On Sept. 13, members of the Wisconsin Association of Textile Services (WATS) gathered at The Edgewater Resort in Madison, WI, for the organization’s Annual Conference.

City Uniforms & Linen, Findlay, OH, recently completed the acquisition of Knox Textiles, Edgerton, OH. Knox has provided clothing rental services and janitorial products to customers in Ohio, Northeast Indiana and Southern Michigan since 1936.

Greg Shames, the vice president of operations at American Textile Maintenance, Los Angeles, recently was featured in an article in Family Business magazine. The article is titled, “NextGens to Watch 2023.”

To continue building support for the Healthcare Worker Safety and Sustainability Act, AB 6995, TRSA’s Vice President of Government Relations Kevin Schwalb met with New York Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D) to discuss the importance of the legislation.

Scott Garula recently was promoted to president & COO of the Rental Division at Cintas Corp., Mason, OH. Garula steps into the role vacated when Jim Rozakis advanced to executive vice president & COO at Cintas.

Additional recent headlines from consumer media of interest to linen, uniform and facility services operators, and especially readers of Textile Services Weekly.

Most U.S. outsourced laundries profit more from hotels by servicing their customer-owned goods (COG) than renting linen to them. A Sept. 27 TRSA webinar will explain how the reverse can be true. Participants will hear from experienced U.K. hotel laundry specialists whose customers have preferred rental for decades and a U.S. operator who has 90% of its hotel volume in rental.

TRSA’s recently released Industry Performance Report shows some financial indicators improving above pre-COVID levels, while healthcare is still recovering with profit margin, return-on-net-worth and return-on-assets trends. Using 2022 financial data collected from TRSA members on a confidential basis and compiled by the MacKay Research Group, Boulder, CO, the TRSA report is the only industrywide research report that enables operators to compare their income statements, balance sheets, and financial and employee productivity ratios.

Anytime a safety incident occurs in a plant – including ‘near misses’ – laundry operators have a moral duty, as well as a legal obligation, to investigate what happened and why. Then they must take steps to prevent the incident from recurring. That’s the essence of a forthcoming article in Textile Services magazine on how companies can uncover the root causes of safety mishaps in a laundry operation and take steps to mitigate them.

Kemco Systems, Clearwater, FL, announced today that it has been acquired by CECO Environmental Corp., a Dallas-based company that serves the industrial air and water and energy-transition markets worldwide. Kemco will join CECO’s industrial water group, according to a news release.