Building a Janitorial Supplies List for a UAE Facility

Most janitorial lists get written by scrolling a catalogue and ticking what looks familiar. That is how a building ends up with 40 litres of degreaser nobody uses and no hand towel by Thursday lunchtime. Build it from areas, cleaning frequency and the dispensers already on your walls, and buying wholesale cleaning supplies in the UAE becomes planning, not a monthly scramble.

Walk the building before you open a catalogue

Three columns run the list: area, frequency, and what that frequency burns.

• Washrooms. Twice daily in an office, hourly checks in retail and F&B. Tissue, hand towel, soap, an acidic descaler for the scale UAE water leaves on chrome, touchpoint disinfectant, urinal screens, liners.
• Pantry. Daily wipe-down, weekly strip of the fridge and the floor behind the water dispenser. Degreaser, a no-rinse food-contact sanitiser, kitchen roll, green cloths.
• Floors. Dry dust-mop before anything wet. Sand comes in on every shoe and open delivery door, and a wet mop over unswept porcelain leaves a grey film that later needs a machine. Barrier matting removes more soil than any chemical.
• Glass. Internal partitions daily, west-facing elevations on the morning round: cleaner sprayed at 2 pm in July dries before the squeegee arrives.
• Waste rooms. Daily November to April, twice daily May to September: food waste becomes an odour and fly problem within a day in summer, and Ramadan iftar catering fills the room faster.

Write the frequency beside each line and multiply by 22 working days. The cleaning and janitorial catalogue shows carton quantities and the tier each earns. CoHub buys these lines from vetted vendors and invoices you directly, at list prices excluding the 5% VAT shown separately.

You are mostly paying to ship water

Cleaning chemicals look cheap on a quote and land expensive: a ready-to-use trigger bottle is mostly water, and you pay to freight and store all of it. Read 1:50 as one part product to 50 parts water.

Factor	5 L concentrate at 1:50	Ready-to-use trigger bottles
Solution from one case of 4 × 5 L	about 1,000 litres	20 litres
Weight stored per 100 L of solution	about 2 kg	about 100 kg
Best fit	daily rounds	spot cleaning

The trap is not chemistry but dosing. A cleaner nobody has trained assumes more product means cleaner, so a 1:50 concentrate gets poured nearer 1:10: five times the spend, and a film on porcelain that holds soil and kills the grip on a wet floor. Fix it with hardware, not a toolbox talk: a venturi unit on the sluice tap, or a fill line on every jug and a pictogram dosing chart in English, Arabic and whatever third language your team reads.

A 5 litre multi-purpose disinfectant in cases of four covers daily floor and surface work in a normal office. Get the dilution ratio for each soil level in writing, work back from litres of solution per month, and build the bulk cleaning chemicals range around that number, not pack price.

Labels, safety data sheets, and a store room at 48 degrees

Every chemical on site needs a safety data sheet you can produce at an inspection and a label the user can read, Arabic alongside English. Never decant concentrate into an unmarked water bottle: the commonest finding on a facilities walk-through, and how somebody swallows alkaline degreaser.

Disinfectants and detergents sold in the UAE sit under registration and labelling controls enforced by municipal authorities such as Dubai Municipality. Ask for the registration reference and safety data sheet before standardising a line across sites, and confirm the current rule with the municipality. Abu Dhabi sites under OSHAD-SF also keep a hazardous-substances register.

An uncooled store in Al Quoz, Mussafah or Sharjah Industrial Area runs far above shade temperature by August. Sodium hypochlorite loses available chlorine with time and heat, so buy bleach in quantities you turn over in weeks rather than at the deepest annual tier; half-strength stock costs more than the tier saved. Aerosols print a maximum storage temperature, usually 50 °C, which a steel container in the sun passes by mid-morning. Alcohol hand sanitiser at 70% is a flammable liquid: check quantity thresholds with the Civil Defence authority for your emirate before accepting a pallet.

Keep acids and hypochlorite on separate shelves; mixing them releases chlorine gas. Anyone decanting concentrate needs powder-free nitrile gloves by the carton and splash goggles: nitrile not latex, for fewer allergies and better solvent resistance. Sizing sits in the PPE guide for UAE worksites.

Your dispensers decide your tissue spec

Buying jumbo roll tissue in bulk saves nothing if the roll will not fit the housing you own. Two measurements settle it: core diameter, where 45 mm, 60 mm and 76 mm all circulate here, and the largest outer diameter the cover closes over. Hand towel is stricter — Z-fold, C-fold and multifold are three products and a cabinet is built for one.

Free dispensers are the oldest lock-in in the trade: a keyed cabinet makes the consumable single-source, and the cost lands at the next tender, when the only competitive quote means replacing sixty wall units. Specify open formats when you refit — standard jumbo on a common core, Z-fold around 21 × 24 cm.

Compare ply on cost per use, not per carton. Single-ply hand towel is cheaper per metre and dearer per dry, because people pull twice, and high-traffic retail often moves to centre-feed for the longer refill interval. On toilet tissue a 2-ply jumbo roll in cartons of twelve usually wins an office on comfort complaints alone; both formats sit in the tissue and paper products range. Soap, screens and sanitiser sit with washroom hygiene consumables, where foam soap earns its place: one dose uses roughly half the product of a liquid one.

Bin liners: material, micron and seal

Garbage bags are quoted by piece count, which says nothing about polyethylene in the box. Of two packs labelled 200 × 50 gallon, the lighter splits in the lift lobby. Specify four things.

• Material. HDPE is strong in tension but tears from one puncture. LLDPE stretches and resists puncture, so pantry waste with broken glass needs LLDPE whatever the price gap.
• Micron. "Heavy duty" has no number behind it; a micron figure can be checked on delivery.
• Seal. A star-sealed base spreads load with no corner to leak from; flat and gusseted seals fail at the corner seam with wet waste.
• Size. Flat width about half the bin's circumference plus 5 cm, length bin height plus 20 cm for the cuff.

50-gallon liners, 200 to the carton belong in the waste room and pantry; desk bins take a far lighter gauge, and a refit is the moment to delete them and run central bins per zone. Order the rest of the waste management range to your emirate's segregation rule, Dubai Municipality or Abu Dhabi's Tadweer.

Colour coding, and the laundry that ruins microfibre

The four-colour convention used across UAE hotels, clinics and serviced offices puts red on sanitary fittings, yellow on washroom surfaces, green on food areas and blue on general areas. Colour the mop heads and buckets too: a colour-coded cloth wrung out in one shared bucket is an expensive way to move bacteria around a building.

Microfibre is bought once and destroyed in the laundry. Around 300 gsm suits general surface work; wash it apart from cotton, never with fabric softener, which coats the filament so it stops lifting soil, and never above the label temperature. Give each floor its own trolley: mops, buckets and colour-coded cloths cost little against hours lost walking to a central store. The riskiest overlap is the pantry, where one person cleans a toilet at 9 am and wipes the coffee counter at 11; the office pantry checklist marks where the two lists meet.

A planning benchmark and nine lines for your tender

These are modelled planning figures, not measured averages: 60 desks, 1,200 m², two washroom cores, one pantry, twice-daily cleaning, 22 working days.

Line	Format	Per month	What moves it
Toilet tissue	2-ply jumbo roll, 300 m	12–18 rolls	retail or F&B footfall doubles it
Hand towel	Z-fold, approx. 21 × 24 cm	6,000–7,500 sheets	hand dryers cut it to near zero
Floor disinfectant	5 L concentrate at 1:50	12–20 litres	flat mops use less than string
Desk bin liners	10 L, LLDPE	900–1,300 pieces	removing desk bins deletes the line
Waste room liners	190 L, LLDPE	90–130 pieces	pantry volume, collection schedule
Nitrile gloves	powder-free, box of 100	3–4 boxes	number of cleaners, glove discipline

Count stock against that grid for two months, then put it in the tender. Order quantity is not monthly consumption: most janitorial lines carry a minimum order, so the minimum on gloves or disinfectant often covers several months. Size the store room to the minimum, not the month.

1. State area in square metres and cleaning frequency per area, not "office cleaning, monthly".
2. Say whether consumables sit in the contract price or come from the building.
3. Specify tissue and towel by format, dimension and dispenser fit.
4. Specify liners by material, flat width × length, micron and seal.
5. Specify dilution ratios and require a dosing method, not a promise.
6. Require safety data sheets in Arabic and English before mobilisation.
7. Require the four-colour system, matching mop heads and buckets, one trolley per floor.
8. Ask who owns the dispensers and whether they stay at contract end.
9. Require monthly consumption reporting line by line, so the next tender prices on data.

Periodic work — deep cleans, waste room servicing, floor restoration — belongs in a scheduled line arranged through licensed facility service providers, not buried in a monthly rate where it stops happening by month four. For a per-head budget, the method for costing office supplies transfers onto janitorial lines.

Send us the list and we will price it

Put your line items into a request for quotation — areas, dispenser types, pack sizes where you know them — or photograph your store room shelf on WhatsApp. A sales expert prices every order by hand, applies the tier your quantity earns and issues a proforma, usually the same working day. Delivery covers all seven emirates, payment is cash on delivery, and your bilingual tax invoice with 5% VAT and our TRN follows once the order is paid and packed.