Doing our Part for the Planet – Earth Day 2021

April 21, 2021

Doing our part for the planet – Earth Day 2021

For over 40 years, DKI-CRCS has been focused on helping clean up homes and businesses across Durham Region. As our business has grown, we’ve continually given thought to how we can keep our own operations as clean and environmentally responsible. Celebrating Earth Day 2021 seems like an ideal time to share some of the changes we’ve made over the years.

Perhaps the most noticeable change we’ve made in the past few years was to add three Chevrolet Bolts to our fleet. Our project managers have been making use of these for nearly three years to visit clients. Our team loves them, and we’ve been very happy with how little the cars have cost to run when compared against the gas cars in our fleet. As we look ahead to future fleet acquisitions, we’ll be doing so with an eye to the advantages of electric cars.

Building materials used in reconstruction and restoration of your home or business are carefully accounted for to minimize waste. Our tradespeople are pros at making the most of supplies. Off-cuts are kept on hand to be able to board up doors and windows on other projects waiting full restoration. In fact, because we keep all the odds and ends, we rarely have to loss time to buy materials for boarding up an emergency fire.

Often our work involves working with materials that are damaged from flood or fire, which can make some items difficult to salvage. We’ve made it our business to find ways to restore as much as possible. It’s good for the planet, and for our clients, getting their favourite items returned in top shape takes so much of the edge off a catastrophic event. We have fleets of specialty drying equipment, including machines at our headquarters where an entire litghly smoke damaged couch can be returned to like-new condition.

Cleaning we do on site can often require powerful cleansers, so we were especially excited to find Benefect, a broad-spectrum cleaner that is derived from botanical compounds and uses good bacteria to break down bad bacteria. It’s so benign that personal protective equipment isn’t required for its use. A second cleaner from the same company works wonders on textiles and carpets. We started using Benefect in 2002 and haven’t looked back. As an additional perk, the company was founded in Burlington, Ontario.

What we can’t dry, clean and restore, gets carefully sorted into categories to divert as much waste as possible from the landfill. Recyclable materials get sorted out accordingly, and we ensure that electronic waste gets diverted back to our headquarters where it is set aside until a municipal e-waste pick up can be arranged. This can sometimes include our own equipment, but only after it has moved from front-line use, to back-up duty, to finally no longer repairable.

Each of these choices has been made with the planet in mind, and each of these choices has proven to be positive for our business as well. As we look ahead to the future of DKI-CRCS, we are still looking for ways to be lighter on the planet. We’ve learned a lot in our decades of experience, and we’re confident we’ll keep learning and improving what we do long into the future.


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