Detroit's Drought - Water Shut Offs Cause Community Conflict

Current events update on the water situation in Detroit: While the goal is to have as few shut offs as possible, the Detroit Water and Sewage Department somehow needs to collect the $90 million they are owed from nearly 100,000 customers. 

American City&Country

The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) announced last week it will intensify efforts to collect nearly $90 million it’s owed from an estimated 90,000 customers whose bills have been delinquent for more than 60 days.

Nearly half of the department’s customers are in some level of delinquency on their bills, according to Non Profit Quarterly. Many of these customers are low income, and are facing water rates that have grown 119 percent in the past ten years. The average water bill in Detroit is $75 per month, compared to the national average of $40.

And not only is the DWSD facing a tremendous backlog of missed payments, water theft has also become an issue in the cash-strapped city. Earlier this month the department issued 79 citations totaling nearly $22,000 for illegal water usage over a three-day span, the Detroit Free Press reports.

“It’s another example of money that we’re not getting that’s due to us,” DWSD spokesman Greg Eno told the paper. “Those people should be put on notice... if you’re flat-out stealing, we’re coming after you as well.”

However, activist groups including the Detroit People’s Water Board, Food and Water Watch and the Blue Planet Project are condemning the department’s actions, claiming that denying access to clean water is a human rights violation. The U.N. has even spoken out against the shut offs.

To read the full article, click here.

Tune-Up Your Water Conservation Program in 2014

Water is one of our most valuable resources. It is also one of our most wasted. SkyPro window cleaning system not only conserves water, but uses chemical free water as well. Here are some tips if you are looking to conserve water in other ways.

Buildings.com 

Water is one of our most precious resources. For commercial properties, it is also one of the least managed. In many cases, managing water resources means simply reviewing the monthly water bill against the previous month’s bill. Across the country, water rates are soaring – Atlanta is nearly $30 per thousand gallons – and the lack of a conservation program may be draining thousands of dollars from your budget each month. And you probably don’t realize it is happening.

Here are some tips to conserve water in 2014:

• How can you manage what you don’t measure? Like you do with energy, make conserving water a priority by viewing water bills on a monthly basis and comparing to previous months or even years.
• Check for leaks. On a day when no one is in the building, turn off the water and read the meter. After 15 minutes, read it again. If the meter moved, you may have a leak that’s costing you money.
• Incorporate technology that reads the pulse of the water meter in real-time and sends you alerts 24/7 when consumption surpasses a certain benchmark or when a major leak has occurred. This technology collects data and sends it wirelessly to a website portal where managers and owners can view a property’s water consumption for the entire month, day, or even down to the hour.

To read more tips on how to conserve water, follow this link.

LEED-certified Buildings Reach Three Billion Square Feet

According to this CleanLink article, LEED buildings are on the rise and will be an industry worth around $248 billion in 2016. These high-rise buildings are projected to not only help minimize adverse effects of construction, but maximize sustainability and health-related features as well.

istock.com 

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) announced today that 3 billion square feet of green construction space has earned LEED certification around the globe.

“This milestone is the result of leaders across our industry making the business and environmental case for healthy, sustainable buildings,” said Rick Fedrizzi, president, CEO and founding chair, USGBC. “More than 4.3 million people live and work in LEED buildings. As our numbers continue to gain momentum, the impact is significant — jobs are created, revenue is generated and well-being is prioritized — proving every day that LEED works.”

Green construction has grown massively over a short period of time: McGraw-Hill estimates that it will comprise half of U.S. construction and be worth up to $248 billion by 2016. LEED is the most widely recognized and used green building program across the globe, with more than 1.7 million square feet of commercial building space LEED certifying each day in more than 140 countries and territories.

In the U.S. alone, buildings account for 41 percent of energy use, 73 percent of electricity consumption and 38 percent of all CO2 emissions. Globally, buildings use 40 percent of raw materials, or 3 billion tons annually.

To read more on LEED building, click here.

The Evolution Of Chemical-free Cleaning

Sky Pro has always valued clean, pure, chemical free water and prides themselves in using this water in their window cleaning. Over time, the world of chemical-free cleaning has evolved and grown into what we see in the market today. This Cleaning and Maintenance Management article describes new options, a safer industry and the new generation that is arising, as well as proof that it works and taking the next step towards this way of cleaning. 

Geir Tonnessen, Flickr.com

Over the past several years, green cleaning products have become increasingly less toxic while delivering comparable results to their traditional counterparts.

This, in part, is due to the emerging science of using plant, bio-based and simple tap water formulations that target soils and harmful bacteria instead of eradicating large swaths of microorganisms.

We are slowly realizing that nature can also provide us with some of what we need to safely and effectively clean surfaces without the use of toxic substances.

Taking the notion of environmentally preferable cleaning a step further, some companies have developed non-toxic, chemical-free innovations.

This industry has begun to explore this idea of less harmful cleaning strategies, including completely non-toxic, chemical-free substitutes and technologies that use no chemicals — natural or otherwise — to achieve more effective cleaning results.

We are evolving beyond green to extreme green to chemical-free cleaning.

New Options
Things like electrolyzed water, which separates tap water into positive and negative streams that attract soils and render harmful bacteria inert, have emerged as the new go-to solutions.

Other cosmopolitan, chemical-free technologies like steam vapor and ultraviolet light have begun to emerge as viable solutions to clean sensitive environments such as hospitals and other healthcare facilities.

A recent literature review entitled “Control of the Environment,” which focused on steam vapor as a chemical-free disinfectant, concluded that steam cleaning is effective for periodic deep cleaning of hospital environments.


To read the full article, click here.

H2Only Renewable Cleaning Puts Water Tech Into Practice

Sky Pro isn't the only one using water to clean and disinfect. According to this Cleanlink.com article, water can stand in for a closet full of chemicals, when used appropriately. See how others are helping to reduce these chemicals while still maintaing effective cleaning results. 

brendonhatcher, Flickr.com

When cleaning K-12 schools, the aim is to keep occupants safe and healthy, particularly as children are among the most vulnerable of populations.

And the students’ health habits aren’t always up to par. There’s a reason that viral outbreaks tend to occur in school environments: Not only do children have daily close contact, touching the same items, eating lunch together and sharing a restroom, but proper hand washing is not yet ingrained in their young minds. This article looks at two approaches to green cleaning in schools. Both building service contractors profiled share the same goal of reducing illness and therefore, absenteeism.

Ruben Rives’ belief in his cleaning system becomes apparent in the first few minutes of conversation. The owner of H2Only Renewable Cleaning in Doral, Fla., is passionate about his cleaning processes and his clients, including about 20 schools scattered throughout Dade County and Broward County in Florida, as well as several in Atlanta.

Rives uses “renewable cleaning technology,” which is the removal of chemicals and pathogens utilizing water as the key ingredient.

He devised and completed a pilot program with a school in Broward County four years ago, reducing chemical usage and incorporating microfiber cloths, ionized water and a dry steam vapor system in its place.

“For us, it has to do with chemical-free cleaning. It’s basically making sure that you do touch-points on a daily basis, and use as few toxic chemicals as possible,” says Rives

To read more about the extraordinary power of water in this article, click here.

Understanding Enhanced Water Technologies

This is an excerpt from a CleanLink article.

Earlier this year, the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) Board focused its cleaning services for the Boston Logan International Airport on certain criteria, one of which was the “least harmful cleaning program” possible. In July, a decision was made to require the cleaning crew to use the most sustainable products and cleaning practices they could, while achieving the same cleaning results.

As a result, the airport — which services 29.3 million passengers a year — began using enhanced water to keep surfaces clean. The custodial program now utilizes a combination of aqueous water-activated technologies for chemical-free disinfection and floor stripping.

In doing so, Massport joins the ranks of hotels, schools, hospitals and office buildings that are exploring the benefits of water-activated cleaning technologies.

To read the full article, visit cleanlink.com.

Water Efficiency

This post is an excerpt from an issa.com article.

Americans have been blessed in the sense that, for most of our history, a shortage of water has just not been a big concern. Except for the Dust Bowl period in the 1930s and short-term droughts over the years, water has been plentiful and relatively inexpensive. However, this appears to be changing and, as it does, the shortage is likely to impact both consumers and companies, including those in the professional cleaning industry.

As far as the business implications, Marc Levinson, an economist with JPMorgan Chase, complained back in 2008 that most American companies are simply not taking water shortages or the cost of water in the United States seriously. According to Levinson, many firms filling out loan applications or seeking investors “provide a great deal of information about potential risks to their operations, earnings, [and] profits, but they don’t do an adequate job of disclosing the risks they face in the event of water shortages—even short-term ones.”

Furthermore, Levinson believes that the few companies that actually do think about water supply risks remain very shortsighted. “They figure they can truck in water,” he says. “But not only is it very expensive to truck in water, but they’ll be in competition with scores of hundreds of other [companies and consumers] scrounging to get water at the same time.”

The end result: The cost of water is going up in many parts of the country and will likely continue to go up, potentially impacting a company’s competitiveness, and in worst-case scenarios, threatening its ability to survive. In fact, many experts now believe companies closing plants or going out of business entirely due to rising water costs, water shortages, or the lack of dependable water supplies will become more commonplace in years to come.

And as the cost of water goes up, so too, will the cost for many agricultural products, including those used to manufacture green cleaning products. And as these costs escalate, those increased charges will be passed on to end customers.

The the full "Water Efficiency" article is available at the ISSA website.