Save the planet

Climate change – what can I do?

I have decided to write a little bit about what can we do in the cleaning industry to ease our Mother Earth.

Most of our clients think this is up to the cleaner: use less cleaning products, don’t run the water when cleaning the shower, don’t flush the toilet once we’ve bleached it – and yes those are very valid points. Is there anything else we can do? You probably think “but it is not up to me I am not the cleaner” – I will try to show you in this blog that with just a little bit of effort there is so much you can do!

A lot of clients think that switching to Eco products is enough, and that’s all we can do. This is indeed great and not only safer for the environment but also for our cleaners who don’t have to breath strong, sometimes poisonous fumes.

Although I believe this is a good first step, please don’t stop there. Instead of buying those products in the supermarket and each time throw away the plastic bottle, keep them – find a local shop where you can refill the bottles. I know sometimes this can be a pain as we all have busy lives, but one hour of your time will make a huge difference. We use roughly 5 bottles of each product a year. If we have 5 cleaning products, that’s 25 unnecessary plastic bottles ending up somewhere. I know what you think, 25 bottles is not that much – but since we have about 250 clients that’s about 6250 plastic bottles. Thousands of extra plastic bottles being used unnecessarily. If you have trouble finding a local shop which could refill your products please get in touch with me, I might be able to help give you advice on where you can go.

Another thing you can do is to provide cleaning cloths. Every time I meet my clients I tell them how important it is to have plenty of them. Of course you can buy brand new ones – microfibre are the best. Capable of tackling the toughest of cleaning challenges, microfibres are perfect to clean glass, stainless steel and ceramic surfaces streak and scratch free. If you are buying new ones, get different colours. Make sure the cleaner is aware what surface or purpose each coloured cloth is for. For example: red for toilet, yellow for sink, green for glass etc. You can leave a little note along with the cleaning products.

However, buying new cloths is not necessary as we all have old towels, cotton t-shirts – don’t throw them away, keep them, cut them up and leave them for the cleaner to use.

Of course, it is best if you have plenty of them so that the cleaner can use a different one each time – it will save you on washing them every week. Instead of washing 5 cloths every week you can wash 10 fortnightly – but please do make sure you do wash them and have them clean. A lot of times the cleaner will find only one cloth – as you can imagine this makes effective cleaning almost impossible and either reflects poorly on the quality of cleaning, or majorly increases the usage of kitchen towel, which has a huge impact on the environment. I personally don’t allow our cleaners to use kitchen towel paper.

The environment for me and everyone at AG Cleaning Services is very important and I try to encourage you to buy only necessary cleaning products. Although I do strongly recommend switching to Eco products, I do understand that those products are not that strong for the hard water in London, so please do keep lime scale removers and bleach – our cleaners will use those, but as little as possible.

These are only two little steps but the impact is huge, so please consider implementing them. Our planet, as well as our cleaners, will be grateful.

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