What is colour coding?
Colour coding is the practice of assigning colours to cleaning equipment by area — typically separating washrooms, kitchens, general areas and clinical spaces — so that equipment is not carried between them.
Use this diagram
Free to use on your own site, in training material or in a handout, as long as the credit link stays on it. Paste this where you want the diagram to appear.
<figure>
<img src="https://cleanoptix.co.uk/glossary/colour-coding/diagram.svg" alt="colour coding — diagram from CleanOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
<figcaption>
<a href="https://cleanoptix.co.uk/glossary/colour-coding">What is colour coding?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://cleanoptix.co.uk">CleanOptix</a>
</figcaption>
</figure>The point is preventing cross-contamination, and it works because it is visual. A cleaner does not have to remember a rule; a red cloth in a kitchen is wrong on sight, including to a supervisor walking past.
There is a widely used convention, but it is a convention rather than a single legal standard, and it varies between sectors and organisations. What matters is that one scheme is used consistently across a site and that everyone on it knows which.
It fails at the edges: the equipment store, the laundry and the moment someone is short of a cloth. Those are the points worth designing around rather than the training itself.
In practice
A kitchen cloth found in a washroom caddy.
The cleaner is agency cover, working her first shift on the site. The system is in place, the chart is on the wall of a store she was never shown, and nobody mentioned it at handover.
Colour coding only works if everybody who touches a cloth knows the scheme, which makes it an induction control rather than a purchasing one.
Cover shifts are where it fails, every time, and the site with the best chart is as exposed as the site with none.
What goes wrong in practice
- Two schemes in use across one contract because different sites were mobilised separately.
- Colours taught at induction and never reinforced, so the scheme decays over months.
- Equipment washed together, which defeats the separation the colours exist to create.
- Running out of one colour, which reliably produces substitution rather than a request.