Ashkin Educational Series: Understanding the LEED Safety First Pilot Credit

I’m going to place a series of articles on LinkedIn and on my company website regarding LEED’s new Green Cleaning Guidance for Safety First Pilot Credit. It's important that industry professionals understand this program to ensure effective cleaning, protect health, and get our economy moving. This first post is to provide you with some background. 

Historically, cleaning effectiveness has always been subjective, based on appearance. While well-intentioned, we have always known this is not a useful way to measure cleaning effectiveness.  And with COVID, it's time we do something about it.

Here’s more from LEED to help us understand and ensure effective cleaning.

Historically, facility cleaning performance has been based on subjective visual inspection. Since most harmful contaminants are not visible to the human eye, this approach poses barriers to objectively and quantitatively demonstrating that a building has been thoroughly/effectively cleaned.

As learned during the Coronavirus pandemic, higher and measurable levels of facility cleanliness are now demanded in the commercial office, schools, hospitality, and other sectors. In 2009, the US Green Building Council’s (USGBC’s) LEED for Existing Buildings Rating System opted to include the Association of Physical Plant Administrators (APPA) Custodial Effectiveness Assessment as a method to evaluate cleaning performance systematically.

The USGBC considered various methodologies and ultimately adopted APPA’s program because it addressed numerous types of buildings and the spaces within them, had an established approach to prioritizing multiple buildings and spaces, and standardized reporting that LEED reviewers could use to verify that the project submittals met the credit requirements.

With the development of relatively inexpensive testing devices such as ATP rapid monitoring systems, it is now possible to replace subjective visual quality assurance approaches with a customizable system to objectively measure surface contamination that provides quantitative, reliable, repeatable, and reportable results and the appropriate corrective actions to protect occupant health.

Testing surfaces can objectively identify cleaning performance deficiencies at an affordable cost, which could pose a barrier, especially for smaller LEED projects. Rather than the occasional snapshot provided by detailed but infrequent testing (e.g., quarterly, semi‐annual, or annual testing), this approach is based on taking a limited number of routine (e.g., daily) samples that over time will result in statistically meaningful performance analysis.

Evidence suggests that creating a cost‐effective quantitative daily testing protocol and appropriate corrective action measures will improve overall cleaning performance. Notably, an approach using random sampling of space and surface types discourages the cleaning staff from focusing on the surfaces they know will be inspected, and at the same time, collects enough data over time to identify performance deficiencies. In addition to daily random sampling plans, other plans can be developed if concerns arise. Other sampling plans can also be created for periodic independent external inspections.

These inspections can independently verify internal testing performance. Objective routine (e.g., daily) surface testing can identify needed changes to cleaning requirements, frequencies, and other issues that can improve cleaning performance by focusing resources on those spaces and surfaces that are most important to protecting health, while minimizing unnecessary cleaning (e.g., over disinfecting spaces and surfaces).

Next in our series will be a discussion of actual testing protocols. As always, Be smart. Be strong. Be safe. Together we’ll get through this.

Steve