ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

A Chinese hospital has given a new meaning to the idea of the wheelie bin by fitting cleaners employed to empty bins with rollerskates to speed up the rubbish collection.

Park Fang, manager at the Huaxi Hospital in Chengdu, Sichuan province of south-west China said he had been forced to cut the number of cleaners because of cost and also because the hospital was so large the staff that remained had been too slow to empty rubbish bins.

So they employed new cleaners with the one necessary qualification being that they could rollerskate to a high standard. Since then they haven't looked back. The new rollerskating cleaners get paid 15 per cent more than the previous ones.

Fang added: "There were always too many cleaners here anyway, marching backwards and forwards with rubbish. This way, everything is done much faster with fewer staff. It's also fun to give people something to look at and nobody has to wait very long at all now for a bin to be emptied."

Lian Chen, one of the cleaners, said: "It is definitely the coolest job I have ever had. I get paid to rollerskate eight hours a day and I love rollerskating. The hospital is a great place to practice with lots of interesting things happening all the time."