The average person spends the bulk of their time indoors. While that might not seem problematic on the surface, it also means that most people are at the mercy of indoor air quality.

Here’s the problem. Indoor air can contain up to 5 times the concentration of pollutants as outdoor air. Even worse, some of the pollutants come from cleaning products that commercial properties rely on to keep things clean.

Fortunately, green cleaning services offer you a way to improve indoor air quality. Keep reading for a breakdown of how these are beneficial.

Types of Indoor Air Pollutants

There are several types of indoor air pollutants that routinely find their way into businesses and commercial spaces. One of the more common types of pollutants are molds and mildews. These usually stem from excess moisture in the building.

Another common source of pollutants is combustion products. These are leftover gasses and particulates that you get from gas-fired appliances, such as furnaces or water heaters. A few common culprits are carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide.

One of the more varied types of air pollutants is volatile organic compounds. These are compounds that enter the air through evaporation.

They come from sources like cleaning supplies, pesticides, and building materials. While not all VOCs are dangerous in small amounts, they can become a problem through buildup over time.

Beyond that, many pollutants enter buildings or facilities right through the front door on people’s clothing and shoes.

With those basics out of the way, let’s look at how green cleaning can help boost indoor air quality.

Prevention

One of the simplest green cleaning strategies is simple prevention. Green cleaners don’t just look at ways to reduce pollutants that have already found their way inside. Green cleaning looks at keeping those pollutants outside from the start.

Since shoes represent a key way that pollutants find their way inside, good mats and mat cleaning policies are essential. Ideally, you want anywhere from 10 to 15 feet of mats that people walk across before they enter the building.

Mats encourage employees and visitors to wipe their feet, which can help remove pollutants. Even casually walking across mats can remove and trap pollutants.

Of course, mats can become overloaded, so regular vacuuming by a green cleaning company goes a long way to keep those mats working effectively. By limiting the volume of pollutants that people track in, you help make the air quality better.

Better Technology

While not confined specifically to green cleaners, professional cleaning services almost always have better technology on hand. For example, professional-grade vacuums remove far more pollutants from mats and carpets than consumer-grade vacuums. This improves the efficiency of the mats and carpets in trapping pollutants.

Most green cleaners also use microfiber cloths and flat mops. These tools do a much better job of catching and trapping pollutants than traditional cleaning rags and mops. Traditional cleaning rags and mops often stir up pollutants rather than trap them.

The more pollutants you catch with these tools, the fewer pollutants can damage your indoor air quality.

Fewer Volatile Organic Compounds

Most organizations ask a lot of questions when they hire cleaners or a cleaning service. One question that rarely comes up is, “Do your cleaning products produce VOCs?”

For many commercial organizations, sterilizing problem areas is the main concern. You want the surfaces your employees come in contact with kept free of bacteria or viruses.

Yet, many cleaning supplies contain VOCs. A few common types of cleaning supplies with VOCs include:

• Disinfectants
• Toilet bowl cleaners
• Rug cleaning solutions

In other words, the kinds of cleaning supplies that commercial cleaning services use all the time.

Even worse, those cleaning supplies are often far more powerful or used in a concentrated form. That means your building gets an extra dose of VOCs every time your cleaning service uses them.

Green cleaning services avoid cleaning supplies that include VOCs. There are alternative cleaning supplies that generate similar results without adding VOCs to your air.

The fewer of these VOC-containing products your cleaners use, the better your air quality.

Better Technique

Many cleaning supplies these days come with their own misting spray bottles. While the misting approach does have some advantages, it’s also a problem. Misting cleaning supplies onto surfaces means spraying those cleaning supplies into the air.

While a lot of the cleaner will end up on the surface, not all of it does. Some of it will disperse into the air and add to your air quality problems.

While green cleaning supplies don’t contain VOCs, that doesn’t mean you want cleaning solutions in your air. Rather than use a misting approach, many green cleaners use the bottle to spray a stream of cleaner onto a cloth.

Then, they use the cloth to wipe surfaces. This won’t completely eliminate cleaners in the air, but it means less of it in the air.

Benefits of Green Cleaning

One of the big reasons why indoor air quality matters so much is that poor air quality can make employees sick. Minimally, poor air quality can aggravate allergies. In more extreme cases, it can give people headaches or trigger asthma attacks.

If things get bad enough, you can end up with a case of sick building syndrome. That’s when simply being inside your building causes many people to display similar symptoms.

Green cleaning helps you reduce the chances of triggering minor or major health problems for your employees.

Green Cleaning Services and You

Poor indoor air quality isn’t just an annoyance. It can turn into a threat to the health of your employees. Green cleaning services can help you reduce that threat.

Green cleaning helps you limit pollutants in the air through prevention and technology. It also helps you reduce the amount of VOCs in your building through different kinds of cleaners.

You still get a clean building, but with better air for all.

Green Clean Commercial specializes in green cleaning services for commercial operations. For more information about our services, contact Green Clean Commercial today.