Despite some major barriers to growth and prosperity, the contract laundering and textile rental sectors worldwide have delivered remarkable growth, maintained profitability and made notable contributions to reducing carbon emissions and water consumption, while improving textile sustainability. This has been initiated by vigorous and disciplined research and development in a wide range of areas, by an even wider range of innovators. This month we look at who has been involved and what has been achieved.
There are three main sources for laundering and rental research and development:
Machine manufacturers, textile manufacturers, chemicals suppliers and service providers
Launderers and textile renter operators
Universities, independent laboratories and consultancies Interestingly, these achievements have been largely made by organisations independently identifying the changing needs of the ultimate customer, the textile user – and the opportunities for better processes and equipment to bring about financial economies and significant improvements in productivity.
Now let’s look at some of the latest advances and see what they are achieving for the market leaders:
Sustainability and the costs of linen injections
For many years, most launderers and a surprising number of textile rental operators relied on sodium hypochlorite (chlorine bleach) for stain removal. If this did not do the trick, they simply increased the dosage and accepted a textile life of only 60 – 80 wash and use cycles. The fact that chlorine bleach rots cotton and high dosages were one of the main causes of unnecessarily high linen injection charges was not recognised and acted upon. Two main changes have revolutionised rental costs for the market leaders. The first is that chemicals suppliers have come up with superb low temperature chemistry which remove stains without significant chemical damage, through the use for example of powerful, targeted emulsifiers for fatty protein and oily stains. The second is the discovery by Laundry Technology Centre (LTC) of a safe method of monitoring textile degradation in multiple washing, using a simple 25-wash test swatch. These two developments are opening up the way to lifting average textile life for hotel and restaurant linen from 120 up towards 200 wash and use cycles, which would trim another 40% off textile injection costs.
Disinfection
Up until around 2010, most healthcare textiles were subjected to implied thermal disinfection, which involved a wash stage which held the bath at 71C for a minimum of 3 minutes plus mixing time. When NHS contracts were changed after this to permit disinfection controls which conformed to the European Norme EN14065, healthcare launderers (and rental operators were able to bring in low-temperature disinfection.
This has now been adopted as a British and International Standard BS EN ISO 14065:2016 and enables much improved assurance that disinfection is being achieved consistently. LTC has developed cost-effective techniques to streamline requirements, with maximum use of inhouse monitoring. It is expected that the outstanding success of this for healthcare will pave the way for disinfection to become a standard requirement for hospitality textiles and workwear in the near future. This will also herald further reductions in energy demand and associated lower operating costs.
Productivity
The biggest challenge for the sector currently is high national labour costs and the consequent high percentage of operating costs which labour represents. Machine makers have continued to lead the way with advance sorting systems which can reduce the number of staff in the sorting area from a typical four or five down to just one person, who is there to spot and rectify the occasional problem.
Label manufacturers have led the way with intelligent machine-readable labels that can now enable accurate reading of the contents of an entire bag in just a few seconds, for example. These have been followed by reliable equipment for the pneumatic diversion of each single item into the correct batch assembly container. Further downstream the latest clip feeders for the ironers allow remote assembly of batches of flatwork for smooth, automatic feeding into the ironer itself.
This largely eliminates any gaps in the feeding sequence to give steady, consistent operation of the ironer, so that without running any faster, it boosts productivity at this key point. It also enables automatic minimisation of the gap between successive items, to enable edge to edge feeding into the first in-running nip to give maximum coverage of the heated bed. Although LCN has not yet seen any independent figures for the productivity now being achieved with these advances, an improvement of up to 10% ought to be possible in many plants.
Conclusion
We realise that this is not the whole story but the space to answer in full this Reader’s Query does not permit more. We have therefore devoted the whole of the Nov-Dec issue of LCN to each of the other advances now coming to fruition. These will look at energy, water and chemicals economies and future legislation on effluent quality, and controls to manage the mounting contamination in our oceans. Laundering might be one of the oldest professions, but it is going through a very impressive season of advanced development and LCNi will be bringing you the latest on this.
