Ergon: A ‘Fossil-Free’ Laundry for Special-Needs Staff
Plenty of laundries offer opportunities for developmentally challenged people to work in washing or finishing departments. The Ergon laundry in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, has taken this idea further than most with a high-tech “fossil-free” laundry staffed largely by people with disabilities. Textile Services Weekly toured Ergon earlier this year. Highlights follow.
You know you’re dealing with a different kind of laundry when you visit the Ergon laundry website. The first words you see when you visit the site are (using auto translation) “Nice to meet you, we are team Ergon.” Below the greeting is a question-and-answer section for organizations or individuals looking to place people with special needs in laundry jobs. The Q&A area centers on issues such as what level of “sheltered work” environment the employee needs, the finer points of Holland’s “Participation Act” designed to help people with disabilities get jobs and how candidates can apply for employment at this laundry in suburban Eindhoven, a city of roughly 250,000 people, about 85 miles northeast of Brussels.
After a brief orientation session with Ergon management, Jacco van Riessen of WSP Systems, a Netherlands-based laundry technology supplier, led this correspondent, Senior Editor Jack Morgan, on a tour of the 60,000-square-foot (5,600-square-meter plant). Other visitors included Bob Hager, president and CEO of Miller’s Textile Services Inc. Wapakoneta, OH; TRSA President and CEO Joseph Ricci; and Jim Slatcher, regional sales manager for Lavatec Laundry Technology Inc.
The Ergon facility, which receives partial funding from the Dutch government and the European Union, opened last year. It services an area within a 62-mile (100 km.) radius of the plant. The customer base is largely hospitals, clinics and long-term care homes. The laundry currently processes roughly 110,000 lbs. (50 metric tons) per week with a staff of 124 people. Unlike a for-profit laundry, the mission here is to provide productive work for people with special needs, rather than maximizing productivity. With that said, Ergon leverages technology to boost throughput, even if there is a fair amount of hand folding and other light manual labor in the plant.
Energy conservation is a key concern here, and the plant uses a combination of heat pumps, solar panels and energy recovery systems to ensure sustainable processing. Residual energy from the heat pumps also is used to cool the building, which was comfortable to walk through when we visited in early June. With the aid of its solar cells and extensive energy-reuse systems, the Ergon Laundry generates more energy than it uses in natural gas for its equipment. It is therefore considered a carbon-neutral facility.
The Ergon Laundry also makes extensive use of automation to maximize safety and efficiency for its special-needs staff. The textile goods – mostly “house linen,” i.e., flatwork sheets and towels, have radio frequency identification (RFID) tags attached to help ensure accurate deliveries. In this plant, the RFID technology also is used at various stages throughout the production process to instruct employees at each work station, van Riessen says. After sorting, goods move on a cart dumper that drops the textiles onto a conveyor that leads to a Lavatec tunnel washer on an upper level. The tunnel has 16, 132 lb. (60 kg.) modules. One interesting feature that we saw is that there are no trenches for the tunnel’s wastewater. Instead, the tunnel is raised about 15 inches from the concrete floor. The wastewater runs in pipes under the floor. It goes through a heat exchanger as part of the plant’s energy-conservation efforts. In addition, the plant relies mainly on well water for its processing needs.
After washing with laundry chemistry from Christeyns, the goods move via a of eight 132 lb. (60 kg.) Lavatec dryers that are powered with natural gas.
From the upper-level wash aisle, we climb a stairway to the roof for a quick look at the plant’s solar panels and heat- pump equipment. Rather than generating heat, the heat pumps collect heat from wash aisle and finishing equipment and move it to other parts of the plant.
Returning to the ground floor, we walk through a busy finishing department. Here we see a flatwork ironer and two small-piece folders. We observed a buzz of activity as employees fed flatwork and moved goods onto carts for packout. Others were engaged in hand-folding small pieces. The spirit of the finishing-area staff was upbeat, but staff appeared focused on the job at hand – i.e., preparing personal clothing, sheets and towels for shipment back to the care homes, clinics and hospitals that sent these items to Ergon for processing. ABS Laundry Business Solutions interfaces with the plant’s production system on the back end, said CEO Gerard van de Donk.
Watch for follow-up coverage of this and other European plants in Textile Services magazine. Click here for more information or to subscribe to Textile Services.