How To Achieve Eco-Friendly Pavement Sweeping

Sweeping pavement on roads, commercial parking areas, and construction sites is meant to do more than maintain a tidy appearance. Keeping pavement clean removes many tons of debris, particles, and other contaminants from these areas that would otherwise end up in storm drains. Sweeping helps protect stormwater, and ultimately the world’s waterways, from these environmental pollutants. What can your pavement sweeping company do to help the environment even more and become an eco-friendly business?

How to Be an Eco-Friendly Pavement Sweeping Company

It may seem like you’re too busy and that there’s too little you can do to make a meaningful difference for the environment through your sweeping business. It may seem much further out of reach to make yours an eco-friendly operation. But, there’s actually a lot you can do that can, altogether, significantly reduce your costs and make your business much more ecofriendly at the same time. For example: CONTROL AIRBORNE DUST.

Taking measures to keep the air as clean as possible is an obvious priority on construction worksites. Workers on the site and occupants of nearby residences and/or businesses are exposed to the thick clouds of dust incessantly being generated by vehicles and heavy equipment moving around on a bare dirt lot during construction work. Naturally, using water to reduce the amount of airborne dust caused by sweeping the space can eliminate much of the dangerous air pollution caused by such dense particulates in these areas.

So, as necessary when servicing construction sites, use water in your sweeping process to help stop unhealthy amounts of dust from being kicked up into the atmosphere. This is an environmental regulatory requirement in many areas of the country.

MINIMIZE

WATER LOAD WEIGHT.

Applying water to control dust during pavement sweeping is essential to manage dirt at many construction sites and the residual track-out beyond the exits from such sites. Potentially, even in some municipal street-sweeping in regions with a lot of wind-blown dust may require water to manage it during sweeping operations. But, carrying nearly a ton or more of water causes its own environmental problems. The additional fuel used for hauling heavy loads of water means additional carbon emissions. continued on page 28

4 Consider using a dust control product in your sweeper’s water tank to enable you to get good dust control results while carrying less water.