Content about Sustainability

MINNEAPOLIS — G&K Services has launched a pilot program to test hybrid electric trucks in its fleet of delivery vehicles. The company has placed hybrid electric diesel step vans—projected to cut fuel consumption and carbon emissions compared to conventional delivery vehicles—into service in its locations in Northern California.

“We are excited to get these new hybrid trucks on the road, making deliveries to our customers,” says Dick Stutz, G&K’s senior vice president of operations. “G&K is focused on both maximizing the fuel economy of our delivery fleet and being good stewards of the environment.”

The new vehicles were obtained in partnership with the State of California’s Hybrid Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project (HVIP). G&K will work closely with state officials and the vehicle manufacturers to track and analyze the performance of these vehicles and assess the technology for broader use.

Anyone wanting to learn more about G&K’s commitment to environmental sustainability may visit the company’s website.

FRANKFURT, Germany — With Texcare International wrapping up today, many exhibitors with U.S. ties expressed delight in this year’s event and vow to return to the World Market for Modern Textile Care in four years.

Robin Thurgood, vice president and general manager of Rennco, brought his Michigan company’s industrial laundry packaging solutions to the show and found attendees intrigued by the prospect of packaging linens automatically rather than by hand.

“This is our first foray into Europe,” Thurgood says. “I’m not sure there’s anything like us over here yet. I’m not sure they’ve gone into this style of packaging. They’re all very interested.”

Dexter Laundry exhibited at Texcare in hopes of opening up new on-premise and coin laundry markets for its washers and dryers, according to Kevin Hietpas, vice president of sales and marketing.

“Honestly, I think we’re more ready for the customers on the coin side, but we’re seeing what the OPL market is like here in Europe and elsewhere in the world, what those customers need,” Hietpas says. “I think we’re close on some counts (and) we’ve got additional product development to do in other areas.”

Dexter has used the show to establish new contacts and will follow up with many potential opportunities with a long-term view, he adds.

The largest booth in the exhibition belonged to Germany’s own Kannegiesser, and Phil Hart, executive vice president of Kannegiesser USA, says the company’s founder is devoted to exhibitions and displaying a full range of high-technology products and systems to the industry.

“It’s been a very full booth,” Hart says. “The number of visitors has been quite high. And the variety. It really is a worldwide show. One of the side benefits of this is we can introduce customers from various parts of the world and just let them talk, let them compare notes and there’s a certain synergy that goes on at that point.”

Sustainability was a buzzword for this exhibition. AquaRecycle President Jeff Lebedin found that it wasn’t water recycling that had visitors to his booth talking but rather the recycling of dryer exhaust made possible by his company’s ThermalRecycle equipment.

“There are a lot of centralized laundries in Europe, and they do a lot of tunnel washing,” says Lebedin, whose company is based in Georgia. “We just don’t see a huge market yet for recycling water, but when it gets into the dryer part of it, recycling dryer exhaust is in its infancy in our industry because very few companies know what it costs them to dry their linen.”

There were 264 exhibitors from 26 nations represented at the five-day show. The United States was third in number of companies attending behind host nation Germany and Italy.

EQUIPMENT/SUPPLIES DISTRIBUTION: STEVE CLARK, LAUNDRY EQUIPMENT SERVICES INC., BERKELEY SPRINGS, W.VA.

As with any mechanical industry in the world today, technology is ever evolving and continues to push equipment to its max in terms of production and efficiency. This is no different in the laundry industry—as long as you use it properly.

Forget all the bells and whistles of additional means for energy conservation and get down to the nitty-gritty of what it takes to improve your laundry’s energy efficiency and water consumption with the equipment you already have. Something that laundry managers often forget is the amount of water in an individual cycle’s bath and the amount of that water retained in the linen at the end of the cycle.

First, do you know how many gallons are in a particular bath? If so, then do you truly need that much? Does your machine capacity and chemical makeup require such an amount of water? With advancements in technology and computer programming, every leading manufacturer of equipment is capable of customizing water consumption on a per-bath/per-cycle basis. Obviously, this cycle variation will depend on the material being laundered. Regardless, it would be wise to break down the water level and percentage of drum capacity with your chemical representative to determine if this percentage can be tweaked.

Imagine saving 1 gallon per bath/per cycle and multiply that by the number of cycles you run throughout a given day. For example, one machine removes 1 gallon of water from five baths in one cycle. At 5 gallons per load and two loads an hour, that equals 10 gallons saved per hour, or 80 gallons saved per eight-hour shift.

Beyond the amount of water going into an individual wash cycle, what about the water coming out? The water retention amount per load can destroy your laundry’s efficiency in the drying or finishing stages of the process. For every percentage point of moisture in a given material, expect additional minutes to be spent in a dryer or finisher, thus requiring more labor, gas, electricity, etc., per load.

Water retention is affected by the amount of water introduced, the extraction rate of RPMs applying the respective G-force, and the length of extraction time. Due to previously mentioned advances in technology and programming capabilities, most equipment is capable of adjusting the RPMs and the length of extraction time to limit moisture retention to a desired amount for premium linen quality and energy efficiency.

Limit your expenses and help the environment; maximize your efficiency.

COMMERCIAL LAUNDRY: TOM GILDRED, EMERALD TEXTILES, SAN DIEGO, CALIF.

Greater energy efficiency and water conservation can be achieved through planning and design using the new technology available in equipment such as continuous batch washers, presses, and dryers.

In some areas, utilities companies and commissions have special incentive programs designed to encourage businesses to be as energy efficient as possible. In working with your utility company, it is possible to precisely plan for proper equipment and energy use in order to achieve maximum savings.

Employing “reduce and reuse” principles ensures that the highest possible level of resource preservation is achieved throughout an operation. By incorporating the latest technology, equipment, processes and infrastructure, it is possible to save millions of gallons of water annually and tremendous amounts of natural gas and electricity. Some of the ways to achieve tremendous savings include:

• Utilizing energy-efficient lighting, and motion-sensor lighting where appropriate, throughout the plant and offices to reduce energy use.
• Going green with invoices, by using e-mail instead of paper to conserve ink, energy and eliminate paper waste.
• Using environmentally sustainable, lighter fabrics that not only make sense for the environment but also require less drying time.
• Utilizing gravity-enabled designs in the plant, such as an overhead rail system, that moves laundry through the facility using minimal energy to produce less risk and strain to employees.
• Installing the latest industrial washers that utilize high-tech water systems with the ability to decrease water usage by more than 75%.
• Incorporating high-pressure presses to remove the maximum amount of water from clean goods and greatly reduce drying time, resulting in lower natural gas consumption.
• Employing heat reclamation equipment, which employs energy-transfer principles to raise the incoming water temperature so that a lot less energy is needed for heating.

Through technology and streamlined processes, it is possible to achieve tremendous energy savings, which results in cost savings and reduced environmental impact. That’s good for the industry and good for the environment.

TEXTILES: TOM LANGDON, ENCOMPASS GROUP, MCDONOUGH, GA.

There are a number of relatively new textile products on the market that can help improve a laundry’s energy and water consumption. Technology developments in yarn spinning and finishing chemistry now allow synthetic fibers to have more natural fiber characteristics.

Fasciated yarn is defined by Webster’s as a form of fiber assembly consisting of a core of parallel discontinuous fibers bound into a compact bundle by surface wrapping minor proportion of the discontinuous fibers around the core to form the yarn. The most common type is MJS, or Murata Jet Spinning, named after the Japanese manufacturer that perfected this technique.

By using this process to spin all polyester or CVS (Chief Value Synthetic) fibers into yarn, products have a more “cotton-like” look and feel. Recent developments in finishing chemistry now can impart wicking and moisture management properties on fabrics once considered nonabsorbent. This market trend started several years ago with sheets and pillowcases, but now has spread into most product groups, including incontinent pads and even thermal blankets.

There are a few challenges that any laundry may have to address when considering incorporating these new products into their system. No. 1 is the difference in cost. Depending on the item, replacing an existing CVC (Chief Value Cotton) item with one that is all-poly or poly rich could be a 20-40% premium in upfront investment over the standard linen price. The second challenge is processing. Because manmade fiber products dry faster and absorb less water, they need to be processed separately to achieve their full benefits. In some cases, this may be more trouble than it is worth.

Although there is an upfront investment, adding these items to a line will more than provide payback over time. By its nature, polyester is stronger than cotton and will last longer. There is less weight loss, which helps protect revenues for those charging by the pound. Studies have shown that these poly-rich items are more resistant to staining, so there is savings to be had by reducing rewash cycles or pre-treating.

This past year was the best time ever to add more poly-rich items to your line or convert completely. The unprecedented rise in cotton prices in 2011 closed the gap, so in some cases switching was a wash (no pun intended), or the premium was slight. If you look at these items from a cost-per-use perspective, they still are a good value.

I’ll offer a few statistics. One company that I work with did some in-house testing on the processing of these new, synthetic-rich items and achieved the following results on several product categories (of course, results may vary from laundry to laundry):

Knit Sheets — Drying time was reduced 25-40% as compared to a cotton-rich item, and water retention was cut in half.

Pads — Drying time was reduced by 50% as compared to a cotton-rich item, and water retention was reduced by 20%.

Clothing Protectors — Drying time was reduced by 60% as compared to a cotton-rich item, and water retention reduced by 40%.

If laundries embrace this new technology, they will experience faster drying times and use less water. They will also have products that last longer. Saving money and time while conserving resources, now that’s a win-win.

HOTEL/MOTEL/RESORT LAUNDRY: JR NORRIS, DELTA UNIFORM AND LINEN, ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.

As energy prices begin to soar, and with today’s current economic uncertainty, now is an excellent time to implement energy benchmarking and waste reduction in your operation.

Conducting energy audits on a regular basis can help determine the actual condition of your equipment as well as its overall performance. These audits can show where and how energy is being wasted, and can help you identify and prioritize future energy-improvement measures.

Unfortunately, it took some time to get our entire team to recognize the benefits and contribute to reducing wasted resources. In addition to insulating hot water and steam lines and repairing leaky valves, we conducted frequent walk-and-talk meetings with maintenance and laundry managers to identify a starting point.

Since our machines are older, we decided we should determine their energy consumption first. To start the process, we had our local electricity provider complete an audit. It conducted a weeklong audit of our usage and compared peak vs. non-peak times. Through these findings, we learned which equipment was pulling the highest amperage and then made proactive decisions to determine what we could do to conserve.

After the audit was complete, we reviewed all of our older equipment that was wasting the most energy. The most energy-consuming piece of equipment turned out to be a 50-hp air compressor, and, unfortunately, we have two of them in place. In an effort to reduce this waste, we purchased a new 25-hp motor, changed the pulleys and reduced the overall amps being used.

Some may ask why we didn’t purchase a new, energy-efficient compressor. We believe in saving first and purchasing newer equipment after all other options have been exhausted.

For example, we had a 900-pound Ellis washer that had such a hard start-up and used so many amps that it continuously caused problems. We implemented today’s technology and installed a soft-start invert drive. This dramatically reduced our daily amps and allowed room on our circuit breaker to install more equipment on our two different power sources. This method of resolution has proven successful in our operation.

In addition to modifying equipment to conserve energy, we also found that by utilizing our skylights as a natural light source, we were able to reduce the number of hours a day that our overhead lights are on. With the generous amount of sunlight that we have in New Mexico, we tapped into this natural resource. The additional natural light encourages more positive production out of our employees than working under bright fluorescent lighting. To take this a step further, we are installing photocells on our fixtures to automatically reduce lighting usage.

The next energy-saving effort we will focus on is a system for reclaiming water. We have grown significantly over the last few years, and have learned that this system will be a vital contributor for cost savings and water preservation. We are in the process of researching this method to determine our future implementation efforts.

Conserving energy can be as easy as wrapping and insulating lines or identifying and repairing all leaking water and air valves. Enlisting your local energy service provider to provide audits of your current consumption can give you a better understanding of your usage and allow you to easily identify waste. Empowering your team to conserve and promote awareness of energy waste can improve the success of your efforts. Education and implementation is the best way to reduce our industry’s carbon footprint and benefit the environment, but it also can assist in reducing our collective bottom lines.

Check back tomorrow for Part 2!

NEW YORK – Manufacturers of laundry machinery, textiles and chemicals reported renewed interest in their products from the hotel industry at the 96th annual International Hotel, Motel+Restaurant Show (IHMRS) here in November.

Exhibitors at the Jacob Javits Convention Center on Manhattan’s West Side expressed satisfaction with increased foot traffic at the show. Attendance peaked at 23,953, up 2,800 from the previous year, including managers and executives from major hotel chains and independent properties, according to show management.

The show provided manufacturers of textiles and formulators of chemicals with an opportunity to tailor their products to the hotel industry.

Standard Textile Co. targeted the high end with a new line of sheets, dubbed “Luxury That Endures,” developed in collaboration with Todd-Avery Lenahan, a hospitality designer. Pre-laundered and room-ready, the sheets are designed to withstand the harsh environments of central laundries. A high-end visual appearance combines with a tensile strength of 117 pounds to create a more durable luxury product, according to Greg Eubanks, group vice president for hospitality sales and marketing at Standard Textile.

“The traffic and interest at our booth has been fantastic,” says Eubanks.

Several manufacturers, among them Riegel and Cintas Corp., exhibited new earth-friendly, eco-conscious products for the hotel industry.

Riegel, a division of Mount Vernon Mills, drew interest with its RieNu line of recycled polyester table linen, made from recycled plastic bottles, otherwise destined for landfills. The use of one of its table napkins eliminates three plastic bottles from landfills, the company says. Riegel offered the table linen in five colors at the show.

“We believe there’s a great deal of pent-up demand in the hotel industry,” says W.H. Rogers, vice president of Riegel. “We’re hoping that will be reflected in the new budgets for hotels in 2012.”

Cintas was among 10 exhibitors who received Editors’ Choice Awards during the opening ceremonies at the show for best new products within the categories of design, equipment and supplies, and green guest amenities. The company was recognized for its Eco Cobra Jacket, an eco-friendly garment option for bellmen, doormen and other front-door hotel professionals, and the latest product within the company’s EcoGeneration™ collection.

Cintas also drew interest with the industry’s first machine-washable tuxedo, which is partially composed of recycled polyester, made from recycled plastic bottles. The company partners with Boardroom Eco Apparel and its mills to take discarded plastic bottles and transform them into recycled fibers. The process breaks bottles down into flakes; from those flakes, a filament is extruded, which is spun into yarn. The plastic-formulated yarn is then woven into a fabric to create the tuxedos. After use, the tuxedos can be tossed into a standard washer and dryer. The company estimates that the machine-washable tuxedos can save hotels up to $1,000 per employee annually.

The hotel industry is also demanding a broader palette of colors in table linen for its facilities, according to Elizabeth Barrett, associate brand manager for Procter and Gamble, makers of the color-safe Tide Professional Laundry System. “There’s definitely a trend toward the use of more color,” says Barrett.

Ecolab, a maker of laundry chemicals, also attracted an increase in floor traffic at the show. “This show was much better than the show two years ago,” says Jim Moore, assistant vice president for corporate accounts. “We’ve met with hoteliers from all over the world.”

Mercedes Benz USA, a Daimler Company, made its first appearance at the show with an exhibit of three vans, including the Sprinter Cargo Van. The diesel-powered van offers payload capacity of up to 5,358 pounds, 547 cubic feet of cargo space, and a standing height of 6 feet 4 inches.

The IHMRS will return to New York on Nov. 10-13, 2012.

Click here for Part 1.

PHILADELPHIA — ARAMARK Uniform Services (AUS) is rolling out 25 hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) into its national fleet and anticipates having 78 hybrid step vans motoring along its service routes in 28 states by spring.

ARAMARK says it is the first commercial uniform supplier to introduce HEVs. The launch was made possible by a $2.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Maryland Clean Cities Program, which is dedicated to stimulating alternative fuel and advanced technology in the transportation sector.

HAYWARD, Calif. — Western State Design, a full-service commercial laundry equipment distributor, will convert an existing 50,000-square-foot building here into a state-of-the-art commercial laundry for sale or lease to an operator, the company says.

The building site encompasses 3.87 acres and includes a 14,000-square-foot enclosed service yard. It is strategically located for effective distribution throughout Northern California.

ASHTABULA, Ohio — Laundry cart manufacturer Meese Orbitron Dunne Co. (MOD) has introduced a program that recycles the plastic from old laundry carts, the company reports. Under the program, MOD accepts old laundry carts with the purchase of new carts and recycles the plastic material for use in the manufacture of new carts, laundry trucks and bulk containers.

I read with interest your article in the June 2009 issue of American Laundry News titled Define criteria for ragging out linen, then train staff to recognize signs, take action. There were many excellent points brought up by your Panel of Experts.

I feel that you missed an opportunity to suggest to your readers that they should consider selling their discards to a reputable wiping cloth company.

“My budget has been cut, and I’ve got to find ways to keep my costs down. Can you suggest operational changes I can make to cut or at least control costs without having to purchase anything or cause a major upheaval in my laundry?”

Consulting: Tom Mara, Victor Kramer Co., Oceanport, N.J.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The American Hotel & Lodging Association (AH&LA) launched its green strategy at a recent board of directors meeting. The strategy focuses on minimum environmental guidelines culled from 88 overall guidelines targeting effective energy, water and waste management.

The guidelines will be continuously added and built upon, with the next set focusing on design and construction, materials and resources, chemicals and cleaning, and indoor air quality.

“What ‘green’ laundry products are available for my operation? Are they truly ‘green’ or ‘environmentally friendly’? What’s the difference? I hear the term applied most often to chemicals, but can’t equipment or textiles carry that description, too?”

Textile/Uniform Rental: Steve Kallenbach, American Dawn, Los Angeles, Calif.