Sustainability

The honest hierarchy

Most sustainability pages in this industry open with certified products, because products are visible and easy to name. They matter, and they are not where the largest reduction lives.

Rank the environmental cost of a commercial cleaning contract and the order is roughly: work that did not need to happen, then water and chemical volume per task, then packaging, then the chemistry itself. The first line is bigger than the rest combined, and it is the one the industry has no mechanism to address — because a fixed schedule cannot know which of its visits were unnecessary.

Not cleaning what does not need cleaning

This is the part of our sustainability position that comes from the operating model rather than from procurement.

Predictive cleaning sets frequency per area from measured usage. A meeting room nobody booked, a wing that emptied for a fortnight, a corridor with a tenth of its assumed traffic — under a fixed schedule each of those receives a full service, consuming product, water, packaging and a trip across the building.

Those visits do not disappear from the contract; they move to the areas that took the traffic. So the environmental gain is not “less cleaning” — it is the same hours producing a cleaner building with less consumed, because none of it is spent on rooms that were already fine.

It is worth being precise about the size of this. We report consumption per account rather than publishing an industry-wide percentage, because the honest answer depends entirely on how badly the previous schedule matched the building — and in some buildings it matched reasonably well.

Products, and where we stop

Green-certified products are used wherever they meet the requirement, which today covers most general cleaning: floors, surfaces, glass, restroom maintenance.

They do not cover everything. Some clinical disinfection has efficacy requirements that current green-certified alternatives do not meet, and some industrial soils need solvents with no comparable substitute. In those cases we use what works and say which, because quietly trading disinfection efficacy in a medical facility for a better-sounding product list would be a failure disguised as a value.

Dilution control is the least interesting item here and one of the most effective. Over-concentration is routine in this industry, wastes product, and frequently cleans worse. Controlled dilution at the point of use fixes consumption and performance at the same time.

Water, packaging and trips

Microfibre systems cut both water and chemical volume per area against traditional cotton-and-bucket methods, and they perform better on most surfaces.

Concentrates and refillables remove single-use packaging at source rather than sorting it afterwards.

Fewer trips. Smart inventory tracks supply levels per site, so restocking is consolidated instead of triggered by someone discovering an empty cupboard. Emergency supply runs are pure waste — fuel, time and usually a partial delivery.

Reported, not asserted

Consumption is tracked through the inventory module per account, which means product volumes, supply counts and service frequency are reportable per period and comparable against previous ones.

We stop short of converting those into a carbon figure. Doing that credibly requires assumptions about supply chains and travel that we cannot evidence, and an unverifiable number would sit badly next to everything else in Standards. What we report is what we measure.