Apply principles of the circular economy with green cleaning products

The Green Key member toolbox now shows a new tool for those interesting in new puzzle pieces to a circular economy strategy.

Green Key establishments now have access to a short assessment of carbon and plastic savings to be made by using green cleaning products. The calculator helps estimating the environmental footprint of the sites’ conventional cleaning products. Establishments can calculate how much plastic waste and crude oil products can be avoided by applying circular economy principles. This tool developed by Werner & Mertz and powered by Green Care Professional is now available in the “washing and cleaning” section of Green Key website’s toolbox.

Green Care products’ components provided by Werner & Metz are coming out of renewable sources. The packaging is also made out of 100% recycled plastic - a good way to save crude oil, plastic and CO2 emissions. These products received the European Ecolabel and Cradle-to-Cradle logo, a certification measuring the safety and sustainability of products made for circular economy.

Some of the Green Key establishments have already switched to Green Care Professional products. For instance, Wildlands adventure zoo at Emmen, Netherlands, opted for a complete green strategy. Their use of Green Care cleaning products in the past six months permitted the saving of 17kg of plastic and 177kg in CO2 emissions.

Furthermore, this CO2 neutral site replaced plastic cups by cups made out of bamboo, since the latter is available in large quantities. Wildlands saves millions of litres of drinking water thanks to its own water treatment plant and uses renewable energy from solar panels. Wildlands Nature and Education Fund purchased 23 hectares of tropical rain forest in Costa Rica in order to brainstorm regarding the development in and around the park. A “children’s council of advice” has been created to involve kids into this thinking process, proving that education has not been forgotten.

Molecaten’s camping and vacation parks are other examples of circular economy in green washing and cleaning. Five of the establishments received the Green Key award thanks to their significant reducing of CO2 emissions. It also rewards their solar panels, energy-saving lamps and timers for air-conditioning and heating. Their use of Green Care products is presented to the clients to emphasize the holistic green concept of the parks, as guests expect an ecologic management approach.

Green Key establishments using sustainable energy resources and green cleaning products contribute a lot to the development of a sustainable tourism industry!

A microfiber cleaning system - The future for a sustainable hotel housekeeping

The Artemis Palace Hotel in Rethymnon Crete, one of the first Green Key awarded hotels in Greece, applies a microfiber cleaning system to reduce the use of cleaning products. All national operators had the chance to see how the system works during the control visit they conducted at the national operators meeting 2014 and confirmed the results of the cleaning procedure.

One of the many environmental goals of Green Key is to lead hotel managers to a more environmentally friendly approach in terms of hotel housekeeping, which, in many cases, represents more than 40% of the total operating costs.

One of the proposed cleaning systems, applied in Theartemis Palace Hotel, Rethymnon Crete, is based on the use of microfiber cloths. In that case, the use of detergents is reduced to the absolute minimum and only used in places where disinfection is needed (e.g. toilet seats). All the other surfaces can be cleaned with using just water and a fiber cloth. More than 99% of surface pathogens, grease and dirt are captured in the fibers. The absorption capacity of the cloth is very high due to the fact that one fiber consists of 1056, really thin, microfibers.

Apart from the absorption and cleaning capacity, microfiber cloths lead to great water, detergent and time saving. Based on real data, collected from hotels that apply the system in Greece, the average water and detergent consumption is reduced 68% compared to classic cleaning systems, while the time needed is reduced more than 15%.

One of the “hidden” aspects of the use of this particular system is that there is no need of storing many different detergents. That actually means that the detergent-chemicals storage space is reduced to minimum, the dilutions are easy to be done and only for one detergent. The detergents are environmentally friendly and biodegradable and are not dangerous for human health.

HSPN is working really hard on promoting this technology to all awarded sites, because it is simply the application of the Green Key basic idea that saving is the environmentally way to act. HSPN keeps on trying to inform hotel managers about microfiber cleaning systems. After all, the key issue of the promotion of innovative and efficient technologies and products is education.

To see how Vikan Microfiber is used https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEfCFY1cZCM