Implement the Green Cleaning Plan

Once the plan and a policy are approved, the Green Team should oversee its implementation. This will require setting priorities with an eye to establishing some early and measurable “wins” to motivate the team and help gain support for continued progress. Another strategy might involve conducting a pilot project.

Setting Priorities

Remember that you don’t have to do everything at once. You can phase in your Green Cleaning Program starting with one or more of the Five Simple Steps to a Healthy School Environment. Or you can prioritize the goals and strategies in your plan based on a number of possible criteria, for instance:

Most immediate results: strategies that eliminate the most immediate risks to building occupants or create immediate or demonstrable harm to the environment;

Greatest potential gain: changes in products or procedures that yield the greatest health benefits for students and custodial staff and will be most readily apparent to building occupants;

Easiest to demonstrate and measure: opportunities for improvement that are measurable and demonstrable to stakeholders or the public;

Most cost-effective: opportunities that produce little visible change but offer measurable cost savings.

Pilot Projects

There is often value in conducting a pilot project before attempting to implement a comprehensive Green Cleaning Plan. A pilot project can be useful when:

working out complex implementation issues or testing a novel approach. It can also be useful to gain limited experience and a track record that will help make the large-scale implementation move more smoothly.

changing a significant number of products, equipment, or to use a new vendor; a pilot project can be extremely useful for evaluating service, training, and other aspects of the competing vendors. In a large school district, a pilot project may include implementation of a few new products and equipment at a small number of buildings.

minimizing risk or overcoming political and other obstacles. Gaining approval to make sweeping changes is made significantly easier when data-based evidence is presented.

All of the ingredients required for a successful full-scale implementation are required in a pilot project as well: Communication, measurement, and feedback, for example are critical to the pilot’s success and by extension the eventual success of the full-scale implementation. Resist the natural tendency to relax just because this is a pilot and not the “real thing.”

The timeline is also important. Pilot projects need to have a clear end-point in the form of an absolute date (usually the best approach) or on completion of a certain measure. In either event, the goals and milestones must be clearly defined and communicated. Typically, pilot projects run for a period of six months to a year depending on the project. Once the project has run its course and the key learning collected, the project should be closed. It is then time to incorporate the learning and move to the full-scale implementation plan.

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Adopt a Green Cleaning Policy

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