Sustainability: Initiatives

Green Cleaning

Americans spend roughly 90 percent of their lives indoors, so the quality of the indoor environment is crucial to their health and well-being. To ensure that our residents and staff live and work in healthy environments and that our buildings are equipped with high-quality, durable materials, we are undertaking an initiative to establish companywide product criteria and standardize our most commonly ordered products.

One of our portfolio-wide procurement strategies has been the rollout of our Green-Cleaning. Some of the most common cleaning products today contain very toxic ingredients and can increase the risk of asthma or respiratory symptoms, particularly within sensitive populations. Green Cleaning products contain environmentally-friendly chemicals that are designed to preserve human health. We worked with green cleaning product experts to draft rigourous criteria and develop a standard cleaning policy across all our properties.

As a part of the Green Cleaning Initiative, we are also installing dilution stations at every RCM managed property. Dilution stations significantly reduce the amount of chemicals needed to create a cleaning solution, as they mix water with a concentrated set of cleaning chemical to create a strong cleaning solution. Dilution stations are easy-to-install and operate and with them, our properties are able to create significant water and dollar savings and still create an array of strong cleaning products such as general-purpose cleaners or glass cleaners.

The last phase of the Green Cleaning Initiative involves our resident green cleaning rollout. With this phase, our residents are each provided a spray bottle full of environmentally friendly general-purpose cleaner. On a monthly basis, tenants can request a free re-fill of their green cleaning solution. This process ensures our team that tenants are not only keeping a clean apartment, but also are also doing it in a healthy and environmentally conscious manner.