Cleaning: just how does one get it right? I suppose the majority of facilities generally do, but it’s the ones that don’t, which we remember – often long after the event and sometimes to the extent that we won’t return as a result. So many of the problems experienced can be down to usage though… not just abuse by members of the public who should know better, but also during perhaps unexpectedly busy times when the place simply becomes overwhelmed. Should someone from the cleaning team be on call to pop in and give everything a ‘quick once-over’, replenish disposables and empty the bins? And what about the extra costs of having someone on standby, who may or may not actually be needed to do any cleaning/replenishing? 

How about local parks? On dry, sunny weekends when more families are likely to visit and thus overflow the bins, should one of the council’s street cleaners be given responsibility for travelling to each at least once an afternoon to empty them, to prevent rubbish from being rummaged through and scattered far and wide by foxes, which will make everything harder to clean up come Monday? Or would that timely intervention be more expensive than Monday’s clean-up costs?

I can recall, decades (and several cleaning magazine editorships) ago, talking to a manager in a company contracted to clean the EUs buildings, many parts of which were only sporadically used. By this I mean the two sets of headquarters in Brussels and Strasbourg, when only one was properly used at a time, along with various Brussels committee rooms and the like which might only be used a few times a year even when the buildings were occupied. According to my source, the schedules never wavered; everything had to be cleaned to schedule, every day or week, whether that room/part of the building had been used or not. To both of us, (and probably many others involved) it seemed like an incredible waste of our money…

Fast forward a few decades… I’ve not stopped pondering over news we ran in last week’s broadcast on physical AI technology specialist Butlr’s, Smart Cleaning module (https://www.thecleanzine.com/pages/24393/ if you missed it) - one of many new systems transforming our industry beyond all recognition. Combining thermal body heat sensing technology and machine learning to infer behaviour, it offers a solution to some of the issues our industry faces - reducing unnecessary costs without compromising cleaning standards by constantly alerting us to the reality of what’s going on in our buildings and allowing us to react accordingly. I never envisaged all those years ago that this type of technology would be available… No longer do we have to devise and endlessly rejig cleaning schedules to cater for potential busy periods as it’s being done for us. That’s quite something, isn’t it? Where next I wonder?