How Sustainable Practices Can Transform Laundries

DENVER — We hear about environmental friendliness and energy efficiency across the business landscape and everyday life (just look at the high-efficiency label on your home washing machine).

Every industry recognizes the value of sustainability for cost savings, increased efficiency, and responsible stewardship—but laundry businesses face unique challenges.

Let’s explore how to navigate the path to sustainability and transform your laundry operations.

ENERGY EFFICIENCY CHALLENGES FOR LAUNDRY COMPANIES

The most significant energy efficiency challenges for laundry companies usually fall into two buckets: optimizing existing systems and technologies and installing new equipment to offset consumption.

You can deploy holistic solutions to achieve your operational goals.

Efficiency Solutions—Solving for sustainability comes down to balancing two things: conservation (using less energy) and efficiency (using equipment more efficiently).

If we look back, LED lighting was the trailblazer for efficiency, but laundries have more opportunities to choose from today.

High-performance industrial laundry machines run long hours, using substantial electricity and power. With the right improvements, a business can boost sustainability and safety, reduce power usage, enhance work conditions, and improve quality control.

Additionally, investing in solar energy can offset electricity consumption. Rooftop solar installations offset up to 50% of electricity consumption per year, and some states offer incentives to fund these projects.

Solution Spotlight—Because Cintas handles delicate products, energy efficiency is vital—from using the best equipment to reducing energy consumption. So, Cintas partnered with Redaptive to retrofit 115 of its 475 locations—7.2 million square feet—with LED lighting on its way to hitting net zero by 2050.

The project yielded outstanding results, including:

$2.2 million annual gross savings.
An 18.7 million annual decrease in kilowatt-hours.
An annual decrease of 7,000 tons of CO2e.

By partnering with Redaptive, Cintas improved its lighting efficiency and elevated morale and safety by providing work environments that help employees focus.

Funding Solutions—Customized financing programs give you the resources to tackle large efficiency projects with best-in-class partnerships and interim funding.

The right partner can support energy efficiency upgrades across your laundry business, such as:

Energy-as-a-Service Solutions: For lighting, HVAC, equipment upgrades and alternative power generation.
Equipment Financing: Traditional leases and loans for new and used equipment.

Avoid large capital outlays, access multiple funding mechanisms and bypass hidden costs with usage-based, savings-based or fixed-payment funding options.

Data Collection—Leverage energy data to enhance sustainability reporting and performance analysis. By leaning on expert tools and partner support for reporting, your laundry business can dig into utility data for metered assets, compare performance with industry benchmarks, report Scope 1 and 2 emissions, and more.

Plus, it’s easier to:

Monitor progress.
Identify efficiency opportunities.
Assess a project’s environmental impact.
Verify cost savings.

Collecting and analyzing such information can help your business identify cost savings and develop a roadmap toward net zero.

OVERCOMING SUSTAINABILITY ROADBLOCKS

Prioritizing sustainability is challenging for many laundry companies. Making equipment and infrastructure upgrades may reduce energy consumption, but the added costs of these upgrades are often a roadblock to meeting sustainability goals.

The struggle? Balancing operations with cash-flow-positive projects you can accredit to the bottom line and use to move toward sustainability targets.

Turn the Ship Around—As pressure mounts from investors and shareholders, changing course is like trying to turn the Titanic around right before you hit the iceberg. Many of today’s businesses plan to go net zero, but the roadmap to get there isn’t always clear.

Inefficient equipment loses money, kilowatt hours and sustainability. But if you have limited sustainability staff to oversee projects across hundreds, thousands or millions of square feet, improvements can be slow going.

Such inaction can come off as greenwashing, but the right strategy can help a business accomplish its goals at scale quickly. Installing efficient equipment with a little help improves cost savings and sustainability progress.

FINANCIAL PAINS PUT A STAIN ON SUSTAINABILITY INITIATIVES

Laundry services need to understand the savings potential of sustainability efforts. Being up against limited budgets and personnel shortages to manage projects often clouds the bigger picture, but both are easy to overcome with support.

Laundries often fall short in one or more areas required for large-scale projects:

Expertise.
Funding.
Manpower.

Unlock New Funding Sources—Alone, your budget may run out, but partnering with the right organization can provide virtually unlimited funding to improve sustainability.

Instead of capital on a balance sheet, partner money goes as an operating expense, just like a utility bill.

For instance, smart metering measures usage and savings reflected by variable monthly billing so it can be treated as an off-balance sheet expense.

Increase Manpower and Expertise—Laundries with multiple locations often struggle with limited manpower or bandwidth when a project requires engineers and procurement support across their portfolio.

This becomes a double-edged sword because without people to develop projects, you don’t have a project to finance.

But doing more with less or pressing pause on your efforts aren’t your only options. Supportive partnerships can help you manage and implement projects and make sustainability achievable.

Working with a strategic financial partner presents significant monetary and energy savings opportunities for laundries.

Rapid scalability and deferred payments help your business shift from being able to handle a few projects a year to many projects and reach sustainability goals sooner—just by borrowing labor and money, which can be paid back with the energy savings generated.

ELEVATE YOUR SUSTAINABILITY WITH EXPERT RESOURCES

Is sustainability shifting into focus? Improving your laundry business’s efficiency is possible, whether you need help with funding, manpower, expertise—or all three.

The missing piece is finding the right partner that offers all the services and support you need, from fully funded project and program management to proven performance and bottom-line results you can see firsthand.

As a result, you’ll enjoy increased efficiency and cost savings for your laundry operations—all while being a friend to the environment in the process.