Office Cleaning Companies with Green Cleaning Practices Help Employee Health

If you want to keep your employees healthy and coming to work, you want to make sure your workplace uses green cleaning practices.

We probably don’t need to say why keeping your workplace free of germs, in this age of the Coronavirus and the flu. Plus, you probably don’t need much persuading that green cleaning is smart and necessary. You probably got the memo a long time ago, that the environment is important. Nobody wants dangerous chemicals seeping into the soil and eventually our waterways.

But nevertheless, let’s run through a few green cleaning issues you should be considering if you own or manage a business. It may surprise you how dangerous it can be to not use green cleaning practices.

Your cleaning chemicals could be putting your employees at risk. You may have heard how last year, at a restaurant chain, a worker was using a cleaning agent with sodium hypochlorite. It’s a chemical found in many household bleaches, but when it’s mixed with ammonia, it can release a gas called chloramine.

You don’t want to get near chloramine. With this restaurant chain, the incident wound up killing one worker and making 10 others sick.

You can prevent accidents like that in several ways, such as hiring a commercial cleaning service such as Stratus Buildings Solutions. (As you probably know, being at our website, we specialize in green cleaning and never use toxic chemicals.)

But if you’re not in the market for hiring a commercial cleaning company right now, you can also avoid the trouble by either training your employees about the dangers that some cleaning agents possess – or by making sure whatever cleaning supplies your office uses, that they aren’t potentially dangerous.

However you do it, though, it’s extremely important to be aware of what you’re using to clean your workspace. Look, we get it – most people don’t think about a cleaning solution being dangerous. Why would you? But they can be, and your employees are counting on you to be thinking about these things.

Do an inventory of your cleaning chemicals. You can’t really be sure that your cleaning chemicals are safe, of course, unless you go through what you’re using to clean your workspace. Now, again, if you hire an eco-friendly cleaning service such as Stratus Building Solutions, you may not need to do any sort of inventory. But if that’s not yet on your agenda, if you have a custodial staff or somebody who handles any cleaning products, you or your employees should take a look at what you’re using – and come up with policies to prevent later buying toxic cleaning chemicals.

You could take an entire course on toxins in cleaning chemicals and still not know everything you need to know, and there’s so no reasonable way to list everything here that you need to be aware of, but some (of the many) chemicals in cleaning agents to watch out for and stay away from include formaldehyde (a known carcinogen), butyl cello solve (you can irritate your lungs, breathing that in) and petroleum distillates (very flammable and not advised to be breathing in).

Keep in mind that those cleaning chemicals stick around awhile. Sure, you may do your cleaning at night, and your workers come in, in the day, and so you aren’t too concerned whether your cleaning products are toxic or not. But hours after some cleaning agents are used on desks, computer terminals, phones (we hope you’re wiping down phones), doorknobs (we hope you’re wiping those down, too) and so on, those chemicals are often still there.

And your employees are breathing them in.

As the American Lung Association notes, cleaning chemicals can contribute to not only headaches but allergies, respiratory problems and, yes, cancer.

Sure, it can sound like a lot of worrying for nothing. You might figure that you’ve gotten through life this far, using cleaning chemicals that pollute the world, and you’re still here.

But we know you care about your employees. You care about keeping health insurance premiums lower. And the best way to do both is to take care that the commercial cleaning service you use specializes in green cleaning.