Teachers and consumers across the UK are increasingly opting for eco-friendly cleaning products, having become ever more mindful of the risks and harm that such products can have on the environment.
For their part, companies specialising in eco-friendly products have managed to take their messaging into the mainstream, showing customers that ‘leaning green’ when purchasing cleaning products can now get you a product that’s both effective at what it’s supposed to do and better for the planet – while at the same time not having to necessarily pay significantly more.
For a good example of how new technology has changed the way we think about cleaning products, take Electro Chemical Activation (ECA). Using nothing more than salt, water and electricity, it’s possible for an onsite ECA dispenser to produce up to 40 litres of environmentally-friendly cleaning and disinfecting solution per day.
Less is more
Look at using concentrated products, since opting for these will typically save you money and leave less of a toll on the environment than their non-concentrated equivalents.
The benefits of concentrated products become easy to see when considering the impact of using them at scale. They require less packaging (resulting in less material getting dumped at landfill sites), take up less space (freeing up demand for transport and shipping) and reduce the amount of fuel needed to distribute them.
Given that concentrated products have to be diluted before use, staff who use them will often keep a supply of reusable spray bottles to hand. Regular users of ready-to-use products will tend to just dispose of their (typically sealed) packaging once they’re finished with them, which contributes significant amounts of waste to landfill sites.
Best value
Once you’ve decided on which general products you’re wanting to use, be sure to compare suppliers on both price and the quality of their products. Try asking other schools or organisations in your local area which cleaning product supplier or distributor they use and what sort of deal they get. You might even be able to negotiate down the price of orders by partnering up with one or more other schools.
Next, look at trying to rationalise your purchases – could you potentially buy a combination chemical or cleaning agent that performs the same job of two separate cleaners? This is where concentrated cleaning products can again be helpful – being able to store more units of a given product than you would otherwise can mean not having to place orders as often. Note that you can purchase concentrates from YPO, which offers loan dispensers for free.
