ISSA and the Cleaning Industry Research Institute (CIRI) announced, early August, improvements to the (US) ISSA Standard for Measuring the Effectiveness of Cleaning in K-12 Schools (Clean Standard) that enhance its use in evaluating cleaning processes at United States’ school facilities.
The Clean Standard provides K-12 schools with a tool that helps them evaluate and monitor the effectiveness of their cleaning processes using both a quantitative measure (ie. ATP meters) and traditional inspection methods. The ability to objectively evaluate cleaning processes and products is critical to providing a safe and healthy indoor environment for school-age children.
Recent enhancements to the Clean Standard include updated values that define ‘effective cleaning’, which are central to the standard. Specifically, revisions have been made to the table at Section 5.5 that set forth the values that define ‘effective cleaning’ for the range of ATP values with Hygiena SystemSure Plus.
Values for other ATP systems in the Clean Standard (Charm Sciences Novalum and 3M Uni-Lite NG) remain the same. These revisions are the result of intensive field study during 2014 and substantiated by industry and research scientists, and are now reflected in the latest edition of the Clean Standard at www.issa.com/cleanstandard
Since it was first issued, the Clean Standard online toolkit has been downloaded more than 2,000 times. The standard’s quantitative and qualitative measurement tools have been used by schools, cleaning service contractors, distributors, and others in the commercial cleaning marketplace as a way of evaluating and improving their cleaning processes. In addition, certification and training programs have developed around the Clean Standard, such as the program offered by CIRI (see www.ciriscience.org/training-certification.php for details).