These days, there are a number of new paper products on the market for building service contractors, which have hygiene and the environment at the top of their list of priorities.

If you’ve been in the cleaning business for any length of time, you are probably familiar with the terms “cleaning for appearance” and “cleaning for health.” In recent years, cleaning for health has been a way for building services contractors to differentiate themselves from their competitors and to proactively respond to societal concern about environmental safety and human health.

Say the word “audit” and people tend to scatter like a bunch of marbles. The audit does not have a very positive reputation to begin with, so most people would certainly not associate audits with anything as beneficial as sustainability.

Paying a visit to my old elementary school, the school’s custodian showed me how using a magic marker he placed colored dots between each coat of floor finish as it was applied in certain hallways. If I remember correctly, he used a red dot after the second coat of finish, a blue dot after the third, and a yellow dot after the fourth. As time went on and the finish wore away, the dots told him how many coats of finish were still left on the floor.

In the past decade, new technologies have given facility managers and BSCs the opportunity to make their buildings run more effectively and efficiently. The same goes for the pest management industry, which over the past few years has introduced new technology that can help your facility manage pests more efficiently—and with less impact on the environment.

Headaches, fatigue, eye irritation—all of these conditions seem like natural symptoms of working in front of a computer screen for 40 hours a week. Even the occasional runny nose or sore throat shouldn’t come as a surprise to someone who interacts with numerous other people on a daily basis.