Can you give us a quick overview of the Green Cleaning Program at Calvin College?

The program started when we had our first LEED building up, then I started to explore the idea of using green products to maintain that Green Certification in that particular building. From there it spread to us using green cleaning and green products through out the rest of the campus wherever possible. At this point in time, all of our cleaning is being done with green chemicals - that was the first step.

The next step was that we supply all of our students in our dormitory halls with green cleaning chemicals for their bathrooms - glass cleaners, toilet cleaners, general bathroom cleaners. So then we introduced them to the green chemicals with refillable bottles. So this is one of the big things we are doing – our students are using green chemicals to clean their restrooms clean in their dorm suites and they refill the bottles at the main lobby desk when they are empty.

From there we went from just chemicals to doing matting and from matting we went further into using backpacks with the four filters to improve indoor air quality and now we are doing pest control on the exterior of the building to keep the pest outside. We are re-lamping with energy efficient light bulbs and going to almost exclusively microfiber dust cloths and dust mops and wet mops, which we launder ourselves and reuse.

Do you have any tips for those attempting to launch a Green Cleaning program?

First of all encouraging the staff to actually try the green products is the first step. I took away some of their favorite cleaners and said "here, try the green stuff." And when they tried it... now the staff prefers the green products instead of their old stand-bys. Just getting your staff to try it is the key.

I had some real hassles with some old-timers like "I don't want to put a backpack on my back, I'll get a back-ache" and so on, so we had some special training with trainers that came in and trained our people in how to put the backpacks on correctly. That that is something to note, that if you do go with the backpacks, make sure they are trained to wear them correctly.

One of the problems I had with the older staff was their not wanting to wear the backpacks, but now, if I tried to take their backpack away and give them back their push vacuum, I'd have a fight on my hands!

I've been doing a lot of coaching with my team, and we've even set a mission statement for ourselves. The college itself has a mission, but for our department, our mission statement is "to create a clean, healthy, safe environment in which education can take place." So our big emphasis is on the health (of our students) and green plays a big part in that.

Did you run into anything that was harder than expected, or easier than you expected?

It was easier than expected... we were thinking "oh, we can't get rid of this product because green just won't do it..."

But we started to use Spartan chemical products, and the Spartan Chemical Green Solution All Purpose Cleaner has been most effective where we were thinking we would have to use a harsh degreaser or whatever. We've been trying to use the All Purpose cleaner and we are finding that it works better than some of the old die-hard heavy duty cleaners that were not green. In that sense, that was easier than expected, was finding green products to do the job.

One of the other things we do, is to always use the model "less is better." So if we can just use hot water to clean an area, we do that before we introduce any chemical of any kind, and so with that, even if it is a simple thing like using a Mr. Eraser instead of a Graffiti Wipe, we are just always looking for ways to do things that are safer, healthier, with the least impact to the environment. We're just looking all the time for anything (to help with this), and our staff as a team is now always searching for ways to make our program greener.

Is there anything new or on tap for your program?

We're building a new wing to our residence halls, and I think they are going for Silver (LEED Certification) on that building, and what I have been looking at is that with our existing buildings – we are looking at establishing LEED Certification for all our existing buildings, and so looking at that more and more to see what I can do on my end with Building Services, to have everything in place to get all points needed for existing buildings and get it on paper.

Calvin had an Environmental Stewardship Committee way before it was in style to do so because of our Christian commitment - we saw that taking care of the environment was one of our duties to God - so we've been focusing on that for a long time, so as a college and a community we are really focusing more and more on green and how we can protect the environment, and how to use the gifts that God has given us, wisely.

 

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