Consulting Services: Mike Tatch, Tatch Technical Services, Randolph, N.J.
I do think plant safety has changed. The updated machinery incorporates enhanced safety features designed to safeguard operators, including limit switches, safety bars, and electronic sensors.
However, the newer machinery requires more qualified maintenance technicians, especially regarding safety. An example would be clearing a jam in a wash tunnel, which requires specialized training, including rescue, or repairing conveyors, sling bags, and bag elevators that make fall prevention and protection more important than ever.
Linen Supply: Dyan Troxel, HandCraft Linen Services, Richmond, Va.
Laundry plant safety has improved dramatically thanks to automation, smarter machines and data‑driven monitoring systems. These advancements help prevent accidents before they occur.
Historically, one of the biggest sources of injury has been manual handling. Automation has reduced high-risk manual tasks, which can help reduce repetitive motion injuries and ergonomic strains. While automation has significantly improved efficiency, it requires that we review and provide more complex lockout/tagout requirements.
Newer equipment is developed with safety in mind. These new safety features, such as interlocks, emergency stops, light curtains, and additional guarding systems, are being built into modern equipment, helping prevent access to moving parts and reducing injury potential.
Data analytics help track machine performance, near misses and maintenance needs. These online platforms use real-time data to predict problems before they happen. The predictive insights enable quick responses, reduce downtime, and prevent unsafe machine failures.
Safety protocols should be reviewed annually at a minimum. Extra reviews could be added after incidents, with equipment changes, or after regulatory updates to stay compliant and reduce risk.
Textiles: Lenore Law, Alliance Textile Solutions, Corona, Calif.
While safety was not always important in the commercial laundry business, it has become the most important thing in the plants.
Whether it’s an industrial plant or a linen plant, a hospital plant or a hotel plant, whether it’s an all-rental plant or a COG (customer-owned goods) plant, safety is front and center and has been for at least the past 25 years.
With workers’ compensation insurance costs skyrocketing, education about accidents and plant safety has become extremely important. Whether it’s a smaller laundry or a large multi-plant laundry, safety and proper training are extremely important.
As we advance into more technological plants and environments, safety within the plants will be even more important, as there will still have to be people to program the robotics and also work side by side with the robots.
As equipment like washers and dryers shifts to tunnel washers in a lot of plants, there are many more places where people can be hurt if something goes wrong. Working alongside all the tunnel washers are more conveyors and equipment overhead, as many plants only have room to go up versus out since they have no more land to expand in, especially within certain states.
New plants are being built that have a lot more technology in them, so more training will be necessary for all the technology to be coordinated, combining old with new. Again, safety will be even more important going forward.
On the COG hotel side, they will have a large laundry that washes most of their items, and those laundries will incorporate lots of safety. But a hotel can also have an older, small, more outdated laundry to wash seasonal product or special items that its large COG laundry doesn’t handle all of the time. These smaller hospital and hotel laundries will still need to incorporate safety training, as there still are smaller boilers and places where people can get hurt easily.
Going forward, whether a small laundry or a large laundry, safety will always be front and center, the most important thing. Many large laundries are now using electric trucks and vehicles, and that also needs to be incorporated into safety training.
While we are shrinking in terms of companies within our industry, we are expanding in technology. With that comes more ways to be injured, so training will be an ongoing process going forward as an industry.
We will need more people skilled in safety training and from human resources and with OSHA backgrounds so that people not only get trained internally but come with degrees to help our industry grow properly amidst all of the technological changes. We will need more policies and procedures for maintaining equipment handling soiled linen and working in smaller confined spaces.
Going forward, our industry will be on the map as a great career choice.
Check back tomorrow for the conclusion with safety insights from commercial laundry and chemicals supply experts.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].
