The Role of Cleaning Today

Humans are capable of cleaning with a mop and flying from Paris to New York in 7 hours!

The reasons behind this oversight...

It is truly fascinating to see how humanity can focus its attention on certain areas while neglecting others, sometimes to its own detriment. This behaviour becomes even more surprising when we consider the consequences of such selective interest.

What comes to mind when you hear

the word “cleaning”?

“There is no Wikipedia article specifically dedicated to cleaning.”

What comes to mind when you see or hear the word “cleaning”? Housework, broom, mop, rubbish bin, dirt, splashes, tedious work, probably.

Now, what if we did the same exercise with the word “aeronautics”? This time, you might think of aircraft, travel, technology, comfort, reliability, quality, speed — perhaps even dreams for some people.

The contrast between these two sets of words is quite revealing, isn’t it?

If we take the comparison a little further, the Wikipedia article on aeronautics contains 4,814 words, 27 illustrations and links to a wide range of highly detailed articles.

The Wikipedia article entitled “Cleanliness” — yes, there is no article specifically dedicated to cleaning! — contains 763 words, two illustrations and links to around ten related articles, all of which are fairly brief.

Travel or cleaning?

And yet, what is more important for a human being? Flying from Paris to New York in seven hours, or living in a clean and healthy environment?

If you had to give up one of these two things, what would the consequences be?

If fast international travel disappeared, you might lose the opportunity to enjoy a great holiday, secure a lucrative business deal or receive your Amazon order within two days. It would certainly be inconvenient, but hardly impossible to live with.

But what if your means of cleaning disappeared tomorrow? Your health and potentially your life could be put at risk.

The accumulation of organic dirt encourages bacterial growth on everyday objects, creating significant hygiene risks for you and those around you — not to mention the discomfort involved.

The reasons behind this oversight

“To think about what it means to live is to dream one’s life.” Apparently, cleaning does not inspire many dreams...

So why is there such a lack of attention given to an area that we have known to be crucial since the rise of modern hygiene and our understanding of microbiological life in the 19th century?

First of all, because cleaning is not particularly inspiring.

A multitude of factors have probably contributed over the centuries to creating this perception within our collective unconscious: cleanliness is good, but the work required to achieve it is considered low-status or undesirable.

Even though cleaning is a fundamental part of our everyday lives, it remains surprisingly difficult to find studies dedicated to the subject. This is further evidence that cleaning often goes unnoticed.

Here is one hypothesis: our Western society has a distorted view of its environment.

We tend to focus exclusively on the primary function of the objects we design, then quickly forget about those objects once that function has been fulfilled. At that point, they are considered waste that simply needs to be disposed of.

Yet what do we observe in nature, from which we originate and which we increasingly try to imitate through biomimicry?

Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.

Lavoisier understood this very well. In 1789, he turned the idea into a fundamental principle of chemistry, which would later be applied across many other scientific disciplines.

Could our collective unconscious therefore be encouraging us to look at things too narrowly and create this concept of “waste” that does not actually exist in nature?

When all our attention is focused on the immediate usefulness of the objects we manufacture, we forget that they have a life before they are used, a life after they are used, and that throughout their “useful” period they interact with much more than just their primary function.

And this is where the vicious circle begins.

The concepts of waste and cleaning evolve alongside one another and suffer from the same denial of reality.

By neglecting secondary functions that do not provide an immediate benefit — such as cleaning or recycling — we allow our knowledge in these areas to stagnate.

Cleaning remains tedious while almost everything else in our environment becomes easier: finding information on Google, flying from Paris to New York, and so on.

As a result, we ignore cleaning even more, and its image remains particularly uninspiring.

Secondly, it is important to understand that the science of cleaning is extremely complex.

It lies at the intersection of several sophisticated scientific disciplines:

• chemistry,

• mechanics,

• fluid mechanics,

• thermodynamics,

• microbiology.

And to make matters even more complicated, all these disciplines are interdependent. In other words, the way one of them acts during the cleaning process depends on the others.

Dr Sinner theorised this relationship in 1960 through a diagram known as the Sinner’s Circle, which illustrates the main parameters involved in cleaning.

This circle is still used today, which suggests that the fundamental theory of cleaning has seen relatively little development for almost 60 years.

The combination of limited human attention and the scientific complexity of the subject has therefore brought us to a curious situation:

humankind can reach for the stars aboard an Ariane rocket, yet still clean it with a mop.