Dr. Michael Berry is a well-known personality in the carpet cleaning industry. An advocate of Indoor Air Quality, he is a retired from the US Environmental Protection Agency, where he served as deputy director of the National Center for Environmental Assessment at Research Triangle Park. Today, he's a research professor at the University of North Carolina, where he's doing work in the Environmental Studies program.

CFM: Where did your affiliation with the carpet cleaning industry come from?

BERRY: It goes back to the early days when I started the Indoor Air Research Program at EPA (US Environmental Protection Agency). It was one of the first industries that I made contact with because it had such a direct impact on the quality of air and just the general environmental quality of indoor environments. We started a dialogue and a relationship, and that's basically how it all started in terms of my involvement with the industry.

CFM: Did you come up with the concept of IAQ or Cleaning for Health?

BERRY: I can't accept credit for something that Florence Nightingale picked up on nearly 200 years ago. Cleaning for Health is an integral part of public health practice. One of the basic strategies of environmental management is cleaning. So, there really is nothing new there.

I think that I've been associated with cleaning for health in the carpet cleaning industry, but it's nothing that I came up with. It's something that's been around for quite a while.

CFM: Can you explain indoor environmental quality and its relationship to cleaning for health?

BERRY: A quality environment is an environment where no adverse effect occurs, and that effect can occur to human beings or valuable materials.

When you clean properly, health protection is a given. It's an artifact of that process. If you think about it, a healthy condition is a condition where there is a high sense of well-being. Health is the state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

So, what happens when you go in and clean; is what you're doing is trying to create that sense of well-being? That's why we clean a carpet.

Why do we clean the carpet? We want to restore order. And when you get right down to it, what you're doing is elevating the quality of life, and the sense of well-being. You're trying to restore order. So, it happens anyway, if it's done properly.

It's always been surprising to me that people "ooh" and "aah" about this idea that, "Oh, it's healthy!" Of course, it is. That's a natural artifact of cleaning, but not necessarily when you treat. Just because I can alter the appearance of something and create an illusion, doesn't mean it's all that healthy.

CFM: Is a carpet a good thing to be in a home?

BERRY: I think it's a great floor covering. It creates a sense of comfort, of warmth, of dignity. It reduces noise levels. I always get very interested when I see carpet ripped out of environments for one reason or another, and then watch as, over time, people gradually move carpet back into that same environment. So it must have something going for it.

CFM: We're seeing figures that show a decline in carpet. More people are opting for hard surface flooring, or other types of flooring, whether it's wood or what have you. What's driving this exodus?

BERRY: I'm not sure there is an exodus. I think a lot of that claim is anecdotal. When I look at the carpet industry, the sales are about the same. If anything, the carpet industry is a mature industry. I think we hear a lot of anecdotes, that carpets are being taken out, but I sure don't see that on the carpet sales side of the business literature.

When carpet is called into question, many times it is because it hasn't been properly maintained. But I think that once people miss their carpeted floors, sooner or later they come back to it.

I would say we have to really look at that one very, very carefully. I'm not at all concerned that carpet is going to go away, as something whose time has come, because I just don't see that.

I think that we are beginning to look at carpet as a system. We're not looking at it so much as a product. And I think that in this new age, we are beginning to see the importance of an alliance between the carpet manufacturers and the cleaning industry.

Editor's Note: To read the full interview with Dr. Michael Berry, go to http://www.cleanfax.com.