Your customers don’t know the cold hard facts about dust. Here’s what you can share with them.
Even though you know how important it is to keep a space free of dust and dirt, there’s a good chance your customers think of it more from an aesthetic point of view.
Understandably, they want things to look nice, especially if they run a retail shop or restaurant where quality is judged partly on cleanliness. But, primarily, dust seems more like an inconvenience than anything.
While a percentage of your appeal is that you keep your clients’ spaces looking nice, you also do a lot that helps keep everyone healthy. That can be a little harder to notice, though. Your clients can’t really see the bacteria living on door handles or elevator buttons that you remove every day. Nor do they see the improvement in air quality that comes with a clean space.
It’s the old conundrum of something only being noticeable when it isn’t right. You don’t pay much attention to highway maintenance until you hit a pothole. You probably don’t give much thought to your hot water until the water heater goes out. Similarly, most of your clients don’t know many facts about dust because it isn’t something they see in the same way you do.
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Important facts about dust and air quality to share with your clients
You may or may not want to share these facts about dust all in one shot. You’re probably better off working them into conversations here and there. Your initial walkthrough is a good time to discuss air quality and some of the ways dust and dirt can impact the health of people in the building.
1. Keep your HVAC filters clean to save money. Saving money is always a good place to start, and one simple way to save money is to regularly clean and replace HVAC filters. Clean filters help the entire system run more efficiently, meaning reduced heating and cooling costs. It doesn’t hurt that clean filters also collect more dust, improve air quality, and help everyone stay healthy and comfortable.
2. Air quality impacts employee productivity. Here is another of the facts about dust that can help your clients save money. Study after study after study has found that poor indoor air quality can lead to headaches, trouble concentrating, respiratory infections, drowsiness, fatigue, and allergic reactions. While those symptoms aren’t exclusively a result of dust, any dust can contribute to the overall problem.
3. Dust may be responsible for up to 34% of indoor air pollution. According to a study published in the March 2020 edition of Experimental & Molecular Medicine, bacterial and fungal sources of dust may have “adverse pulmonary effects” and may be “involved in the development of chronic pulmonary diseases such as asthma, COPD, and lung cancer.”
4. Dust is alive! Again, this may be one of the facts about dust that you already know, but sharing it with your clients is an almost surefire way to ensure they will want you there every single moment of the day. Among other things, dust includes microscopic arthropods known as dust mites. The CDC points out there are at least 13 different species of dust mites and that they are significant causes of allergic reactions. They also point out that it’s not just the mites that cause an allergic response, but “fecal pellets deposited by the mites.” The CDC also states that carpets are an excellent “microhabitat” for mites.
5. Dust is also dead. Dust mites aren’t the only thing you’ll find in dust. It’s comprised of dead skin cells from us humans. Estimates vary, but the average seems to be that we shed about 0.09 grams of dead skin cells each day.
6. Dust may carry other harmful substances. Along with dust mites and dead skin, dust may also carry microscopic particles of asbestos, silica, or other toxic substances.
7. Dust is easy to reduce. The Environmental Protection Agency points out that you can significantly reduce many sources of dust, including dust mites, pollen, animal dander, and “other allergy-causing agents,” through regular vacuuming with a vacuum cleaner equipped with a HEPA filter.
Indeed, many of these facts about dust are disturbing. Just be sure when you share these with your clients, you give them that final fact. The rest are there to “sell” your services and also inform clients of how vital good janitorial work is to the health of their business and their employees.
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