INTERNATIONAL
The new ETSA Awards recognise the most accomplished and innovative projects run by ETSA members. The first ETSA Awards took place on 12 May at the Association’s Congress in Rome last month. There were many nominees with innovative projects for the award category ‘Best Innovative Project’, and the winner was Lindström Oy, for its project ‘Workwear Flex’, representing a new digitalised approach to their market.
With the RFID tagged workwear to enable traceability and optimise the workwear inventory levels they were thereby able to increase efficiency. This solves the problem of the traditional workwear rental model, which is based on personalised items with limited flexibility and availability to optimise inventory levels. This often leads to overstocking, and even in industries with strict hygiene requirements there often is a lack of hygiene guideline adherence. The new Workwear Flex, as it was re-branded and improved in 2020, allows for customers to keep track of workwear in stock, in use, and in the laundry. The award was presented to Juha Laurio.
The Sustainable Leadership and Recycling Award, went to Hr Bjorkmans Entrémattor for its water recycling project, which consisted of a new water recycling system that took nearly two years to develop. Today, it now allows for 98% of their dirty water and laundry water to be recycled. This will save around 16 million litres of water annually. The patented closed water recycling system uses low washing temperatures and special detergents in order to increase the water reuse rate up to 98%, this has resulted in sizable energy and water savings. The system has also prevented a large volume of used and contaminated water from entering the municipal wastewater treatment cycle.
The winner of the Corporate Social Responsibility Award went to Bardusch Beteiligungen, Wolfram Rees, who was the head of the project along with the other managing directors, accepted the award with Marco Marcone. ‘150 of years Bardusch - 150 projects for a sustainable future’ was put into place in 2021, denoting Bardusch's 150th anniversary. As the main part of all activities for the anniversary, Bardusch's group decided that they wanted to give back to the employees and local communities that embedded and enabled the company's success over the last 150 years. The idea behind this was to give every employee in every Bardusch site, location and country the opportunity to name their own outstanding ideas, local or regional CSR projects that they think should be supported, then Bardusch might support said project.
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