In ages past, when deciding on which professional carpet cleaning service to contract, facility owners or managers were usually primarily concerned with balancing out the cost and the effectiveness. But those time are not called “ages past” without reason. Today, a range of additional issues need to be taken into account when making business decisions – and make no mistake, choosing a carpet cleaning service is a business decision as much as it’s an appearance management issue.
It is safe to say that the most prominent such issue is the environmental impact of methods used in carpet cleaning. With ever-present fears regarding the use of chemicals and the effect that various human technology has on the environment, facility managers are under increased, if justified, pressure to look for ways of maintaining the appearance and condition of their carpets that will also have the smallest possible environmental footprint.
Why Go Eco-Friendly?
Being eco-friendly even in such seemingly less important matters like carpet cleaning means building up the good reputation of your company as well as giving yourself a reason to feel pretty good about yourself. But there are other various – and sometimes quite substantial – benefits for your carpet and your business as well.
Keeping Your Carpet Strong – Dry cleaning and low moisture will not damage your carpet since they use less water and the carpet fibers stay wet (and thus prone to deterioration) for only a really short time period. If your carpet were to be left too wet for too long and not dried immediately it could cause substantial moisture and potential molding and fiber integrity loss.
Saving Time – Dry cleaning and low moisture cleaning offer the advantage of time: Floors can be used again almost instantly after cleaning is complete. For this very reason, dry-cleaning compounds are often used in call centers, banks, hotels, event centers and wherever there is high frequency of floor use.
Cost Effectiveness – Finally we are getting to the bottom line: going for more environmentally friendly carpet cleaning will most likely affect your company’s bottom line in a positive way, since the quick drying means less downtime, which is especially important when it comes to frequently used carpets, such as in hotels or banks, where more people passing through means more customers and more profit.
How to Go Eco-Friendly?
An ever-growing number of carpet cleaning companies are going green, offering green cleaning with eco-friendly cleaning products as part of their general service.
In spite of the increasing prevalence of green methods, you can never be sure if your carpet cleaning company is really eco-friendly. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to ask a carpet cleaning company what brand of products they use in their machines and see if those are ok with you. It is important to remember that with dry or low moisture cleaning the process is guaranteed to use less water, which in itself is a hugely important environmental benefit. Additionally, the chemicals that are employed nowadays are more eco-friendly than ever before and are rigorously tested before being approved for use.
Today, the dry cleaning process means using an absorbent, 98% biodegradable cleaning compound is spread evenly over carpet and brushed or scrubbed in. In commercial applications, a specially designed cylindrical counter-rotating brushing system is used, without a vacuum cleaner, providing a thorough clean all the way to the bottom of the fibers.
What About Hot Water Cleaning?
When talking about the environmental impact of your preferred carpet cleaning method, it’s important to clear up the myth that steam/hot water cleaning is chemical-free and thus more eco-friendly. It is true that both home and commercial machines primarily use hot water, many times though some cleaning solution needs to be applied to get rid of stains or grease.
It may happen that ground-in stains reappear in the first few days after carpet cleaning. Commercial solutions can eliminate some of these problems, but there are certain stains — pet stains or chemical stains, for example — that may need multiple treatments or simply cannot be removed by regular cleaning and require stronger agents.
Carpet cleaning technology has come a long way. Today, the most frequently used and most effective methods for getting your carpet back into shape are pretty eco-friendly to begin with: dry cleaning and low moisture cleaning methods, which are at the core of our carpet cleaning services here at Geyen Group, both save water and time, thus minimizing the strain on the environment as well as on business. When paired with biodegradable cleaning agents, the techniques we employ are guaranteed to provide a true eco-friendly carpet cleaning combo.
