Dr. Michael A. Berry in his book “Protecting The Built Environment – Cleaning for Health” made these observations about improperly maintained carpet, and how it effects the indoor environment. Making sure your commercial carpets are clean not only protects your employees but promotes better productivity by keeping them healthy.
“More and more indoor cleaning problems are related to dirty carpet. Carpets serve as “sinks” and collect pollutants of all kinds from both indoors and out. People in turn are exposed to those sinks when the come into contact with them directly.”
“A carpet left unclean captures all kinds of particulate matter. Because some of this matter is food for living organisms, a carpet full of it can become a niche for bio-pollutants. Clean carpt does not promote the group of bio pollutants.”
“Carpets that are not cleaned and properly maintained can cause many health problems inside the building environment. It is estimated that patients allergic to bio-pollutants (fungi, mites, cockroach, bacteria) make 500,000 to 1,000,000 hospital visits each year.”
“From a public health perspective, it is difficult to justify indoor carpet unless a routing and effective cleaning program can be assured. Such a program calls for properly trained personnel applying appropriate cleaning methods and using environmentally sound cleaning technology.”
“Most people clean carpets because they look bad. Rarely does anyone acknowledge that their carpet needs to be cleaned to protect their health. In spite of this, every time we extract pollutants from carpets we enhance the quality of the indoor environment by reducing exposures and protecting health.”
There is more and more information being made available regularly that pertains to indoor air quality, and how to preserve it to the best of your ability with the resources available. We all need to stay up to date on this important issue and involve ourselves with companies, products, and contractors that are taking an active approach in complying with present guidelines, and are striving to institute programs which will exceed future mandates on indoor air quality.
JPM Enterprises offers a maintence program for all our customers.
See our report on commercial carpet lifecycle cost analysis.
