Most facilities managers I speak to still think of water as somebody else’s problem to solve, like the municipality’s, the landlord’s, maybe the building engineer’s. In cleaning, that assumption is starting to look outdated. Across several South African metros, water interruptions linked to ageing infrastructure are becoming less predictable, and a cleaning operation that can’t function without a constant, guaranteed water supply is carrying more risk than most people realise.
Water availability has become a much more practical consideration for us than it was a few years ago. The important shift has been to stop treating it as simply a facilities issue and start treating it as a risk we plan for, knowing in advance where water is genuinely necessary, where consumption can be reduced, and where a different approach altogether would do the job better.
It helps to start with where the water actually goes. In most facilities, the heaviest consumption comes from the obvious places like mopping, washroom cleaning, general floor care. What’s easy to miss is how much of that usage is simply assumed rather than required. The traditional bucket-and-mop method, in particular, uses considerably more water than the task actually needs.
One of the things we’ve challenged is the assumption that every cleaning task requires a bucket of water. The answer isn’t simply to tell a cleaner to use less. You need to look at the methodology itself and ask whether there’s a better, more controlled way of performing the task.
That questioning led to a fairly simple change on the ground: moving from bucket-and-mop to a spray-and-mop technique in appropriate areas. In the sites where we’ve implemented it, the switch has delivered roughly a 60% reduction in water usage compared with the traditional method, without any drop in cleaning standard. The saving came from changing the process, not from doing less.
The same thinking has extended into equipment and product choice. Controlled-use dispensing, microfiber technology and pre-dosed products all let us apply water and cleaning solution far more accurately than older methods allow, cutting unnecessary consumption without compromising the outcome.
None of this counts for much, though, if a site loses water altogether. That’s where preparedness becomes the real test. Our teams need to know a site’s priorities well enough to make quick, sensible calls – which tasks can continue as normal, which need an alternative method, and which can safely wait. Site management needs to be kept informed throughout. Done properly, the aim is for the disruption to be barely noticeable to the people using the building. Good management is often about dealing with problems before the end user even knows there was one.
What doesn’t change, regardless of how tight water supply gets, is the standard itself. Hygiene, health and safety requirements aren’t up for negotiation and using less water is not the same as doing less cleaning – that’s a distinction I feel strongly about. We ask ourselves whether we can achieve the same or better outcome using a different product, piece of equipment or method. Where a particular task genuinely requires a certain amount of water, that requirement needs to be respected. Sustainability has to be practical and responsible.
Choosing the right product for a water-constrained environment is more complicated than picking the one with the lowest water requirement on the label. Concentration, dilution ratios, application method, surface type, dwell time and the skill level needed to use it correctly all factor into the decision. Cleaning chemistry and dispensing systems have moved on considerably in recent years, and concentrated, controlled-dosing products can reduce water use at the preparation stage while improving consistency of results. But a well-designed product is only as good as the team applying it, which is why training sits alongside methodology and equipment as one of the three things that actually determine whether a change works.
Our role is to understand the facility, identify the risks, and build the right response around those conditions. Water is one factor among several – productivity, hygiene outcomes, environmental impact, labour, consumables, and cost all sit in the same equation, and a competent service partner should weigh all of them simultaneously.
That’s really the shift I think our industry needs to make; judging a cleaning operation by what it achieves rather than by how much water, chemical and labour goes into it. The better question isn’t whether a building can survive a water interruption without disruption, it’s whether the people responsible for cleaning it were already planning for that possibility before it became necessary.
Written by Danie van Rensburg is Operations Executive for Excellerate Services