to reduce water consumption when cleaning carpet is to use a combination of interim “dry” or “bonnet” cleaning systems—which use little to no water—along with carpet extraction.

One common approach for dry cleaning is encapsulation. With this method, dry absorbent compounds (containing small amounts of water, detergent, and solvent) are sprinkled over carpet and worked into the carpet with a machine. The compound absorbs soil in the carpet, which are later removed with vacuuming. A combination system, that often proves satisfactory and helps reduce water consumption, is to use an interim carpet cleaning method two times and then extraction for the third cleaning.

Bonnet cleaning is performed by soaking a bonnet in a cleaning solution and attaching it to the bottom of a floor machine. As the machine moves over the carpet, the bonnet agitates the carpet, helping to remove dry soils mainly at the higher end of carpet fibers. The entire process uses very little water, and for a “quick clean,” for a soiled hallway for instance, it can prove effective.

Dilution

When it comes to chemicals and water savings, using auto-dilution systems instead of manually mixing chemical and water at a tap can help cleaning professionals use water more efficiently. Typically, auto-dilution systems are used to ensure just enough chemical is mixed with water so that it meets the needs for the cleaning task at hand. This reduces chemical waste, but it also ensures that just enough water is used as well, which often reduces water waste.

Expert Guidance

To address these challenges, cleaning professionals and building managers are likely need expert guidance to find ways to become more sustainable. An effective way to find this guidance is to turn to astute facility maintenance distributors.

Some distributors now have access to computerized or web-based technologies that can compare the products, tools, and procedures currently being used by cleaning professionals and suggest alternatives that may help use water and other natural resources more responsibly. For instance, in each of the examples discussed earlier (commercial kitchen cleaning, floor refinishing, carpet cleaning, and dilution systems), there are alternative products and procedures available that use significantly less water as well as other natural resources.

As in most industries, the jansan community has only begun to focus on sustainability issues during the past decade or so. But as this trend gains momentum, more and more cleaning professionals are beginning to conduct their businesses in a more efficient and sustainable manner. While there may be some resistance to these changes at first—as there was to Green cleaning movement a decade ago—our industry is in a position to lead the way in the sustainable use of water (and other natural resources) in the facilities we clean and maintain.

Michael Wilson is director of marketing for Afflink, a leading sales and marketing organization for the facility management, health care, education, industrial, hospitality, and related industries. He may be reached through www.afflink.com.

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