When was the last time a professional cleaned your building’s trash chute? If you’re like a lot of New York businesses, you probably don’t even know! With all the hustle of running a business, sometimes the small stuff gets put on hold. The problem is, if you leave the small stuff alone for too long, it won’t be small stuff anymore.

Your building’s trash chute runs the length of your entire building. It’s accessible from every floor, and it sees heavy use every single day. It’s instrumental to the building’s proper operation, so it’s also instrumental to your businesses’ successful operation. Here are four reasons why cleaning your trash chute can seriously improve your work environment, your employee’s morale, and, ultimately, your company’s productivity.

Improve Office Safety

First and foremost: a dirty trash chute can be a major safety concern. Think about all the gunk a building’s tenants use their trash chute to dispose of. How much of that stuff actually makes it all the way to the dumpster? You never know what kind of garbage gets stuck to the sides of your chute. Grease, paint, soggy paper, rotting fruit… all the office garbage you can imagine (and some you probably can’t!) has probably congealed on the walls of your chute at some point.

The really annoying thing about garbage stuck in a chute is that it catches other garbage. The more garbage gets lodged in the chute, the more stuff clings to it. Pretty soon, you have a full-fledged clog. Big old clogs of grease and other flammable substances can be a huge fire hazard. Fires that start in a trash chute can quickly spread throughout a building… which is bad.

Prevent Health Hazards

Yes, fire is a hazard to your health. Unfortunately, however, your chute can pose health risks in more subtle ways too. A lot of the trash most office buildings throw out is organic. Old, rotting food attracts mold spores, bacteria, and a whole cocktail of other unpleasant germs. If your building lets that disease cocktail fester in your chute long enough, it won’t stay there.

It’s another downside to the convenience of garbage chute accessibility: germs and mold spread through it like crazy. Germs can waft up from your garbage chute/petri dish until they’ve infected the whole building. In some really rough circumstances, mold spores might even start circulating through a building’s ventilation shaft. The longer a chute goes without being cleaned, the longer germs have to establish themselves in the building. Not only is that gross, it’s also really bad news for anyone working in the infected building. That’s you.

Keep Pests Away

Well, you saw this one coming. We are a pest control company. Trash chutes are the perfect breeding ground for pests. Roaches, rats, flies, moths, and all kinds of other pests thrive in dirty trash chutes. They offer everything pests look for: food, humidity, darkness, privacy, and accessibility. Roaches and rodents can even use chutes to climb from floor to floor, infesting everything as they go.

If your office has ever struggled with an infestation you couldn’t shake, your trash chute could be the culprit. Pests spread out from central nests in the trash chute. You kill the ones bold enough to venture into your office, but the root problem remains. Then, it’s only a matter of time until your problem rises (literally) again. Washing out a chute wipes out pests and addresses the root reason why pests came to your building in the first place.

Create a Better Work Environment

Yeah, cleaning a trash chute is important for those somber, “protecting the health and safety of your peers” reasons. But the less “serious” reasons are important, too. Cleaning a trash chute will just make your office a better place to work! Your co-workers won’t dread their turn to take the garbage out. You won’t have to hold your nose in the hallways.

It might sound like we’re overstating here. After all, it’s just a trash chute. But consider the dumpster outside your building. It’s gross, right? It stinks. It’s ugly. There are flies all over it in the summer. That’s what your trash chute could look like, only it’s in your building. If you’ve ever felt like there’s “something rotten in the state of…” your office, that something rotten could be your garbage chute. Cleaning it out could give you a whole new lease on your work life.

Trash chutes shouldn’t be something you have to think about much. You have more important things to worry about. Ironically, though, if you don’t think about your trash chute a little every once in awhile, you’ll end up thinking about it a lot down the line. You don’t want that, either.

The next time you start to suspect there might be something gross hiding in your garbage chute, don’t wait. Just call Assured Environments when the thought strikes you, and we’ll get it sorted out. By the time we’re through with it, your garbage chute will be cleaner than it was the day you moved in.