“Now that the building always smells fresh, people believe it is cleaner.
And it is! It’s cleaner without the presence of all those traditional
noxious cleaning chemicals.”
- Barry Giles

Barry Giles is an International Facility Management Association (IFMA) member, a U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) faculty member, a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – Accredited Professional (LEED AP), an active member of the USGBC LEED-Existing Buildings (EB) core committee and a member of the USGBC’s Curriculum committee where he represents LEED-EB interests.

Originally from Surrey, England, over the years Giles has worked extensively in the construction industry in four different countries. He instructed southern Caribbean workers in 20th century building techniques and built the largest leisure facility on the Grenadines Islands.

Giles passion for the environment and green construction are integral to his current position of building services engineer for Moss Landing Marine Laboratory in Monterey, Calif. He spearheaded the organization’s LEED-EB pilot program, helping the facility earn a Gold standard in 2004.

Today, Giles is working with engineers and designers on the construction of a new 500 ft. ocean pier to be built into the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary at Moss Landing. This pier will be part of an ocean observatory for the marine laboratories.

Since its establishment in 1966, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories has grown an international reputation for excellence in marine science research and education. Moss Landing students and faculty are engaged in a variety of research projects, both locally and globally, and the lab is one of the oldest marine laboratories in California. The Marine Laboratory building is situated on a 21-acre hillside in Moss Landing with breathtaking views of Monterey Bay and local wetlands. The footprint of the building was designed to preserve existing landscape and the cultural heritage of the property. Twelve acres of native dune and drought resistant plants now surround the facility and with that has come significant advances in animal and plant species protection.

After joining the Moss Landing facilities staff some five years ago, Giles made it his personal goal to achieve LEED-EB certification for the building, an unprecedented initiative within the CSU system. Although the CSU system encompasses 23 campuses and more than 35 million sq. ft. of building space, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories was the first (and remains the only) CSU building to be awarded LEED certification.

The Ashkin Group recently interviewed Giles about his experiences in green building construction, facilities management and Green Cleaning.

The Ashkin Group: How do you think Moss Landing defines green building management?

Giles: As a whole, Moss Landing defines itself. Our philosophy or ethic here is to have a long-term commitment to the future of the environment. We do great work inside Moss Landing, but the building is great in itself, too. Although we're a teaching establishment, we don't just educate students. We do work that is nationally important. We don’t just graduate students and produce new marine biologists, our research changes policy. We provision students as the pioneers of the future and strive to give them a broad background in all the relevant environmental issues, including how we operate our building to make it as green as possible.

The Ashkin Group: What led up to the LEED-EB certification effort at Moss Landing?

Giles: Before we pursued LEED-EB, we had already changed to Green Cleaning to reduce the environmental impact of our cleaning program and signify to our building occupants that we were thinking about the environment. We were able to show our occupants we were taking an environmental view of that one facet of the building operation.

The Ashkin Group: What were your concerns in shifting to a Green Cleaning program and how did it turn out?

Giles: We thought it was going to be a difficult process and it ended up being very seamless. We didn’t know what to expect and we had preconceived ideas that it would involve increased costs and a complete lowering of standards while everyone got used to the new program. In fact, the company we contracted to implement our Green Cleaning program literally changed us to Green Cleaning overnight--seamlessly.

The results have been that the building is cleaner, smells better and looks better. The floors have a higher polish and last longer, the bathrooms do not smell of noxious chemicals and because they smell better, they actually look cleaner. The reason is, you aren’t going into the building and smelling a traditional cleaning chemical and asking yourself where it might be coming from. Now that the building always smells fresh, people believe it is cleaner. And it is! It’s cleaner without the presence of all those traditional noxious cleaning chemicals.

The Ashkin Group: Were there any special cleaning challenges you faced at Moss Landing?

Giles: Our public areas, such as our seminar room, have a lot of traffic because they are regularly used by outside entities resulting in a lot of impact to our front of house areas such as our doormats, front lobby and public bathrooms. Green Cleaning has helped enormously to alleviate the cleaning problems that come from high usage. For example, the smell from chemicals contained in traditional cleaning products. Before our Green Cleaning program, the frequent cleaning of our high usage areas often triggered complaints about a chemical smell. Green Cleaning has stopped all that.

Since our Green Cleaning program was a relatively seamless experience and did not require added costs, it helped pave the way for us to introduce more difficult green building management concepts and motivated us to examine other building operations. In bathrooms, Green Cleaning gave us new ideas for reducing water usage, installing more touch-free fixtures and putting up signage to inform building occupants about all we are doing for the environment. In the process, we’ve met other people in the green building management industry who have given us additional great ideas to implement in our building. The exchange of knowledge has been very useful.

Overall, the absence of complaints from our occupants tells us the Green Cleaning program is a success. The only comments we’ve heard are about how much cleaner the building looks and smells.

The Ashkin Group: What about some of the unique cleaning challenges posed by the research laboratories?

Giles: Our building is a mixed-use building and Green Cleaning has not adversely impacted the labs in any way. It works seamlessly in those areas too. In fact, in our trace metals labs, Green Cleaning has highlighted the fact that we use floor polishes that do not contain any zinc, a trace metal that cannot be introduced into the trace metal labs. Before we made the switch to green, we could not clean the trace metal lab floors.

The special cleaning needs of our labs is a good reminder that some facility maangers still hold a preconceived notion that it's not easy being green. Well that's not true today. No matter what the cleaning challenges a building may have you can be sure that in the market place someone already has met that challenge and they are quite willing to share their solution with you.

There is no further reason why any facility manager should be in the dark about Green Cleaning. All anyone has to do is inquire for more information at the local chapters of the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA), IFMA or USGBC.