Running a hotel or restaurant can be an incredibly difficult undertaking. Research shows that the vast majority of restaurants close within their first year of opening, and it’s not much easier to run a hotel either. Most hotels do not survive more than a few years. Hotels and restaurants both tend to close because they have such high overhead. The overhead is the amount of money you need to spend to just do business.
For example, a hotel needs to hire a staff, pay all of its taxes, pay utilities, launder their linens every day, and a pay whole host of other costs that tend to recur. These are the overhead costs of running a hotel. If you are just opening a hotel or restaurant, or if you are trying to stay afloat, you may have to borrow money to fund these overhead costs. This means that you’ll have to make a significant amount of money before you can ever begin turning a profit. In order to reduce some of their overhead cost, many restaurants and hotels choose to hire their linens from a linen service.
Hiring Your Linens
Hiring your linens from a linen service is a great choice if you have economic concerns about your business. When you are buying and laundering your own linens, you are spending a lot of money each month that you don’t need to spend. First, you have to pay for the linens themselves. Then, you have to pay the costs of laundering the linens every day. Finally, you have to pay to replace the linens frequently because of the frequent use and laundering. This means that you have high initial costs as well as high maintenance costs. These costs are also unpredictable, as you never know how many washes a set of linens can withstand before it begins to fray.
If you hire commercial laundry services in the UK, you can stabilise your expenses. You will know exactly how much you’ll have to spend every month on your linens, and you won’t have to worry about the price fluctuating. Also, you won’t have to worry about laundering or replacing your linens, as you’ll get fresh linens every time they are delivered. That is an economic benefit, but it also has considerable environmental benefits.
Environmental Benefits
There are many environmental benefits of hiring linen services. Laundry services consume resources in a few ways; they use water to wash the linens, obviously. Also, they use some kind of energy source to heat the water and run the washing machines. Finally, they use an energy source to produce the drying heat and spin the dryers. The chemicals used in cleaning can also have a deleterious effect on the environment. However, there are many different ways to avoid these outcomes.
Large linen companies have done a considerable amount of research to find out the perfect amount of water needed to wash linens. Domestic machines and even most commercial machines are not calibrated that carefully. They are designed to fill up the tub of the washer with water; they’re not designed with the actual linens in mind.
For example, a prominent linen hire service recently committed to a climate agreement that would reduce its emissions by over 25% by the year 2020. One of the ways in which they are achieving that goal is by reducing their water use by 27%. Research found that they were using 27% more water than was absolutely necessary to get linens clean. They are now reducing the amount of water used, which in turn also reduces the amount of energy needed to heat the water—less water needs less heat, obviously.
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When the linen service consumes less water, it consumes less energy. Since so much electricity is still produced by coal-fired power plants, using less electricity will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Natural gas produces a lot of the heat for washing machines, and natural gas is another fossil fuel. Though much cleaner than coal, natural gas still emits harmful carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Cleaning Chemicals
Since large linen services have the necessary resources, they can do research into the minimal amount of resources needed to get their linens clean. They do this because it is the environmentally-friendly thing to do. However, they are also a business, and using fewer resources saves them money. Similarly, they have found that environmentally-friendly chemicals are actually more efficient in many respects than some other chemicals that have long been used.
The environmentally-friendly chemicals are typically natural bases and acids that have been honed and refined. They are gentle on the actual linens, which means that the linens will last through more washes. Also, since these chemicals are natural, they tend to break down when they go to wastewater treatment facilities—they break down into their natural components and are harmless.
That makes it easier for wastewater treatment facilities to treat the water and allows them to consume fewer natural resources to treat the water. This only compounds the environmental benefits from the linen service itself.
The Basics
Basically, the environmental benefits of using a professional linen service revolve around their own self-interest. A linen company wants to do right by its customers and by the environment, but their biggest motivation is usually their profits. Fortunately, being more environmentally-friendly is also the most economically viable choice for a linen company. Using less water and less heat will save them money while also helping the environment. They can then pass those savings onto you. Using naturally-occurring cleaning chemicals saves money because they require less laboratory processing to create.
These companies also use more efficient machines with bigger washing tubs. Research has found that the amount of water and resources needed to clean linens does not increase proportionally with the amount of linens being washed. For example, if it requires ten litres of water to clean ten linens, it does not require twenty litres of water to clean twenty linens. Therefore, utilising larger washing tubs with more space will use far fewer resources than simply washing multiple loads of linens. That results in economic and environmental savings. You will be able to get clean linens for less money, while also helping the environment.
If you want to keep your overhead cost low and predictable while doing the environmentally-friendly thing, you should choose a professional linen service with a commitment to the environment.