K-Bro Riverbend: Canada’s ‘Two-Touch’ Launderer
Textile Services Weekly recently toured several plants near Vancouver, BC, Canada, including K-Bro Linen Systems Inc.’s newest laundry facility in Burnaby, which focuses on minimizing textile “touchpoints” through automation wherever possible as part of a drive to achieve the highest level of infection-prevention control (IPC), safety and efficiency.
Because the plant specializes in processing healthcare textiles – along with a selective complement of hotel linens – managers aim to limit contacts between textiles and staff, said General Manager Kevin Stephenson. “We try to focus on this plant – because it’s healthcare – on minimizing touchpoints,” Stephenson said of the plant that opened in 2018. “So, in a perfect scenario, we sort it once in the wash floor, and there’s really only two more touchpoints after laundering. One at the finishing machine and another to place it onto the cart for delivery.” Stephenson acknowledged that there can be instances where there are more than two touchpoints. Nonetheless, the 120,000-square-foot (11,148-square-meter) laundry is an improvement over less-modern facilities, including “The older laundries I grew up with had many more touchpoints, where you were in and out of the washer by hand, in and out of the dryer, back into a laundry tub, over to a folder, and so on until prepped for delivery,” he said.
K-Bro Riverbend, located near a turn in the Fraser River, is one of 10 K-Bro processing plants across Canada and its Fishers Services subsidiary in the United Kingdom. A publicly held company, K-Bro is based in Edmonton, Alberta. The Burnaby plant is a high-volume launderer serving area hospitals and hotels. “We’re pushing through approximately 200,000 pieces every day,” Stephenson said. “The facility services acute hospitals, long-term care facilities and four hotels, with operations running 365 days a year.” The hotel textiles that the plant processes are high-end and a combination of both “pooled” inventory and customer-owned goods.
Stephenson notes that executives in hospitals owned by the provincial government require laundry contractors to certify that they meet high standards for quality and safety. Incident prevention is also a high-priority, and the provincial government works with laundries like K-Bro to audit its safety program. K-Bro has an in-house occupational health and safety coordinator who oversees safety in the company’s three plants in British Columbia: two in Burnaby and a third in Victoria, about 70 miles southwest on Vancouver Island. All these plants must follow provincial regulations requiring companies to demonstrate the effectiveness of their incident-prevention programs. “The BC government, through WorkSafe BC guides employers with best practices to follow as far as training and hazard prevention,” Stephenson said. To ensure compliance, K-Bro Riverbend undergoes regular third-party safety inspections. “Every three years we conduct an external audit,” he said. “It’s called the COR – Certificate of Recognition. Auditors come in, interview your staff, verify your programs; they really look at what you’re doing.” He adds that K-Bro conducts regular self-audits as well. “Internally we do that every year,” Stephenson said. “We passed our audit earlier this month. We’re extremely happy with the results.”
Technology is another area where K-Bro Riverbend excels. In a walkthrough of the plant, we saw a massive operation, including an extensive overhead rail system. “It’s primarily JENSEN equipment in this plant,” Stephenson said, noting a long-standing partnership with the Switzerland-based international laundry machinery manufacturer. The heart of the production system is the plant’s three side-by-side high-capacity continuous batch washers. The tunnels save on water with significant reuse of water from the rinse side to the initial wet down. A combination heat-exchange and wastewater-treatment system from Thermal Engineering of Arizona (TEA) also helps keep the plant’s total water consumption extremely efficient – including its use of conventional washers for heavily soiled items.
After washing, using peracetic acid and other chemicals from Ecolab Inc., an exit conveyor then moves the goods from the press to the “cake breaker.” Here, two metal arms on either side of the cake help break it up to simplify the next stage of processing in the dryer room or off to the finishing side of the facility. The goods then travel by slings to additional conveyors and down a chute, utilizing gravity to further break up the loads. They next go to a series of blanket folders, small-piece folders or one of the thermal-oil ironer lines.
The plant is “steamless” meaning that it uses a water-heating system, rather than a traditional boiler. In this area and many others, Canada’s “two-touch launderer” keeps a sharp focus on continuous improvement in textile processing and resource conservation. Watch for follow-up coverage of K-Bro Riverbend and other Canadian operators in upcoming issues of Textile Services Weekly and Textile Services magazine.