We clean with LEED compliant products

Everything we bring in meets LEED standards

Green cleaning starts with what we carry into your building, before anyone wipes a single desk. The cleaning products we use meet LEED standards. So does our equipment, and so do the trash liners that go into your cans. On products and materials, we are LEED version four compliant. That matters because whatever gets sprayed on desks and counters each night does not leave with the cleaners. It stays in the building with your staff.

A lot of people judge a cleaning job by the smell. If the lobby smells like bleach or pine in the morning, the cleaners must have come. That smell is product still hanging in the air, and it sits in the same rooms where people work all day. When green cleaning is done right, the first person through the door smells nothing at all. The trash is gone and the surfaces are clean, and there is no chemical smell left over from the night before.

We hold every building to the same standard, from a five thousand square foot medical office to a corporate headquarters of two million square feet. One long time customer is a world headquarters here in Lisle that covers one point two million square feet. A small suite gets the same LEED compliant products as a campus that size. On a big building the choice of product adds up faster, because it gets used across every floor every night.

• Cleaning products that meet LEED standards
• Equipment and trash liners that meet LEED standards
• Vacuums that trap the finest dust particles
• LEED version four compliant materials
• Help getting your building green certified

Fine dust stays inside our vacuums

Every vacuum pulls air in the front and pushes it out the back. On many commercial vacuums, the finest dust goes in with the dirt and comes right back out with that air. It settles on desks and window sills an hour later, or it gets pulled into the air system and carried to another floor. Our vacuums capture particles as small as three tenths of a micron, so that dust stays in the machine.

Three tenths of a micron is far too small to see. Nobody spots one of those particles sitting on a desk. What people notice is the result. A gray film builds up on monitor screens, and dust is back on top of the file cabinets two days after they were wiped. When the vacuum holds on to that dust, the rest of the cleaning lasts longer, and staff stop asking whether anyone came in last night.

The order of the work matters as much as the machine. Dusting goes first, from high to low, so whatever falls lands on the floor. The vacuum goes last and picks it up. If a crew vacuums first and dusts after, the dust that comes off the shelves and vents lands on a carpet that is already done. By morning it has been walked into the fibers. That office passes the checklist and is dusty again by lunch.

Illinois winters keep office air sealed in

Around Lisle, the heat runs in office buildings for a long stretch of the year. From the first cold weeks of fall into spring, the windows stay shut. In most newer office buildings they do not open at all. The same air gets heated and pushed through the building again and again. Anything a cleaner puts into that air keeps circulating, whether it is fumes from a harsh product or dust from a weak vacuum.

Most of the office parks around Lisle and Naperville are sealed buildings. The walls are glass or precast concrete, and one central air system serves every floor. Out toward Aurora and Bolingbrook, a lot of the warehouses and food distribution buildings are tilt-up concrete with big open floors. Bare concrete sheds its own fine dust, and in a building that size it drifts into the offices up front. That dust has to be picked up by a machine that holds on to it, because a dry broom just moves it into the air.

Winter adds salt. After every snow, the parking lots and sidewalks around DuPage County get salted, and that salt comes inside on shoes. It dries on the entry carpet and the lobby floor into a white powder that breaks down finer every time someone walks on it. A weak vacuum pulls up the big grains and blows the fine powder back into the lobby air. Summer does not open the building back up either. The air conditioning runs through the humid months, and the windows stay shut.

We help buildings earn green certification

We are members of the US Green Building Council through its Illinois chapter. That is the group behind LEED, the green building rating many property managers already know. We have helped customers get green certification for their buildings. A cleaning contractor can help or hurt that effort. A green rating for an existing building looks at how the place is run day to day. Cleaning is one of the things done there most often.

Green certification asks what goes into a building as well as how clean it looks. For the cleaning side, that means the products and materials the contractor uses. Ours are LEED version four compliant, so that part of your building's record is already in order. A contractor who buys whatever chemicals were cheapest that month leaves the property manager with a problem to sort out before the application goes anywhere.

CLS is also a member of the Indoor Air Quality Association. In an office building, green cleaning and indoor air are closely tied. A lot of what a cleaner leaves behind ends up in the air sooner or later, and in a sealed building it hangs around. Want to know where your building stands? We offer a free, no obligation building cleaning audit and consultation. Call (630) 816-0300 to set one up.