Our friends at Laundry and Cleaning Today recently asked our technical director Paul Hamilton for his thoughts on the life of linen. This is what he said:

The environmental cost of commercial linen use is concentrated in its beginning and end.

The beginning here means its manufacture – and the vast quantities of water and energy associated with this. Harmful chemicals used are a whole other story.

The end is the disposal of unwanted textiles at the termination of their life cycle – and as an industry, laundries are becoming keenly aware of our sector’s contribution to the UK’s textile waste problem, arguably now as much as 3,264 kilotonnes per year.

By comparison, the part in between – the bit where linens are actively in use – is much lighter on the world’s resources, leading us to think of ingenious ways of prolonging this to avoid the frequency and volume of beginnings and endings.

The sad truth is that, according to our sector’s representative, the Textile Services Association, a woeful 55% of hospitality linen is discarded before it is six months old.

The good news, however, is that there are solutions out there – and such wasteful habits do not need to endure.

So long as bedding, towels, workwear and tableware is not ripped or torn – that’s another conundrum, in need of ingenious thought – the key reason for condemning linen is that it has become discoloured, marked or stained.

If linen has simply worn out after being washed, washed and washed again, then this is a good use of such stock. We don’t pretend items can last forever – though of course there is a myriad of use for them once they are no longer fit to grace a hotel bedroom, bathroom, dining hall or staff member. Again, this is a separate issue.

Unhappily for laundry managers and the planet, though, often such pieces do not pass inspection long before they become threadbare.

Regenex has two rescue solutions to get that linen back into stock – cleaning and dyeing. As white bedding and towels prevails as every hotel’s favourite choice, Regenex customers ask for much more cleaning than dyeing.

Our gentle multi-bath process based on textile chemistry opens fibres to lift the heaviest and dirtiest stains with a success rate of up to 80%. More than 20 UK laundries are now calling upon us regularly to revive lorryloads of linen, resulting in both costs and carbon footprints lowered.

Our second solution is dyeing, or overdyeing. This solves problems with marks, discoloration and fading, long before an item has worn out.

Regnex can dye lacklustre white items in a range of rich colours, for all sorts of hotel and spa use, or simply top up colour that is already there, for example for washed-out black chef uniforms or faded polyester tablecloths.