Vote for Advance Adfinity™ X20R REV™ Automatic Floor Scrubber in ISSA Innovation Award Program

Advance has entered the Adfinity™ X20R REV™ automatic floor scrubber into ISSA’s 2011 Innovation Award Program. The annual competition allows distributors and cleaning industry professionals to vote to determine the industry’s most innovative products and services in five unique categories, including: cleaning agents; equipment; paper and plastics; services, technology and other; and supplies. The Adfinity X20R REV is entered into the “equipment” category. Voting opened on July 15, 2011 and will close on September 30, 2011, with winners announced during the first week of October.

The Advance Adfinity X20R REV automatic floor scrubber is designed to provide the most uniform daily scrubbing performance and deep scrubbing for chemical-free finish removal in a single pass. Featuring patent-pending Random Orbital Scrubbing technology, the Adfinity REV is the industry’s first automatic scrubber to clean floors with distinct, random orbital and rotational motions, using up to 70 percent less cleaning solution and saving up to 90 percent in time and labor costs.

Advance will also be featuring the Adfinity X20R REV at the ISSA/Interclean trade show October 18-21, 2011 in Las Vegas, NV. Trade show attendees can visit booth 1415 in the exhibit hall to see the Adfinity X20R REV, in addition to Advance’s other latest developments. Attendees will also have an opportunity to watch product demonstrations and speak with application experts.

To vote for the Adfinity X20R REV, visit http://www.issa.com/vote.

Flexible Cleaning: Detergent and Water Cleaning

All facilities, regardless of whether it’s a university or grocery store, require hard-floor cleaning machines that are both environmentally preferred and flexible enough to handle a wide variety of cleaning applications. With recent technology advancements, automatic scrubbers with flexible cleaning capabilities are now available for cleaning professionals and facility managers. Today, we will look at these machines’ ability to use multiple types of cleaners and water only.

Ideally, a “green and clean” scrubber enables facilities to use any type of detergent or cleaning fluid—including green-certified cleaners. Machines that are designed to use a proprietary cleaning fluid only or water only are not conducive to the variable cleaning practices used in many buildings today. For example, a facility may choose a neutral cleaner for routine daily cleaning, but prefer to scrub with a stronger detergent for deeper cleaning weekly or monthly. Or a facility might use water-only cleaning interspersed with detergent-cleaning to gain the benefits of each; detergent-based cleaning gets into pores and removes more soil, while the intermittent water-only cleaning washes residual detergent out of surface pores to improve floor appearance. Once detergent is washed out of the pores, the water-only process no longer provides the same cleaning benefit. For porous floors, a good practice may be to alternate cleaning methods—detergent and no detergent—to keep floors looking their best.

Stay tuned for next week’s blog post on automatic floor scrubbers with the ability to change detergents while scrubbing!

Recognizing Green Cleaning Standards in Your Industry

In addition to major associations and government green cleaning standards and guidelines, there are also market-specific green cleaning standards and guidelines that apply to specific industries. The following are just a few Advance wants you to be aware of:

• Green Guide for Health Care: This guide is a voluntary, self-certifying program of best practices for the health care industry, including a sustainable purchasing policy for cleaning products and materials.
• Healthy Schools Campaign: A multi-pronged endeavor for improving education, this group promotes the use of safe and environmentally friendly cleaning products in K-12 schools.
• EPA Executive Order 13101: The Environmental Protection Agency has a policy in place for emphasizing and increasing the purchase and use of environmentally preferable products.

For more information related to your specific industry, visit: http://www.advance-us.com/solutions/industrysolutions.aspx

Who is Defining “Green”?

We’ve talked about different green certifications for cleaning equipment, products and chemicals, but who is really behind these certifications? Where do they come from? Advance wants to introduce you to the major industry associations and government cleaning standards and guidelines behind them:

• US Green Building Council/LEED: The LEED Green Building Rating Systems were developed by the US Green Building Council. LEED-EB (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Existing Buildings) provides guidelines for how to develop, adopt and maintain a policy for the use of janitorial equipment that maximizes reduction of building contaminants with minimum environmental impact. Green cleaning can also contribute in the Innovation category in three other LEED systems: LEED-NC (for New Construction); LEED-CI (for Commercial Interiors); and LEED-CS (for Core and Shell).
• ASTM E-1971: The American Society for Testing and Materials’ “Standard Guide on Stewardship for Cleaning Commercial and Institutional Buildings” covers procedures to assist owners and operators of commercial and institutional buildings in the stewardship of cleaning and housekeeping operations.
• NIOSH/EPA: The reference guide, “Building Air Quality: A Guide for Building Owners and Facility Managers,” documents in Step 5 how to develop and implement a plan for facility operations and maintenance.
• OSHA: Section 5(a)(1) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act requires employers to “furnish to each employee a place of employment which is free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees.”
• Environmentally Preferable Product Purchasing Policies: Multiple industries and government organizations are developing recommendations for environmentally preferable purchasing, including ANSI (American National Standards Institute) and state and local governments.