Floor Maintenance and IAQ

It is commonly known that poor indoor air quality (IAQ) can have adverse effects on our health, but did you also know that how we maintain our hard floors can also impact the air we breathe? As a nation, we spend more than 90% of our time indoors, so it should not come as a surprise that indoor air pollution is one of the top environmental risks to public health.

Polluted indoor air can cause symptoms such as headaches, dizziness, and reduced lung function. One of the key contributors to poor IAQ involves the maintenance of hard floor surfaces.

Adopting a floor care plan that drastically reduces common pollutants can help improve your IAQ significantly and ensure a healthy indoor environment.

CLEANING, DISINFECTING, AND SANITIZING

Dust, mold, pathogens, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from floor chemicals reduce indoor air quality (IAQ). Harsh disinfectants and cleaners release especially high amounts of VOCs.

Interestingly, manufacturers often add fragrances, like limonene, a terpene, to “green products” to create a pleasant scent. These fragrances contain some of the highest VOC concentrations. Professor Anne Steinemann, a civil engineer in Melbourne, Australia, tested 13 “green” products and found limonene in 11 of them.

Long-term, repeated exposure to these fragrances can cause serious respiratory issues for facility employees.

You can safeguard IAQ indoors while cleaning by adopting the following practices:

• Choose cleaners, disinfectants, and sanitizers that meet the US EPA’s “Safer Choice” standard. Read safety data sheets carefully, and scan for harmful chemicals like limonene, ethanol, pinenes, and acetaldehyde.
• Open windows or use exhaust fans while cleaning to ventilate the space and reduce strong smells.
• If your budget allows, invest in a high-quality air purification system with HEPA filters.
• Use only the amount of product you need, and rinse surfaces thoroughly with water to remove leftover substances.
• When dusting floors, switch to commercial hard-floor vacuum cleaners with HEPA filters. These outperform dust mops by trapping contaminants instead of releasing them back into the air.

• Stop using string mops and mop buckets. These tools leave moisture behind and fail to clean surfaces well, creating ideal conditions for bacteria, viruses, and mold. Instead, use automatic floor scrubbers when possible. These machines dispense cleaner, scrub the floor, and leave it dry, saving time and improving hygiene. Make sure they include easy-to-clean tanks so you always use fresh water.

• If you can’t afford auto scrubbers or vacuum cleaners, use clean microfiber cloths to mop and dust floors during both wet and dry cleaning.

MAINTAINING FINISHED FLOORS

When you buff, strip, and refinish wax floors, you may unintentionally expose yourself to a range of toxic airborne pollutants. These include chemical strippers, toxins in acrylic wax finishes, and pathogens released during buffing. Each step in the process harms indoor air quality and poses health risks to building occupants.

BUFFING

Whether or not floors have wax coatings, buffing them releases large amounts of dust, mold, and pathogens into the air, contributing to unhealthy indoor air quality (IAQ). Buffing generates air pollution that includes large particles (PM10), which can stay airborne for minutes or hours, and fine inhalable particles (PM2.5), which can linger for days or even weeks.

These particles pose an even larger threat because they can host disease-causing microbes. This danger is outlined in a report from the CDC (Center for Disease Control) (2019):

A variety of airborne infections in susceptible hosts can result from exposures to clinically significant microorganisms released into the air when environmental reservoirs (i.e., soil, water, dust, and decaying organic matter) are disturbed. Once these materials are brought indoors into a healthcare facility by any number of vehicles (e.g., people, air currents, water, construction materials, and equipment), the attendant microorganisms can proliferate in various indoor ecological niches and, if subsequently disbursed into the air, serve as a source for airborne healthcare-associated infections. (Guidelines for Environmental Infection Control in Healthcare Facilities, p. 20).

Although foot traffic introduces substantial amounts of dust, dirt, and other contaminants to the indoor environment, IAQ is especially threatened when floors are buffed. An experiment that illustrates this issue was conducted at St. Michael-Albertville High School in Minnesota.

THE TEST

An Awair Omni air quality meter was used to record levels of PM2.5 and VOCs in a high-traffic corridor during an entire day, including when halls were empty, while students were milling through the halls during passing time, and when floors were buffed in the evening.

The readings showed a steep spike in fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and VOCs during floor buffing, while levels stayed low throughout the school day (see Figures 1 and 2). You might assume foot traffic alone stirs up high PM2.5 levels, but measurements revealed much lower pollution during those times compared to buffing. This proves that buffing floors produces alarmingly unhealthy indoor air quality and requires immediate attention.