How to choose a cleaning company

There are several good reasons to choose a cleaning service over an individual cleaner.  Are you ready to be an employer?  Does the cleaning company you’ve hired have employees or contractors?  Is your property insured against theft or damage?  Here is a handy guide for choosing the right cleaner to fit your needs.

• It sounds great: You hire an individual who will charge less than a cleaning company and all you have to do is provide the cleaning products and supplies, right?  Wrong!  You’ll also want to supply the IRS with a Publication 926 for Household Employees, but only after supplying the Employment Verification Form I-9.  Then be ready to withhold and pay their Federal Income, Social Security and Medicare taxes. (See IRS for more information) What if something is broken or stolen?  Are you covered?

• Before you hire a cleaning service, ask if their cleaners are employees or contractors.  If they are contractors, the cleaning service you hire doesn’t need to provide liability insurance and in most cases, can’t even ensure how the job is done; only the end result.  If the cleaner is a contractor (1099 worker), they must provide their own business license, cleaning supplies and products and hopefully they are also licensed and bonded.  Do you have the time to verify their credentials?  What if something happens?

• Hire a professional cleaning company with W-2 Employees (like Seattle Green Cleaner).  The company should be licensed and have liability insurance and a bond to cover any theft or damage.  The cleaners are W-2 employees, which gives them benefits (protection if they are hurt on the job, unemployment benefits, Federal Income, Social Security & Medicare taxes withheld, etc.) and the company has done all the leg work of background checks, eligibility to work, training and so on.  This option provides the most protection for you and your home.

Seattle Green Cleaner is environmentally responsible and socially responsible!  Our cleaners are employees who enjoy paid time off, top pay for a job well done, have everything they need provided for them, and they are protected. When you hire Seattle Green Cleaner, your home is also protected.  We are fully licensed, bonded and insured.  After all, you hire a cleaner to ease your work load, not to add to it.

5 Steps to Going Green

Switch to re-usable shopping bags.

• The average American family of 4 throws away about 1500 plastic bags a year – and each one can take up to 1000 years to decompose.

• Plastic bags are manufactured from crude oil and natural-gas derivatives, to the tune of 12 million barrels per year.

• 14 million trees were cut down in 1999 to supply the U.S. with paper bags

• The manufacturing process of paper bags produces 50 times more water pollution than plastic.

• The answer? Switch to reusable bags. They cost less than $5 and can be used over and over. Just keep some in the trunk of your car.

• Visit http://www.ecobags.com/ for more information.

Bank Online

• 405,000 trees are used annually to make the paper required to send everyone in America their phone bills.

• If each U.S. household viewed and paid its bills online, we would save more than 29 trillion BTUs of energy and reduce 1.7 billion pounds of waste per year and annual greenhouse gas emissions would drop by 2.1 million tons.

• Visit http://www.electronicpayments.org/ for more information

Plant Bamboo

• If we planted one million acres of bamboo, we could eliminate up to 4.8 million tons of CO2 per year.

• Bamboo stores more CO2 and generates 35% more oxygen than an equivalent stand of trees.

• Bamboo is a grass, doesn’t require fertilizers or pesticides, it stabilizes the soil and when used in place of wood, reduces rainforest deforestation.

• Bamboo is commonly used in flooring, utensils and textiles. Just be sure to choose sustainably grown bamboo products, produced without pesticides and not in newly cleared forests. When buying bamboo flooring, ask for formaldehyde-free materials.

• Visit www.inbar.int for more information

Become a Vegetarian

• Livestock adds more greenhouse gases to our atmosphere than motorized transportation!

• One pound of meat requires eight times more energy to produce than one pound of veggie protein (such as tofu).

• The 2006 U.N. report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” calls the livestock sector “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to global warming.”

• In the U.S.: 86,000 pounds of excrement per second are produced by livestock (vs. 660 pounds produced by humans).

• The livestock-to-human grain consumption ratio is 7 to 1.

• 32,900 calories of fossil energy are required to raise one 12-ounce steak!

• Even more emissions come from the collateral effects of raising livestock: deforestation of pasture, fertilizers for feed crops, and energy to run meatpacking plants.

• http://www.goveg.com/ for more information.

Use green cleaning products and/or green housecleaners

• Use only household cleaners made from plant-derived ingredients.

• Use only household cleaners which come in recyclable packaging and are biodegradable.

• Use your morning newspaper and vinegar to clean mirrors and windows (you can still recycle the paper when you’re finished).

• Don’t use chlorine bleach – ever! Chlorine bleach is a known lung irritant and was even listed as a hazardous air pollutant in the 1990 Clean Air Act.

• Choose a cleaning company that only uses green cleaning products and green cleaning methods. We of course, suggest Seattle Green Cleaner!