11 Jun Stadium Cleaning Services: Dirty Secrets – Things You’d Never Expect to See in a Stadium
Stadium cleaning and major event cleaning bring their own challenges to the day (or night) of the professional cleaner. People act very differently in a stadium for a sporting event, or a concert, than they do at work or in a more commercial premises. Stadium cleaning is also different to some of the hospitality cleaning we do that would often attract a similar level of behaviour (such as pubs and clubs). It’s just a whole different world of activity, and it results in some very interesting cleaning requirements.
Some things have never been cleaned – until we show up.
Something we almost always notice on jobs that we haven’t worked before is that every cleaning company that came before us knew some tricks of the trade and had a bit of a lazy streak. We always clean under the assumption that someone else from City Property Services will carry out the inspection – and we have extremely high standards.
We often find very old rubbish in places that rarely see the light of day, but really should be cleaned more often. Trash shoved behind and under seats, old food in nooks and crannies, and sometimes much worse. It isn’t necessarily an immediate risk to the health and safety of patrons, but these kinds of overlooked cleaning issues often create problems later on such as rodent and insect infestations or fire hazards. It’s best to deal with it head on and do a thorough job, from top to bottom.
Some people are genuinely disgusting human beings.
It never ceases to amaze us how some people will just do things in public that we would never dream of doing. We’ve found discarded nappies shoved behind seats only a few metres from a bin. We’ve found much worse, but similar, waste from adults. We’ve found plenty of evidence of activity that shouldn’t be happening outside the bedroom, and evidence of activity that really shouldn’t be happening anywhere.
It is always interesting to see how people behave from behind a different lens. We’re sure that if we were at the same events, we probably wouldn’t have even noticed a lot of this going on. However, coming through afterwards and going through a stadium with a fine-toothed comb, you find a lot of evidence of interesting activities.
There is a huge amount of alcohol sneaked in.
This probably won’t surprise a lot of people, but some people choose to take their own alcohol into major events rather than pay the sometimes impressively high prices at the bars inside. Now, we always knew that people had ways and means of getting alcohol inside, and we knew it was a bit of a risk to attempt to do the same thing ourselves.
However, we always get surprised by the sheer amount of evidence of alcohol at some of these events. Dozens of plastic flasks, empty stubbies, cask wine bags and more can be found littering the tiers of seats when we do our stadium cleaning after an event.
There is also a lot of food sneaked in.
Alongside alcohol, a lot of stadiums like to take advantage of their captive audience to charge exorbitant prices for food. Naturally, plenty of people view it as their right, and even responsibility, to get around these rules by bringing their own food into the events. We don’t blame them, but we’d certainly appreciate it if they took their rubbish with them.
We see an absolute mountain of abandoned food wrappers that were brought from outside after any major event. It’s often things that aren’t really necessary. No one needs a bar of chocolate or a packet of lollies, but these are among the common items we see brought in.
We have no idea what causes some of the mess.
Sometimes, we are at a complete loss for an explanation. When we’re doing our stadium cleaning rounds, we’ll occasionally come across a puddle of something, or a stain on a seat (or a wall), and our collective years of experience cleaning cannot work out what it is. There aren’t that many materials available in a stadium to make a mess with, either. Sometimes, we think we’re just happier not knowing.
Some things just can’t be cleaned.
The fact is, we aren’t superheroes. No matter how much we might scrub something, sometimes we aren’t going to make it any better than before. Broken items are an obvious issue, particularly chairs. However sometimes there’s a level of staining or mess that just has to be painted over or accepted as a new part of the décor.
When it comes to stadium cleaning, there are plenty of challenges and plenty of very unique experiences. It’s one of our preferred areas of cleaning, but we’d love to know just how some people get away with what they do in stadiums.