As reported by The New York Times.

It sounds so simple as to be innocuous, a throwaway line in public-health warnings about swine flu. But one of the most powerful weapons against the new H1N1 virus is summed up in a three-word phrase you first heard from your mother: wash your hands.

A host of recent studies have highlighted the importance and the scientific underpinning of this most basic hygiene measure. One of the most graphic was done at the University of California, Berkeley, where researchers focused video cameras on 10 college students as they read and typed on their laptops.

The scientists counted the times the students touched their faces, documenting every lip scratch, eye rub and nose pick. On average, the students touched their eyes, noses and lips 47 times during a three-hour period, once every four minutes.

Hand-to-face contact has a surprising impact on health. Germs can enter the body through breaks in the skin or through the membranes of the eyes, mouth and nose.

The eyes appear to be a particularly vulnerable port of entry for viral infections, said Mark Nicas, a professor of environmental health sciences at Berkeley. Using mathematical models, Dr. Nicas and colleagues estimated that in homes, schools and dorms, hand-to-face contact appears to account for about one-third of the risk of flu infection, according to a report this month in the journal Risk Analysis.

In one study of four residence halls at the University of Colorado, two of the dorms had hand sanitizer dispensers installed in every dorm room, bathroom and dining area, and students were given educational materials about the importance of hand hygiene. The remaining two dorms were used as controls, and researchers simply monitored illness rates.

During the eight-week study period, students in the dorms with ready access to hand sanitizers had a third fewer complaints of coughs, chest congestion and fever. Over all, the risk of getting sick was 20 percent lower in the dorms where hand hygiene was emphasized, and those students missed 43 percent fewer days of school.

Young children benefit, too. In a study of 6,000 elementary school students in California, Delaware, Ohio and Tennessee, students in classrooms with hand sanitizers had 20 percent fewer absences due to illness. Teacher absenteeism in those schools dropped 10 percent.

Better hand hygiene also appears to make a difference in the home, lowering the risk to other family members when one child is sick. Harvard researchers studied nearly 300 families who had children 5 or younger in day care. Half the families were given a supply of hand sanitizer and educational materials; the other half were left to practice their normal hand washing habits.

In homes with hand sanitizers, the risk of catching a gastrointestinal illness from a sick child dropped 60 percent compared with the control families. The two groups did not differ in rates of respiratory illness rates, but families with the highest rates of sanitizer use had a 20 percent lower risk of catching such an illness from a sick child.

Regular soap and water and alcohol-based hand sanitizers are both effective in eliminating the H1N1 virus from the hands. In February, researchers in Australia coated the hands of 20 volunteers with copious amounts of a seasonal H1N1 flu virus. The concentration of virus was equivalent to the amount that would occur when an infected person used a hand to wipe a runny nose.

When the subjects did not wash their hands, large amounts of live virus remained even after an hour, said the lead author, Dr. M. Lindsay Grayson, a professor of medicine at the University of Melbourne. But using soap and water or a sanitizer virtually eliminated the presence of the virus.

Frequent hand washing will not eliminate risk. When an infected person coughs or sneezes, a bystander might be splattered by large droplets or may inhale airborne particles. In a recent Harvard study of hand sanitizer use in schools, hand hygiene practices lowered risk for gastrointestinal illness but not upper respiratory infections.

Still, it is a good idea to wash your hands regularly even if you’re not in contact people who are obviously ill. In a troubling finding, a recent study of 404 British commuters found that 28 percent had fecal bacteria on their hands. In one city, 57 percent of the men sampled had contaminated hands, according to the study, which was published this month in the journal Epidemiology and Infection.

“We were surprised by the high level of contamination,” said Gaby Judah, a researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Ms. Judah added that many of the contaminated commuters reported that they had washed their hands that morning. They may have been embarrassed to admit they hadn’t washed, or they may have picked up the bacteria on their hands during their commute.

For all those reasons, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with other health organizations around the world, urge frequent hand washing with soap and water or alcohol-based hand sanitizers. (They also repeat some advice you may not have heard from your mother: cough or sneeze into the crook of your elbow, not your bare hands.)

And as hospitals put stricter hand hygiene programs in place, absentee rates during cold and flu season also drop.

“Statistically, you can’t determine a causal relationship, but it’s very suggestive,” said Dr. Neil O. Fishman, infectious disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania. “Our vaccination rates remained relatively stable, so what else changed? The only thing different was that hand hygiene rates increased.”

Via Cleanlink:

CRI answers the demand for environmental standards in carpet care equipment
By Corinne Zudonyi, Editor

Within the last decade, the green movement has really taken shape in the jan/san industry and the demand for certified products and equipment has grown. As this environmental consciousness continues to evolve, so does the development of products and equipment that meet the “green” needs of the facility manager.

Roughly seven years ago, Dalton, Ga.-based Carpet and Rug Institute (CRI) conducted a survey among carpet customers in residential and various commercial market segments. It was determined that the number-one issue among every demographic was that carpets couldn’t be properly cleaned or maintained. Upon further examination, Werner Braun, president of CRI, found that no organization was testing or certifying carpet cleaning products — which is when CRI got into the game.

“We started addressing this concern pretty quickly after the survey,” says Braun. “The first set of products we looked at were spot removers. We developed protocols and then went out and bought existing products off the shelves for testing. To our amazement only four of the 24 performed better than water.”

This initial revelation was followed by a positive response from the industry and CRI further expanded their certification program to also include equipment such as vacuums, extractors and complete carpet systems.

Certification Checklist
Spot removers (pre-spray and in-tank) were the first target for CRI. When evaluating these products for their Seal of Approval (SOA) program, CRI officials test for a number of things. First, testers determine whether a product actually removes spots. Then the chemical is analyzed for accelerated resoiling.

“You might have a spot remover that gets a spot out, but it has other solvents included in its formulation that attracts soils,” Braun explains the “resoiling” phenomenon. “Over the next few days, that spot might come back with a vengeance by attracting additional contaminants.”

The third certification step tests how the spot remover effects color fastness and whether the product causes any bleaching. Lastly, the pH is measured, since certain levels of pH can damage carpets. A product that passes all these tests is approved for the SOA certification.

On the equipment side, vacuum cleaners are tested for their ability to remove soil, but also receive close scrutiny relative to the pollutants they emit.

“CRI measures the total emissions from the vacuum, which comes from three different sources,” says Braun. “We measure the emissions from the filter and from under the housing, and we know the vacuum has plastic and rubber parts so we measure those as well.”

Other certifying bodies might only evaluate the emissions from the vacuum filter, and according to Braun, this is a disservice to those seeking a truly “green” machine.

The final test measures the wear and tear the vacuum has on the carpet.

“We know there are vacuums out there that do a good job of removing soil, but they can also put a years worth of wear on carpets in just 10 passes because the brushes are so aggressive that they damage the carpet fibers,” says Braun.

As interest in certified equipment grew, CRI ultimately expanded testing and certification to include deep cleaning extractors and carpet care systems.

Extractor testing is designed to answer key questions: Does it get the soil out? Does it extract the water? Finally, does the machine have a deleterious effect on the carpet’s texture? Passing all three of these tests is mandatory in order to receive any of the three levels of certification (Bronze, Silver and Gold).

Carpet care systems must meet the standards for each individual system component. For instance, if the system vacuums and extracts, it must meet the certifying requirements for both those types of equipment.

Benefits Of Certification
The CRI continues to streamline its certification programs, providing the jan/san industry with a guideline to the most environmentally effective carpet care products possible.

“Using the right cleaning chemical and equipment has highly desirable environmental benefits,” says Braun. “If you have a carpet that has a design life of 10 or 11 years and you use poor cleaning chemicals or equipment, you are going to shorten that design life and the carpet will end up in a landfill prematurely — flushing out half the financial investment.”

Because of this, many carpet manufacturers require the use of CRI SOA-certified chemicals and equipment for the warranty to remain validated.

In addition to the life-cycle cost incentive, there are many green and overall health benefits associated with the use of certified products. Specifically in the vacuum category, CRI developed the “SOA Green” program to target indoor air quality and reduce airborne contaminants from the equipment. Launched in 2000, the SOA Green program required an emissions level at 100 micrograms per cubic liter. At the testing program’s inception, only a quarter of the machines passed the certification requirements.

By 2008, the CRI renamed the program “SOA Green Label Vacuum” and tightened emission requirements to just 35 micrograms in order to achieve the gold label. These elevated emissions standards have substantially contributed to improved indoor air quality in facilities across the country.

“If you think about it, emissions from the vacuum are important because you don’t want to spew dust back into the room or the air you breath,” says Braun. “There are also huge benefits for building occupants or workers with allergies or asthma.”

As the CRI continues to move its certification forward, the demand for stricter certification grows among facility managers. For example, two large districts sought help from CRI in order to improve their indoor environment without sacrificing cleanliness.

After reviewing the benefits of the SOA programs and the improved health that cleaning green can provide, both districts signed a memorandum of understanding to use only SOA products in their carpet cleaning. The move has brought such positive response by workers and parents that the superintendent of schools is considering implementing the policy state wide.

Moving Forward
The concept of green and its demands among facility managers is constantly changing. To meet the growing demands of the industry and in a quest for improved environmental efficiencies, CRI is continuously making changes and improvements to its certification program.

“When we develop a program, it probably isn’t perfect,” says Braun. “But we take feedback from those in the field and we modify it on a fairly regular basis as we become aware of how to do things better and smarter.”

CRI started with a modest spot remover program and now they provide the “Seal of Approval Green” program to promote green carpet cleaning chemicals, as well as the “Seal of Approval Green Label Vacuum” program. They are even exploring a Seal of Approval Green category for extractors and carpet care systems for introduction in the next year or two.

Working towards the introduction of green protocols for extractor and system certification, CRI has enlisted the help of NASA. To help measure equipment efficiencies, NASA developed a machine called X-Ray Fluorescents (XRF Gun), which measures the precise amounts of soil removed from carpets. Tools and measurements such as these will aid in the development of new and improved standards for the industry.

“We are also looking at SOA for pet stains and odor removal,” says Braun. “Cleaning for health is also something we are pursuing, which would expand upon green to include testing for dust mites, mold spores, viruses, bacteria, etc. This introduction would have applications across the entire carpet spectrum.”

CRI is always looking for new ways to advance their certification programs in an effort to support the green and environmental movements within the jan/san industry. As Dr. Howard Elder, former chair of CRI’s sustainability committee, once said, “Let’s not let perfect get in the way of progress.”

Providers Plus Program
In addition to the existing certification programs from the Carpet and Rug Institute for chemicals and equipment, cleaning departments can also seek certification through the “Seal of Approval (SOA) Service Providers Plus” program.

Departments involved with this program must agree to use SOA products exclusively in their cleaning by adhering to a code of conduct and customer satisfaction. Another qualification for inclusion in this program is an involvement and certification from the Institute for Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification (IICRC).

“To have the very highest desirable outcome from cleaning, you have to have three things,” says Werner Braun, president of the Carpet and Rug Institute. “One, you must have the right cleaning chemicals. Two, you need to have the right equipment. And three, you need a trained and qualified cleaning professional and the IICRC does a great job of training technicians and certifying departments.”

As reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has spent her first few months in office focusing on handing out $46 billion in stimulus money. Now, her department is adding staff and signaling it will soon begin putting in practice the more assertive regulation of business she promised early in her tenure.

Ms. Solis has begun hiring 670 new investigators to enforce labor regulations.

There will be 150 investigators added in the Wage and Hour division to enforce wage rules and child-labor laws. Another 100 staff will be added to ensure contractors on stimulus projects are in compliance with applicable laws. The additions will boost the division’s staff by more than one-third.

The Employee Benefits Security Administration, which helps to regulate private retirement, health and other benefit plans covering 150 million Americans, is adding 75 staffers to conduct nearly 600 more criminal and civil investigations.

Ms. Solis and President Barack Obama also have reversed or postponed some policy decisions made under former President George W. Bush. In April, the labor department postponed a last-minute Bush-era rule that would have required unions to disclose more about their finances. The agency will take more time to consider the rule, which businesses praised and unions said was excessive.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration recently formed a task force to design an enforcement program for severe violators. OSHA will conduct an intensive examination of an employer’s inspection history and any systematic problems would trigger additional, mandatory inspections.

OSHA also launched a program to step up inspections of construction sites in Texas after a series of injuries and fatalities.

“The previous administration was not prone to fight on the side of worker protection and we’re going in that direction to level the playing field,” Ms. Solis said.

Business groups are wary that the playing field will tilt too far, at a time when many businesses are still fighting their way out of economic hard times.

“Employers, especially smaller ones, are really looking for help in terms of understanding the requirements and making sure they’re doing things right,” said Marc Freedman, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s executive director of labor law policy. Instead, the department’s “rhetoric” on workplace safety “seems to be heavy-handed enforcement and generation of more regulations,” he said.

Unions want the agency to get tough on employers and push through new regulations on workplace safety and other issues they say the previous administration ignored.

As part of the federal stimulus program, the administration was allotted $575 million for fiscal 2009 to help train workers who have lost their jobs due to foreign trade, and has distributed more than $470 million since January. The Bush administration was allotted $220 million in such funds for fiscal 2008. In addition, the program was expanded in mid-May to include more types of workers.

The Obama administration is also naming more of the people who will hold senior posts in the Labor Department, few of whom have business backgrounds, a shift from most of former President Bush’s appointees.

M. Patricia Smith, the nominee to be the department’s top lawyer, is commissioner for New York State’s labor department, and is known as a tough regulator who has stepped up worker protection.

Mr. Obama’s nominee to head OSHA, David Michaels, is an epidemiologist and research professor at George Washington University known for studies on the health effects of occupational exposure to toxic chemicals.

(Click to see our collection of Green Products)

Via Cleanlink.com

Traditionally, paper manufacturers only produced virgin fiber paper products — products manufactured from harvested raw materials. But because of the high cost to manufacture these products — virgin fiber requires significant energy for harvesting, pulping and processing — and the political context behind the process, paper manufacturers have begun shifting their efforts towards products and processes that are more sustainable.

Even though most end users enjoy the softness and the high quality that is associated with virgin fiber towel and tissue products, jan/san distributors say the commercial market for the most part is not seeking out these traditional products like in years past. The trend nowadays is to purchase paper products manufactured with recycled content, says Teresa Farmer, green program specialist with Kelsan Inc., Knoxville, Tenn.

“Some of the high-end hotels and resorts may still be looking at virgin paper products, but a lot of customers are going to the recycled content,” she says.

Once considered to be low quality and cost more, recycled paper products are now up to par with their traditional counterparts — quality-wise and price-wise, says David Renard, president of Renard Paper Co., Inc., St. Louis. But some customers still need a little convincing that recycled fiber is comparable to virgin fiber paper products.

“Usually, once we give customers a sample of the recycled fiber and they can actually touch it and feel it, then that changes their minds,” says Farmer. “I think people still have the perception that these products only come in a brown roll towel or come as rough toilet paper. That isn’t the case anymore.”

Advanced technology and education on the part of manufacturers has helped to make recycled paper products more efficient and cost effective. Thus, customers no longer have to compromise quality or cost anymore to do the environmentally sound thing, says Bill McGarvey, director of training and sustainability for Philip Rosenau Co., Warminster, Pa.

It’s up to distributors, however, to help customers understand the environmental benefits between using a recycled fiber paper vs. a virgin fiber paper product — and sort through the terminology that is associated with many eco-friendly paper products today.

Recycled Fibers
Customers often misunderstand where recycled towel and tissue products come from, distributors say. Today’s recycled fiber paper products can be broken down into two categories — recovered fiber and post consumer waste material.

Recovered fiber is generated after the completion of the paper making process, such as post-consumer materials, envelope cuttings, bindery trimmings, printing waste, butt rolls and mill wrappers, obsolete inventories and rejected unused stock.

Post consumer waste materials on the other hand, are finished products that went out into the world and have served that purpose, and then were recovered from or otherwise diverted from the waste stream for the purpose of recycling, says McGarvey.

Today, because of their sustainable claims, recycled fiber products are viewed as a necessary offering across the board.

“Everybody’s got to have a green story to tell and the availability of recycled fiber is greater now than it has ever been,” says McGarvey.

Acceptance has not been a problem either. In fact, when customers are given the option of purchasing a paper product that is either virgin fiber or is recycled, they will more than often choose the recycled paper, says Farmer.

Recycled paper products are now being used in restrooms of office buildings, hotels and restaurants that are looking to go green or achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

“The knock against the traditional recycled content was that it wasn’t good enough for Class A offices,” says McGarvey. “That’s not the case anymore as the manufacturers have really stepped up over the past few years with greener offerings.”

In fact, in most instances customers can’t tell the difference between products with recycled content and those that are virgin fiber anymore, says Farmer.

“Now you can get recycled paper in white roll towels and the paper just seems to be thicker. You can also get two-ply bathroom tissue and it’s just a softer product,” she says.

Green Certification
With customers looking to become better environmental stewards, paper manufacturers are making it easier to meet those goals. In fact, distributors are ushering customers looking to go green towards paper products that are certified by third-party organizations such as Green Seal and EcoLogo, as well as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Chlorine Free Products Association (CFPA) and the Green Restaurants Association.

These organizations have put these paper products through strict testing, so distributors are ensured that they are selling customers the greenest paper products available. And, by taking the guesswork out of the equation, it also substantiates a facility’s claim that they’re in fact using a green paper product, says Farmer.

Simply because a product uses recycled fiber does not automatically mean that the product is green. It needs to be produced using a specific percentage of post-consumer content and recovered fibers.

In its Comprehensive Procurement Guidelines for Commercial/Industrial Sanitary Tissue Products, the EPA recommends a minimum of 40 percent post-consumer waste content be used in the manufacturing of towels and a minimum of 20 percent for restroom tissue. For a restroom tissue to be certified by Green Seal, the fiber in the product must contain 100 percent recovered materials, including 20 percent post-consumer materials.

Environmentally friendly paper also isn’t bleached using chlorine derivatives. According to the Chlorine Free Products Association, for a recycled content paper product to be certified as “Processed Chlorine Free” it must include all recycled fibers used as a feedstock that meet EPA guidelines for recycled or post-consumer content. Processed Chlorine Free paper has not been rebleached with chlorine containing compounds and a minimum of 30 percent post-consumer content is required.

Green Seal and EcoLogo standards also mandate that towels and tissue cannot be bleached with chlorine or any of its derivatives such as hypochlorite or chlorine dioxide.

Some paper manufacturers claim their towel and tissue products are bleached using an elemental chlorine process — a process thought to be eco-friendly. However, elemental chlorine free differs from processed chlorine free because elemental chlorine free paper products are bleached with a chlorine compound — most often chlorine dioxide, which releases dioxins into the environment. With processed chlorine free, however, both recycled fiber and any virgin fiber used is bleached without chlorine or chlorine derivitatives.

Since most product packaging ends up in the waste stream, how the product is packaged is also a significant component to whether a paper product is considered green. In fact, most third-party organizations mandate that the cores in roll towels and restroom tissue be made from 100 percent recycled materials.

The manufacturing process is also taken into consideration when determining if a product is truly sustainable. EcoLogo, for instance, requires those paper products that have to be manufactured using virgin fiber, to only use fiber harvested under sustainable forest practices.

Paper by-products from manufacturers often end up paving roads, making grass grow or providing a strong foundation for highways. Paper mills use ash from power boilers for road stabilization and building, and farmers and turf growers are benefiting from waste that is turned into fertilizers or grass seed.

On top of purchasing products that are green certified, eco-conscious end users are also concerned about reducing the amount of paper being used — and wasted — in their facilities.

Waste Reduction
For years, the unnecessary disposal of unused tisue from public restrooms has been a major problem. To offset this costly problem for facilities, paper manufacturers introduced a greener product offering — coreless restroom tissue.

“By going coreless, what they’ve done is they made that roll of toilet paper a complete roll,” says McGarvey. “There’s no center to it — it’s not a hollow roll center, so you have a little more paper per roll.”

A major advantage to using coreless tissue is the fact that it reduces waste — there are no wrappers, no cores and fewer stub rolls to discard, says Farmer.

“When people service restrooms, if there’s a stub roll, they’ll pull that off and put on a fresh new roll,” she says. “And at the end of the day, it’s amazing how many stub rolls there are. And so, if they can use every bit of that paper, it saves them a lot of money.”

Even more than toilet tissue, hand towels are a major source of waste and headaches for facilities.

Roll towels are generally preferred over multi-fold towels, but because multi-fold towels are cheaper, more facilities tend to stock these in their restrooms, distributors say.

Even though roll towels may cost more, there’s usually less waste because multi-fold towels tend to fall out, or users pull more out than they need. By getting customers to switch to roll towels dispensed in touchfree dispensers, distributors say facilities are recognizing savings in labor and product usage.

“It’s usually about 25 to 30 percent savings over the multi-fold towels,” says Farmer. “Plus, they don’t have the mess when somebody comes in and they pull one towel out and 10 fall to the floor. A multi-fold towel is going to be cheaper than a roll towel, but when they stop and look at the long-term return on investment, that’s when they start to see.”

Each customer has their own preference of what towel and tissue products they want in their restrooms. However, helping them sort through the terminology may help them find the best fit for their facility and the environment.