Ashkin Educational Series: Do You Know?

This is the second part in our educational series on understanding LEED’s Green Cleaning Guidance for Safety First Pilot Credit.

Here we discuss the importance of routine surface testing to help ensure effective cleaning programs. Here are the key steps we need to know:

1. Identify the device or technology to be used to measure surface contamination.

a. Examples: In most cases, this will be ATP meters. These devices provide quantitative, reliable, repeatable, and reportable results.

b. Why this is important: Quantitative, reliable, repeatable, and reportable results are essential for scientifically addressing surface cleanliness and ultimately for measuring cleaning performance.

c. Other considerations: Many organizations (e.g., hospitals and food processing) have established protocols and technologies to be used, so it is valuable to work within the existing programs.

2. Identify all space types within the building

a. Examples: Lobbies, entryways, elevator lobbies, offices, workstations, restrooms, conference rooms, classrooms, restaurants, break rooms, laboratories, copy/print, mailrooms, etc.

b. Why this is important: Identifying cleaning performance by specific space types will provide performance data identifying specific cleaning issues within those spaces.

c. Additional Considerations: In large buildings (e.g., buildings over 50,000 square feet or those on multiple floors), consider grouping space types within proximity to each other to minimize time wasted for the person doing the testing.

Grouping spaces also increase the likelihood that one space in the designated group is vacant at the time of testing as not to inconvenience building occupants or waste the tester's time waiting for a designated space to be made available for testing.

3. Prioritize the space types within the building

a. Examples: Consider prioritizing space types based on the risk of cross‐contamination from multiple users. These might include restrooms, food service, breakrooms, and high‐use conference rooms compared to individual offices.

b. Why this is important: Prioritizing areas based on usage (including the number of different people that use the space), the vulnerability of the occupants (such as children or immunocompromised individuals) or the nature of the activities in each space (such as food preparation or health-care-related activities) will focus testing resources on higher risk space types.

c. Additional considerations: Consider lobbies and other visible areas of importance to the building. These additional areas may not be a priority from a health perspective, but are essential to demonstrate to occupants and visitors the steps being taken to protect their healt

#cleaningforhealth #leedcertification #healthandsafety