At half past five in the evening, the lights are on across every floor of a three-storey office building. Two cleaners are at work. The heating is still running, because the setback does not start until ten, and so is the ventilation. The cleaning itself needs almost none of it.
This situation appears in no sustainability chapter of any tender, and depending on the building it can account for a considerable share of the environmental impact of the cleaning. Whether more than the products used, only the building's operating data can answer, and that is precisely why the calculation is worth doing.
The other way round it also holds: unlike security services, cleaning offers a great deal to improve. Chemicals, water, electricity, materials and packaging are all consumed, and to that come transport, textile laundering, waste water and the service life of the surfaces themselves. Set the right criteria here and you change something.
The question that comes before all the others
Before talking about products and machines, it is worth looking at the soiling itself. The Federal Environment Agency's guidance starts precisely there: environmental protection in building cleaning begins with reducing the soiling that arises in the first place.
In practice that means: made-up paths right up to the entrance, adequately dimensioned entrance matting zones, a properly thought-out waste concept, and avoiding floor coverings that are hard to clean. A short matting zone picks up considerably less than a long one, and how much less depends on its length, construction, material, the traffic route and its upkeep. The difference affects cleaning effort, chemical use and the life of the floor coverings over years.
These decisions are the client's, not the tenderer's. They therefore come before the tender, and a one-off investment in them has a lasting effect.
Cleaning products: established and verifiable requirements
For the environmental performance of the products used there is an established instrument. The Federal Environment Agency's guidance on the sustainable public procurement of cleaning services and cleaning products contains, in Annex II, the supplier questionnaire on the environmental performance of washing, cleaning and care products. It is referenced by the states of Hesse and Baden-Württemberg and by the federal Assessment System for Sustainable Building, which makes it the most widely recognised framework in the field.
Its status is worth stating: the guidance itself dates from 2012, and Annex II was updated in 2017. The methodology still holds; the individual criteria should be checked against today's market and against the EU GPP criteria for cleaning services before a current tender.
The system is simple. The tenderer completes the questionnaire for every product intended for use on the contract. Where a recognised eco-label is evidenced for a product, the individual questions fall away. The EU Ecolabel, the Blue Angel and the Austrian Ecolabel come into consideration for this.
Three things matter here.
Labels may be required under Section 34 VgV where the requirements are linked to the subject matter of the contract and the criteria are objectively verifiable and non-discriminatory. The client must at all times also accept other equivalent evidence. The questionnaire is a serviceable tool for this, because it structures the assessment. It does not, however, take the decision off the contracting authority: which requirements apply, which route of evidence is permitted and how the assessment is made, it has to settle unambiguously itself.
The labels are also not interchangeable. The EU Ecolabel, the Blue Angel and the Austrian Ecolabel cover differently cut product groups with criteria of their own, and not every cleaning or care product has a matching label. Name the product group and the criteria version, take over only requirements relevant to the contract, and set out expressly how special products are to be handled.
And: the questionnaire takes dilution into account. A product that is low-impact in its working solution but used at twice the concentration is no better than one with a less favourable formulation used correctly. The dosing system therefore matters at least as much as the choice of product.
Dosing, concentrates and packaging
Where product is poured from a drum into the bucket by eye, two problems arise at once: overdosing, with the known consequences for surfaces, and consumption far above what would be needed.
A suitable dosing system using concentrates addresses both. It reduces the quantity of chemicals used, cuts packaging considerably because concentrate arrives in smaller containers, and lowers the error rate in application.
The fixed dosing unit is one solution here and not the only one. For small buildings it can be disproportionate, and it only works if it is calibrated, maintained and not bypassed. There are also dosing bottles, sachets, cartridges, dosing through the machine, and ready-to-use products for special cases. Specify the function, therefore, namely reproducible dosing with maintenance, tamper protection and instruction, rather than a particular device.
On packaging you should ask in measurable terms rather than openly. An open question about measures ends up rewarding the better-phrased answer. What is usable: container sizes, the concentration factor, the returnable share, a take-back system, and the expected packaging volume per contract year for the products actually envisaged.
Machines and equipment: a trap
At this point a criterion circulates in specimen tenders that no longer holds.
Delegated Regulation (EU) No 665/2013 on the energy labelling of vacuum cleaners was annulled by the General Court of the European Union on 8 November 2018. The Commission did not appeal, the judgment is final, and since 18 January 2019 the energy label for vacuum cleaners may no longer be used. Anyone asking today in a tender for the energy efficiency class of a vacuum cleaner is requiring evidence that no longer exists.
The ecodesign requirements for vacuum cleaners continue to apply unaffected; they cover, among other things, rated power, dust pick-up, dust emission, noise and motor life.
Power input alone is nonetheless no use as an award criterion. A weak machine runs longer, cleans less well and consumes more in the end. Assess in context instead: power input and area performance, running time, noise level, dust emission, suitability for the floors present, plus repairability and spare parts availability.
Year of manufacture is not something you should reward. A ten-year-old machine that is well maintained and repairable may have the better environmental balance than a newly purchased one, and an age criterion produces precisely the new purchase you want to avoid. More informative are working condition, maintenance records and remaining service life.
On carbon emissions the same applies as for packaging: ask for figures rather than for measures. Expected building-related travel distances, vehicle classes, delivery frequencies and the degree of consolidation can be compared. An open question about reduction measures assesses drafting skill. Battery-powered equipment does not automatically go on the credit side here, since manufacture, charging losses and disposal of the batteries all count.
Environmental management and voluntary schemes
Two questions we consider worthwhile and which cost little effort.
Evidence of independent external supervision of environmental management, through certification to ISO 14001 or EMAS registration for instance. The value lies in a third party having checked, not in the certification as such. What matters here is the wording as evidence subject to equivalence, so that smaller firms with comparable structures are not excluded.
And a question about voluntary participation in environmental or sustainability schemes, in Bavaria for instance the Umweltpakt Bayern or the Qualitätsverbund umweltbewusster Betriebe. These schemes have lower barriers to entry than full certification and are within reach for medium-sized firms in particular.
As an award criterion they are delicate, though, because they are regionally available and can disadvantage a tenderer from elsewhere without any link to the performance of the contract. We therefore use them as an informative question and instead assess the specific measures the tenderer commits to for this building.
Training as a sustainability criterion
Without this point everything above comes to nothing. The most environmentally sound product causes damage if it is wrongly dosed, used on the wrong surface or applied by the wrong method.
The question is therefore not whether training takes place but how. What content, at what interval, in what form, in what language, with what evidence. The Federal Environment Agency's guidance provides for annual training of personnel as a requirement for the performance of the contract, and that is the right place for it: as a condition of performance applying throughout the term.
Annual training does not, however, replace instruction on recruitment, on a change of product or on a change of method. And it works only together with the rest: if the time for the method taught is not costed, or the product is not in the building, the best training changes nothing.
How difficult it is to get training to land in the building we address in a separate article.
Daytime cleaning: environmental and social at once
Where cleaning takes place during normal hours of use, lighting, heating and ventilation no longer run for the cleaning alone. In buildings whose systems run on solely because of out-of-hours cleaning, this is the strongest energy lever in the whole subject. How large it turns out to be depends on the actual running times of the systems, on the control of lighting and ventilation, and on how the building is used, and that can be calculated in advance. Where people work until eight in the evening anyway, little remains.
At the same time daytime cleaning changes working conditions considerably. Instead of fringe hours early in the morning and late in the evening, which force very small contracts and long travel times for a few hours' work, continuous blocks of employment arise. That is the precondition for anyone being able to live on this work.
The price for it is real and should not be talked down. Daytime cleaning creates disruption, it requires arrangements with users, and it meets resistance from everyone accustomed to finding a finished room in the morning. It works well in office buildings, to a limited extent in schools, and in areas with public traffic only with careful planning.
As a procurement matter it does not belong in the evaluation but in the preliminary thinking. The client decides whether it wants it and then describes it in the specification of services. Leaving it to the tenderer as an option means nobody offers it, because it carries more costing risk.
Where a criterion sits decides what it achieves
The most common mistake in this whole field is not one of substance but of system. A sustainability aspect can sit at four points in the procedure, and the choice of point determines whether it still achieves anything after the award.
As a suitability criterion it acts once, in selecting tenderers, and filters the market. Suitable for fundamentals, certified environmental management on large procurements for instance.
In the specification of services it becomes a minimum requirement everyone has to meet. Suitable for anything not open to negotiation, the exclusion of particular substances for instance.
As an award criterion it is weighted and rewards performance above the minimum. Suitable for gradations.
As a condition of performance it applies throughout the term and is enforceable. Suitable for anything to be maintained permanently.
The mistake is to put everything into the award criteria. A tenderer awarded points for its dosing system, but not owing it as a condition of performance, can be pouring from the drum again after six months. Legally that is then hard to get hold of, and in practice nobody notices.
Finally: monitoring
Everything described here presupposes two things. First a baseline, because without one no improvement can be evidenced. Before the contract starts, therefore, the products in use, the annual consumption, the packaging volume, the delivery frequency, the machine inventory and the cleaning times all have to be recorded, supplemented where needed by the building's energy operating hours.
Second, that somebody looks after the award. The effort is small if you know where to look: which products are actually in use, whether they were approved, how dosing is done, whether the machines are maintained, whether training took place. Order quantities and delivery data round out the picture as a plausibility check; proof for or against a service having been performed they are not. How performance monitoring in cleaning is set up we describe separately.
Without that step, sustainability in procurement remains a chapter in the tender, and after the evaluation nobody reads that chapter again.
Further sources
For your own work on criteria catalogues, five publications are serviceable and are regularly drawn on by contracting authorities and in review proceedings:
Guidance on the sustainable public procurement of cleaning services and cleaning products, Federal Environment Agency, with the supplier questionnaire in Annex II.
Guidance on the sustainable procurement of cleaning services, Hessian Ministry of Finance.
Saubere Sachen! A guide to sustainable cleaning services, Ministry for the Environment, Climate Protection and the Energy Sector of Baden-Württemberg.
Sustainability information for the product group cleaning products and cleaning services, Procurement Office of the Federal Ministry of the Interior.
Guidance on sustainability in building cleaning, Federal Guild Association of the Building Cleaning Trades. With this source it should be said that it comes from the employers' side of the industry.