How to Get Your Linens Their "Greenest"

Crothall Laundry Services leads the industry in environmentally responsible practices.

Hospitals can greatly reduce their environmental impact through the decisions they make with regard to laundry processing. In many ways, Laundry is at the forefront of the healthcare industry in Green initiatives, and some technologies, once considered revolutionary, are now standard practice.

Standard Laundry Technologies

Tunnel Washers

Since their introduction 40 years ago, tunnel (or continuous batch) washers have offered a way to significantly reduce water consumption. This technology can reduce the volume of water used to clean one pound of soiled linen from 3.0 (conventional washing processes) to 1.5 gallons. While the purchase price can be expensive, the investment quickly pays for itself in water, energy, and chemical reduction.

Heat Reclamation

Incoming fresh water enters a laundry facility at a relatively low temperature and must be heated to 150 degrees to effectively sanitize linens. Wastewater from the laundry process can be routed into a heat exchanger, through which incoming water passes, raising its temperature above 100 degrees. This significantly reduces the required energy to heat incoming water.

Crothall Innovations

Crothall is looking beyond these available technologies and implementing forward-thinking strategies through innovation and capital expenditure.

Water Utilization

At the Crothall-managed Hospital Laundry Services (HLS) facility in Wheeling, IL, engineers partnered with a chemical vendor to develop a novel approach to water reuse. Several companies offer water recycling systems that take used water, filter it, and bring it back into the wash process as fresh water. At HLS, a system was crafted to take used rinse water and excess water from linen presses and pipe it directly back to the initial wash/bleach zone of the tunnel washer, yet have enough water available for the wet-out process. This is accomplished with no reduction in cleaning quality.

This has reduced water usage at the plant by 50%, making an additional 40 million gallons per year available to the community for drinking water and sparing it from the sewer system. HLS currently uses 0.9 gallons of water per pound of linen. The plant is now taking another look at conventional recycling/filtration systems, which could cut water usage in half again, making HLS the gold standard, operating at one-third of industry benchmarks for water usage.

Plastic Recycling

Laundry processing produces a surprisingly large amount of plastic waste. Soiled linen collection bags, used to transport linen between the hospital and the laundry facility, are normally made of non-recyclable plastic, which ends up in landfills. To support Crothall Laundry Services' commitment to recycling, two alternatives are available. First, Crothall offers leak-proof, reusable, non-plastic collection bags. Second, Crothall can introduce a collection bag made from recyclable plastic. At Crothall's Clermont, Florida, facility, 90% of the waste is comprised of recyclable plastic, which represents 90 tons of material removed from the waste stream per year.

Phosphate-Free and NPE-Free Chemicals

In the 1960s, it was discovered that NPEs, powerful chemicals used in laundry detergents, were killing or mutating fish and playing havoc with the ecosystem. Producers such as P&G and Unilever voluntarily removed NPEs from home laundry products. In Europe, NPEs are prohibited in all detergents, but there is no legal ban in the U.S.

Phosphates are used in alkalis, highly effective surfactants that bond to dirt to help clean linens. They cause harm through a process called eutrophication, which deprives lakes and streams of oxygen and kills aquatic life. Like NPEs, phosphates are still permitted in the U.S.

Laundry chemicals without NPEs or phosphates are available, but their higher cost has made industrial laundries reluctant to switch. Crothall is taking the initiative by introducing non-phosphate-based alkalis and NPE-free detergents at all of its facilities.

The goal is to be the first 100% phosphate- and NPE-free healthcare laundry processor in the U.S. by December 2008.

Other Initiatives

• Crothall is researching next-generation fabrics with new weaving specifications intended to increase linen life. Early indications show the new blends may increase product life span (reducing waste) by as much as 20%.
  
  
• At HLS, fluid-proof and fluid- resistant surgical linens are laundered using state-of-the-art processes. Products are sterilized in Hi-Vacuum steam sterilizers and packaged in puncture-resistant sterility maintenance covers. An average pack of reusable textiles replaces 3 pounds of disposable medical waste, and HLS provides over 1 million packs annually. According to estimates from Practice GreenHealth (formerly H2E), this 1,500-ton reduction in waste also saves about $1.05 million in disposal fees for HLS's client hospitals.
  
  
• Linen past its usable life with respect to healthcare standards may still be usable for less quality-conscious applications. Crothall is looking for ways to recycle out-of-service linen to second-tier users.
  
  
• At University of Alabama at Birmingham, Crothall appointed a "dumpster diver" - someone who spends three hours a day sorting through the hospital's waste to find discarded linen. In 2005, the program rescued approximately $1.5 million of linen from the trash. As an added benefit, items such as recyclable cardboard and even expensive medical instruments have been recovered from dumpsters.

As a leader in the healthcare laundry industry, Crothall has a responsibility to be unselfish in its development and sharing of innovations to reduce the environmental impact of its operations. Our goal is to continue to develop revolutionary solutions, simple enough to share across the industry for the benefit of everyone.