material solutions

Prolonging fabric life

1 August 2006



Bedding and towels worth thousands of pounds are wrongly condemned every day when all they require is the right treatment at the laundry, according to Ian Harris of the Laundry and Drycleaning Technology Centre


The life expectancy of any textile will be affected by both the conditions in which it is used and by the way it is handled and processed in the laundry.

Whether the textiles are owned by the customer or by the launderer, the maximum reasonable fabric life will be demanded. If the fabric does not last, it is invariably the launderer who will pay the price either in the form of compensation for the textile owner, or in lost rental profit because the textile has to be replaced prematurely.

There are are two prime reasons for condemning textiles: the fabric has been torn or physically damaged; or it has residual dirty marks and stains – and in this we include greying.

Physical damage will frequently be due to either abuse or “fair wear and tear”.

Many launderers budget on receiving a certain number of cycles from their textiles. This budgeted figure can be up to 150 cycles on a sheet or 100 cycles on a towel before they are condemned as being past their useful life.

However, examination of the condemned linen stock rooms in many laundries will very often show a different picture.

Recent studies into the reasons for condemning stock revealed some variations between hospital and hotel laundries, but in most cases the linen had been condemned because it was poor quality and had residual stains and marks.

Further investigation found that much of this “condemned” stock was in a generally good condition – it was simply stained or marked.

But the most revealing area for concern was there was nobody who knew how to best treat these textiles to remove these marks and put the stock back into circulation.

So thousands of pounds worth of otherwise good sheets, pillow slips and towels are being condemned daily when all they need is to be given the right process or treatment.

These days, an “old school” trained washroom foreman is hard to find. Greater laundry automation and the use of bigger and higher production units mean that smaller washers are left to deteriorate and nobody knows how to operate them on “special” manually controlled processes anyway.

In many laundries the washroom foreman is now a machine operator with little or no technical training.

Of further concern is that very few people even appear to be checking these condemned items to try and identify why they have been abandoned. There is just a chance that the laundry may be causing the staining and could reduce the problem by improving its housekeeping standards or changing the way in which the textiles are handled.

The right treatment

The most common treatment we have seen for re-wash items is a normal wash process to which an extra dose of bleach is added. If that doesn’t work, the items are condemned.

But grease, carbon, washroom mud, rust marks and drag marks are not affected by bleach. So why re-wash in bleach? This just another way of increasing costs and reducing profit.

Every professional washroom should have at least one 50 – 100lb washing machine that can be manually controlled and a trained and experienced washroom foreman who knows how to use oxalic and hydrofluoric acid, sodium metasilicate and sodium hypochlorite. Used correctly, these basic chemicals will successfully remove and recover up to 90% of stained condemned textiles for a small fraction of the cost of replacement.

There are a number of simple guidelines that a launderer should follow in order to improve fabric life.

• Ensure that the fabric is the correct one for the customer’s purpose. Make sure you have the right technical specifications – it shouldn’t be just a matter of price. A higher specification fabric will often only cost a few pence more but it will last considerably longer, making it much better value for money. The specification should identify not only the physical dimensions and weight of the material, but also its dimensions after several wash cycles and its compliance with the various appropriate BS specifications for colour variation, dimensional stability, and construction methods.

• Publish some guidance notes or provide some training for your customers on how to get the best from your products and service. It is in their best interests to ensure that the textiles you supply meet the standards the user expects.

• Classify your customers according to the type and degree of soiling you are likely to encounter from them. It is wrong to wash, for example, engineers’ overalls with butchers’ coats – and equally so to wash bedlinen from the local bed and breakfast where it may stay on the bed for a week (or more) with that from a high-standard five star hotel.

• Items that are heavily stained or soiled should be placed to one side for “special” treatment during sorting and classifying. Heavily soiled work should not be left too long before processing, as the longer it waits, the more difficult it can be to remove the soiling.

• Ensure the wash processes are correctly designed with the right temperatures during the various stages. Too high a temperature at the beginning will “cook” protein stains onto the fabric, while too low a temperature on oil and fat stains will leave the fabrics smelly and make them a major fire risk. Residual oil and fat is often highly acidic and will gradually destroy cotton if left long enough. It is worthwhile giving that extra little bit of time, temperature and alkali to oily soiling as the fabric can last two to three times longer as a result.

• Bleach should not be used as a substitute for poor washing. It will affect protein and dye but there is no benefit from bleaching drag marks, carbon or graphite.

• Check the re-wash and classify it according to reasons for treatment. Every piece of re-wash costs three times the normal price to handle and process – and is a good way of seriously losing profit.

It is often a useful exercise to check the re-wash. Up to three-quarters of re-wash is due to operator error, with products dropped on the floor, excessively creased, poorly fed into the calender or over-dried in the tumbler. By improving the controls and handling procedures in the laundry, re-wash levels can be more than halved.

Checking the re-wash will help avoid the “re-wash loop” – items constantly going around in a circle, being repeatedly re-washed and never leaving the factory. Certain stains, such as mildew and rust, will never just wash out and will need special treatment.


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