Linen and Disposable Textiles
With everything that goes into running a hospital or healthcare facility today, it’s easy to overlook the importance of textiles. However, textiles are essential to providing quality healthcare. From bed linen to patient gowns to lab coats to surgical items, textiles are everywhere in the healthcare industry.
According to the 2005 Comparative Operating Revenues and Expense Profile for the Healthcare Textile Maintenance Industry, hospitals with more than 300 beds use between 21 and 22 pounds of textiles per patient day. This equates to more than 2 million pounds of laundry for a typical 300-bed hospital. As an alternative, some hospitals and healthcare facilities use disposable products. However, these products cannot be re-used and sometimes must be treated as hazardous waste.
As you can imagine from the volume, textile goods – both linen and disposable – have a significant environmental and fiscal impact on healthcare organizations. Administrators looking to reduce the amount of waste generated by their facilities, improve their environmental footprint and strengthen financial sustainability should closely examine how its uses and processes textiles and when it decides to use disposable products.
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What is the environmental impact of using linen?
Reusable healthcare textiles affect a facilities environmental footprint in a number of ways:
- Merchandise: Are you buying or renting eco-friendly products when available?
- Water: How much water does it take to wash a pound of linen?
- Fuel & Electricity: How much natural gas, oil and electricity does it take to process linen?
- Chemicals: What is the environmental impact of chemicals being used to launder your linen?
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What is the environmental impact of using disposables?
Disposable products used as an alternative to textile goods also have an impact on the environment:
- Material: Is the material used to manufacture the disposable product made of recycled material?
- Water: How much water does it take to manufacture the disposable product?
- Fuel & Electricity: How much natural gas, oil and electricity does it take to manufacture the disposable product?
- Chemicals: How much chemicals does it take to manufacture the disposable product and what chemicals are used in the process?
- Waste: How much solid waste and how much hazardous waste does the disposable product produce when it is thrown away?
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What is the fiscal impact of linen and disposable textile use?
The choices administrators make regarding linen and disposable products use will affect the organization’s bottom line. Consider these costs:
- On-Premise Laundry: If you operate an on-premise laundry, are you accounting for all of the costs necessary to run that facility, including all labor, benefit, water, energy and merchandise costs?
- Storage Space: How much space in the facility is reserved for storing reusable and disposable products? Can that space be reduced and used for revenue generation activities either by improving control of textile inventory or reducing the amount of disposable products in use?
- Outsourcing: If you are operating an on-premise laundry, what savings would you realize by outsourcing and converting the laundry to revenue-generation space?
- Disposable of Solid Waste/Hazardous Waste: How much does it cost per ton to remove disposable product solid and hazardous waste?
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Managing Linen Services and Disposables
Administrators and managers can use this Web site to determine the impact of using linen and disposable products in their operations. This site is divided into three main sections, each containing resources to help healthcare facilities improve its environmental footprint and improve its fiscal position:
Reusables vs. Disposables
This section provides comparisons of linen and disposable products. It illustrates the true environmental and fiscal cost of using disposable products.
Improving Efficiency in Healthcare Laundries
Material in this section helps operators determine if their healthcare laundry is using water, energy and chemicals efficiently, and provides tips and processes to enhance efficiency. It also addresses how to properly care and use textiles in hospitals to prevent loss.
Outsourcing Linen Services
This area provides materials to compare the cost and environmental impact of processing linen in-house versus outsourcing, plus it also provides look at the textile services industry and its environmental record.
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H2E and TRSA
This Web page is the result of a partnership between H2E and the Textile Rental Services Association of America (TRSA). It is designed to provide healthcare organization information on healthcare textiles and laundering. H2E and TRSA have joined together to increase the education about the environmental and fiscal impact of reusable and disposable textile products.
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What is TRSA?
 TRSA represents for-profit textile services companies. TRSA has more than 175 corporate members with more than 1,000 facilities in 20 countries. TRSA members provide healthcare services to hospitals and healthcare facilities of all sizes; linen supply services to restaurants, hotels and hospitality businesses; industrial uniform and image apparel to a wide-variety of industries using uniforms; and dust control products (mats, mops, restroom supplies, etc.) to all types of business.
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