MATERIAL SOLUTIONS
Technical support for the small laundry
Small laundries, unlike their larger industrial relatives, receive very little technical support says Richard Neale of LTC Worldwide, who looks at what they are missing out on
mall commercial and on-premises laundries (OPL) in care homes, schools, residential centres and hotels receive very little (if any) routine technical support. Larger laundries rely heavily on their chemicals suppliers for troubleshooting and updating their processes to take advantage of the latest technology. Where is the mechanism for the startling advances of the last 15 years to be encouraged and implemented in the small laundry sector? What are they missing out on?
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Radical changes in five key areas have enabled massive improvements in quality, turnover and operating costs since 2010. This month we look at how the large contract launderers and textile rental operators have seized the opportunities
now available and what the small laundry sector needs to do to catch up.
Disinfection
Around 2010, the UK’s National Health Service changed its specification for disinfection requirement for healthcare textiles from implied thermal disinfection to allowing alternative methods, providing these were backed up by justified assurance that disinfection was actually being achieved. This opened the way for low temperature disinfection agents in the wash chemistry, and assurance systems that met the requirements of the European Norme and international standard, BS EN ISO 14065:2016. Ability to meet this standard has become a key entry requirement into the UK healthcare market. Interestingly, it was large private sector firms which led this transition, enabling them (and the NHS) to achieve significant reductions in carbon footprint and operating costs. These advantages have not yet been replicated in the small laundry and on-premises
laundry sectors, partly because of the expertise needed to implement the EN 14065 standard in a cost-effective way. Any small laundry processing small lots for doctors’ and dentists’ surgeries, pharmacies, chiropodists and so on are probably already required to disinfect both uniforms and flatwork. This requirement could well extend to small hotels and guesthouses in the future. Anyone still heating these washes up to 71C and holding this for 3 minutes plus mixing time is almost certainly wasting energy, profit and processing time. There are now proven disinfectants which require only 40C and now is the time to make the switch and ozone has been successfully in use in the care sector for many years. If a customer asks for proof of disinfection, or compliance with EN14065, get a copy of the standard and read it. It is reasonably intelligible, as standards go. You will need written procedures, a simple mechanism for checking in-house on say a weekly basis that disinfection is effective and more thorough accurate and checks on a quarterly basis and annual certification. None of this is likely to be prohibitively expensive or difficult. Once you have certification, you can use this as a sales aid, both for healthcare customers (who should definitely require it) and for hospitality customers (who really ought to require it).
Textile life
ACCEPTED STANDARD: This widely recognised standard for assured disinfection is not that difficult to implement
Large rental laundries, operating with pool stocks of just a few classifications, have long recognised the need to manage textile life and have led the way with either well controlled use of sodium hypochlorite or transition to oxygen bleaches. This has reduced significantly the cost of textile injections into each pool, causing quite a few surprises. Modern wash processes are designed with progressive chemical damage low enough to permit at least 200 wash and use cycles, and some careful launderers have achieved between 300 and
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