Tomorrow’s Cleaning Ireland asked our technical director Paul Hamilton to provide a longer read about the current challenges of the laundry sector and what can be done to offset them. Here are his thoughts in full.

Times are hard for the hospitality and laundry sectors with the rising cost of absolutely everything from utilities to staffing, and stock to fuel. The price of essentials sometimes creeps, at other times rockets. It may level off, but it doesn’t go down.

On top of that, there is the increasing difficulty of just throwing anything away, with the forthcoming ‘polluter pays principle’ of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR).

This will place the whole cost of managing textile waste onto one operator in the supply chain – usually the importer, or the brand, or in this case the company that buys and holds the linen stock. In other words, a major additional expense at a time when finances are already stretched.

Our tough trading climate begs the question, what can we do to help ourselves? The answer, as ever, is tighten up on operations. Don’t waste anything. I have two key ideas to think about. The first focuses on staff, the second on resources.

Staffing makes up 40% of a laundry’s costs so why are we wasting time processing ‘bad’ linen?

At Regenex, we work across Ireland and the UK, and we regularly see smart laundry businesses with systems and processes clogged up with substandard linen.

The UK Textile Services Association’s cost index produced once a quarter is always a yardstick for the sector’s fortunes and a notable figure in the latest round is the huge increase in labour costs.

These have risen by 28.4% over the last three years, due to factors including necessary wage increases, and continue to make up the single biggest operating cost for any contract laundry group at 40% of expenditure.

People are every laundry’s greatest asset, and we want to pay them as well as we can. We can all agree that humans are precious. So why are so many laundries frittering staff time on linen that will not reach client standards?

Continued processing of non-conformance linen, to be ultimately discarded, carries a significant cost – especially when the expense of transporting sub-standard pieces, and further staff time among housekeepers tasked with sorting and rejecting them, is factored in.

Yet we can see how this happens. Wasteful practice is easy overlook. A couple of towels here and there won’t make a huge difference but let’s not forget the TSA’s own figures that 55% of hospitality linen is discarded before it is six months old.

So, unsuitable stock is clogging up laundry systems – causing an additional drain on fuel, water, energy and chemicals – at a time when the sector, and indeed the planet, can ill afford it.

Yet who can blame management for trying to keep linen out of the bin, in the hope of inhouse rescue and revival, when the cost of textiles – 15% of a CLG’s outlay – has gone up 4.94% in the past 12 months?

Savvy operators have hit upon an answer to this. More and more are carefully isolating marked or greying linen and sending it to Regenex. ‘Bad’ linen is only bad until we make it good again, using methods that ‘kill or cure’ is no match for.

Regenex applies colour chemistry to lift the heaviest of stains – be they food, fake tan, rust, mould or anything else – before inspecting each batch, repurposing anything we cannot clean, and returning only 100% serviceable items.

So with Regenex on board, precious employees are able to focus their efforts on up-to-standard linen, saving time and resources – and much less stock goes to rag or landfill.

Don’t waste any resources: The new thriftiness pervading the laundry world

As you will know, laundry owners and managers are turning their attention to EPR, or extended producer responsibility – the EU legislation that’s progressing fast and certain to prompt HUGE change for any business that deals in textiles.

You are perhaps aware that EPR is an amendment to the EU Waste Framework Directive (WFD) currently moving through the legislative processes.

When it’s implemented, operators will be billed for the costs associated with the end-of-life management of products. We are yet to find out what those costs might be. But the good intention to support circularity by cutting textile waste cannot easily be argued with.

Greater financial consequences of sending waste to landfill will be yet another incentive for laundries, hospitality providers, healthcare organisations and others to focus on binning far less – and put robust sustainability principles into everyday practice.

We’ve talked for years at Regenex about the wonder of thrift and thriftiness, the art of getting the most out of every precious bedsheet or pillowcase. Now this concept is moving into a sharper and more immediate focus.

At some point in the near-ish future, collection, sorting, recycling and disposal of all textiles in Europe will be chargeable. A final draft of the new rules is expected soon, then EU member states will have 18 months to set up their own schemes.

Forward-thinking laundries are seeing EPR as an opportunity rather than a threat – simply another driver to conserve resources and operate as ethically as possible. Saving money of course is a welcome benefit too effect of buying less stock and extending its lifespan.

Regenex has been in business for almost seven years now. In that time, we’ve seen attitudes to looking after resources – linen in particular – change rapidly.

Laundry owners and managers used to ‘do their duty’ for the environment by recycling old textiles for rag, rather than sending them straight to landfill.

But this attitude seems very old fashioned, heading into 2025, as the business world rightly demands ever-more stringent standards. Recycling properly is no longer the default treatment for waste material.

While recycling still has a place in the management of waste, it should not be a first-choice solution for textiles that would still be fit for purpose, were they not stained or discoloured.

Re-use is a far preferable concept. After not using the earth’s resources to manufacture something at all, re-using that item for as long as possible is the next best option.

From a carbon reduction point of view, re-use lowers the need for new textiles, in line with the Hierarchy of Waste Management’s cautioning against unnecessary manufacture.

Re-use also cuts down on thirsty recycling processes which themselves require another round of water, and carbon emissions. This part of the puzzle is often forgotten about by companies who are proud of their careful waste disposal methods.

As well as boosting environmental credentials, keeping the same stock in circulation for much longer leads to a month-to-month reduction in outgoings – particularly welcome amid the hard times I alluded to at the start of the article.

So, in conclusion, efficiency with staff time and thriftiness with resources – solid edicts for any business – will serve hard-pressed laundries well in the months and years ahead.

• Regenex can revive up to 80% of heavily marked or discoloured linen as long as it is not ripped or torn. Call Paul Hamilton on 07795 693345 or email paulhamilton@bulmerandlumb.com to find out more.