LEWISTON – Head custodian Gerald Chouinard has a new way of cleaning the Lewiston Middle School. His staff has gone green.

The green cleaning conversion at the middle school is example of how the Lewiston School Department is taking steps to save money and energy. While most Maine schools are making changes to conserve, action taken in Lewiston makes the school department a leader, said Deb Avalone-King of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

At the middle school recently, Chouinard showed off new tools of his trade: liquid cleaners for bathrooms and floors that are certified environmental friendly.

“Some of the old cleaners used to be harmful,” he said. Custodians were advised to open windows during use. The new cleaners “have no chemicals. It’s healthy for the air, healthy for the environment, healthy for the students.”

At the middle school, salt for melting ice is green-certified.

Vacuum bags have microfilters to trap dust, winning approval from the American Lung Association.

There are new, smaller mop heads made of microfibers. The old bulky mops “just pushed dirt and dust around,” Chouinard said. The new mops capture more dirt and dust. After use they’re vacuumed, washed, then reused.

Mop buckets are new, too. Instead of one bucket, custodians have a kind of station with three buckets: one for clean water, one for ringing, another for dirty water. “It does a better job of cleaning,” he said. “You’re not spreading around the dirt.”

It’s only been a couple of months since the school converted to green cleaning. Chouinard likes the new way. “You see the difference in the dust you’re not creating, especially in a building like this that’s as old as it is.”

Upcoming budget proposals will call for other Lewiston schools to switch to green cleaning, said head custodian Andre Baillargeon. There’s an initial start-up cost for new equipment. For instance, high school costs to change will be about $20,000. After the start-up investment, cleaning the green way cost about the same, Baillargeon said.

Hosting convention

Because of the conservation steps, Lewiston schools have been asked by the DEP and Maine Lung Association to host a statewide conference in April showing other school facility managers how to go green, DEP’s Avalone-King said.

Facilities manager Paul Caron’s playing a big role in that workshop, she said. “He’s done some exemplary work. He’s a leader in the state,” she said. For instance, the daylight harvesting lighting is more common in new schools, but for old schools “it’s very unusual,” Avalone-King said. “It can save tons of money and carbon emissions.”

The big reason Caron said he’s been able to initiate change is the support he’s received from the school committee, the superintendent and those who work in the schools.

Caron, a former commercial electrician, is a product of Lewiston schools. He took part in the apprentice electrician program at age 16 while a student at Lewiston High. After graduation and serving in the military, he started Caron’s Electrical Service with his father, a business he ran for 25 years. He said he grew bored with that, and has been the school department’s facilities and project manager for the past four years.

A member of the Lewiston-Auburn Cool Communities, an organization working on helping the cities reduce emissions that hurt the environment, Caron said conserving is critical for two reasons. The schools have a responsibility to taxpayers to operate as efficiently as possible. It’s doubtful, Caron said, that rising fuel costs will go down.

And to the larger community it’s important to “operate as environmentally friendly as possible. This means that we need to keep moving forward looking for new ways.”

One example of a new way will be geothermal to heat schools. Geothermal, in this case, involves digging 1,500-foot-deep wells to bring up water to exchange its heat instead of oil.

Lewiston schools looked at geothermal for the new Pettingill School but decided against it because the payback is not there yet, said Superintendent Leon Levesque. “The technology is constantly changing.”