personal protective equipment (PPE), such as gloves and safety glasses. Slip-resistant shoes are recommended. ■ No smoking or open flames allowed around soiled shop towels. ■ Practice appropriate personal hygiene. After handling soiled shop towels, wash hands and face prior to eating, drinking, smoking or performing any other activ-ity that could involve hand-to-face con-tact. Keep soiled shop towels separate from all other goods. Coyne’s customers hail from various manu-facturing and service industries and accord-ingly soil towels with a variety of chemicals. Some towels are squeezed at the laundry after being retrieved so they are only slightly damp before washing. Coyne captures the extract for reuse in an-other industrial process, such as fuel blend-ing in cement manufacturing. Shop towels are washed separately from other goods, such as uniforms, floor mats and other types of towels, for longer periods of time with different chemistry. These “wash formulas” consist of multiple fills for flushes, breaks (injection of wash chemicals) and rinses. It typically requires an hour or more to wash a load, usually at higher water tempera-tures than formulas for other products; steam is often part of the equation. Cooler water flushes help at the beginning of some towel formulas to minimize odors. Temperatures are varied throughout the wash cycle. Using a large washer is also a key factor. “Wash wheels” are several feet in diam-eter, lifting and dropping shop towels over that distance. Machines that handle up to 1,000 pounds of goods at a time are used, providing what-ever action is needed to help remove soils. Modern machine programming controllers enable washers at the proper time to change speeds, shift rotational direction, change wa-ter temperature, inject steam, dispense clean-ing chemicals and move on a timed cycle throughout the lengthy laundering process — all without machine operator intervention. Absorption quality tests help verify wash-ing success. Here is a really simple approach I use with customers: Fill a bowl big enough to hold a shop towel with water; dip the towel to satu-rate, wrap a rubber band around it; and put it in the bowl. If the towel sinks, it’s absorbent. How much? Testing kits are available to assess how uniformly and quickly a shop towel absorbs liquid. Water should spread at the rate of 10 sec-onds or less per inch and the pattern of ab-sorption should continue to be relatively even across the towel, not jagged. Shop towel processing is relatively expen-sive for laundries. Companies that specialize in solvent-laden reusables bear significant capital and oper-ating expenses. Typically, processing shop towels is the most expensive and time-consuming washroom function — 40 percent to 70 percent more — any industrial laundry un-dertakes. CM DO YOU NEED MORE CARPET CLEANING CUSTOMERS? PERHAPS SOME ADDITIONAL WATER DAMAGE JOBS? The answer is found at a Totally Booked UNIVERSITY workshop. NO SALES PITCH ZONE A TBU session is a “no sales pitch zone”. You sign up, you attend, and you go home with marketing strategies and tools that really work, all loaded onto a 2 GB computer drive (no extra cost). No coaching fees, no back-of-the-room deals. From business building strategies, finding more customers and landing more jobs and how to use social media and your website more effectively… it’s all part of the curriculum at Totally Booked UNIVERSITY . Visit www.totallybookeduniversity.com for complete information, or call (740)973-4236 Find us on Facebook.com/TotallyBookedUniversity FREE INFO: Reader Service 253 or CMMOnline.com/freeinfo www.cmmonline.com 33
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