How Would You Answer These Four Questions?

Understanding LEED’s Approach to Measuring Cleaning Performance

In a slowly evolving post-pandemic era, building owners, managers, and cleaning contractors must ask themselves the following four questions to ensure facilities are being properly cleaned to protect occupant health and safety:?

· Are the right spaces in the facility being cleaned?

· Are the right surfaces in those spaces being cleaned?

· Is the current frequency of cleaning sufficient?

· Are we cleaning effectively?

?Historically, cleaning performance has been based on cleaning frequencies and appearance, the subjective visual inspection of how the facility looks after cleaning.?However, visual inspection has proven to be a serious shortcoming for a variety of reasons. First, because it is subjective, what is clean to one person may not be clean to another.

But most importantly, appearance has little to do with how effectively spaces and surfaces are cleaned, especially when the critical consideration is cleaning for health. We’ve been aware of this for decades, and different methods and procedures have been implemented to help us determine cleaning performance, but with the pandemic, these three words – cleaning for health – have taken on an even greater meaning. ?

One of the most effective ways to evaluating cleaning effectiveness is with the use of Petri dishes, swabbing a surface and then rubbing the swab against the agar in the dish. While effective, this method can be slow, sometimes taking two or more days to determine the results. If health-risking contaminants are on a tested surface, this means several building occupants may have touched those surfaces, inadvertently harming their health or the health of someone else.?

In 2009, the US Green Building Council’s (USGBC’s)?LEED for Existing Buildings Rating System?opted to include the APPA Leadership in Educational Facilities’ Custodial Effectiveness Assessment?as a method to evaluate cleaning performance. The APPA program is an annual custodial audit. And while it addressed numerous types of buildings and their spaces, outcomes were not necessarily based on scientific measuring tools. ?

However, today with the use of Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) meters, it is now possible to scientifically determine if spaces and surfaces are effectively cleaned. Subjectivity plays no role; ATP meters don’t tell us what types of contaminants are on a surface.?They tell us a surface may be contaminated and provides us with quantitative, dependable, repeatable, and reportable results. ?

Furthermore, and most importantly, it allows facility managers and cleaning professionals to take appropriate corrective actions when necessary to protect occupant health. ?

So, let’s try and answer the four questions mentioned earlier. By answering these questions, we will better understand LEED’s approach to measuring cleaning performance and the updated LEED v4.1 credit for Building Operations and Maintenance.

Are the right spaces in the facility being cleaned?

LEED v4.1 requires identifying all the “space types” in a facility, from lobbies to elevators, workstations to restrooms. According to LEED, identifying cleaning performance by specific space types will provide performance data helping us identify cleaning issues within those spaces. This will establish cleaning performance benchmarks for individual space types and allow greater focus on the spaces that matter most from a risk reduction perspective. ?

Are the right surfaces in those spaces being cleaned?

The critical concern here is high-touch surfaces within these spaces. In a restroom, for instance, LEED says this could include metal door handles, faucet handles, toilet flush valves, toilet seats, stall handles/locks, feminine-care waste receptacles, and paper towel dispenser handles. Examples in an office could include metal door handles, nonporous furniture surfaces, keyboards and mouse devices, light switches, and comfort controls. These surfaces are often touched by scores of people during the day, making them high-risk surfaces that can become contaminated quickly. Focusing cleaning attention on these high-touch/high-risk surfaces is critical for effectively protecting occupant health.? ?

Is the current frequency of cleaning sufficient?

The updated v4.1 credit suggests these high-touch/high-risk surfaces be evaluated and analyzed as often as daily. The reasoning behind this is that cleaning professionals need this information to help assess cleaning performance and determine which areas are being cleaned frequently enough and which may need more frequent cleaning attention.

Are we cleaning effectively?

With the use of ATP meters, we can now answer this question objectively. LEED believes that frequent testing with ATP meters allows us to not only evaluate cleaning performance, but also help improve cleaning effectiveness. These meters enable cleaning professionals to focus resources on those spaces and surfaces that are most important to protecting health while minimizing unnecessary cleaning, especially the overuse of disinfectants, which has become a significant issue due to the pandemic.

Stephen P. Ashkin is president of The Ashkin Group, a consulting firm specializing in Green cleaning and sustainability, and CEO of Sustainability Dashboard Tools LLC, for measuring and monitoring sustainability with the goal of protecting natural resources and reducing facility operating costs.?He is considered the “father of Green Cleaning,” is on the Board of the Green Sports Alliance, and has been inducted into the International Green Industry Hall of Fame (IGIHOF).?He can be reached at [email protected]