Shades of green

One thing that you may notice in this issue of Cleaning Matters is the number of references to an accreditation scheme called the Ecolabel - a voluntary scheme established to encourage businesses to market products and services that are kinder to the environment.For anyone who isn't familiar with the scheme Mark Jankovich explains what it's all about on page 12.

What's significant about the Ecolabel's rise in popularity is that it marks a growing consumer demand for anyone claiming that their products are green to substantiate it.Currently there is a vast gulf in the credentials of some of the products on the market which claim to be green and how they actually perform.

There is also a chasm between how well these green products perform, this must be addressed to overcome the perception that green cleaning products just don't work as well as traditional cleaning products.Hence one of the most important criterion of the Ecolabel is that in order to comply, a product's cleaning ability must be equivalent to or better than a market-leading or generic reference product; after all no matter how kind a product is to the environment it simply isn't going to get used if it makes a job harder to do.

For anyone wanting to discuss these issues further industry stalwart Delia Cannings will be leading an informal discussion on the topic of Green Cleaning at the Hilton Hotel at the Birmingham NEC at 2pm on the 2nd March during this year's Cleaning Show and welcomes Cleaning Matters readers to come along and join in.

The Cleaning Matters team looks forward to catching up with you there or during the course of The Cleaning Show on Stand D15. In the meantime to whet your appetite please find a selection of some of the products that will be exhibited at the show on pages 36 to 50.

Georgina Bisby
Editor, Cleaning Matters