Reduce Carbon Footprint
Eliminating the need for hot water in most commercial laundry operations will greatly reduce the amount of Carbon released into the atmosphere. With the ever-increasing threat of Global Warming all around us today, it is becoming virtually impossible to do anything without first considering its environmental impact. How much water will this use? How much energy will this consume? How much pollution will it all generate? These are all good questions among the growing list of concerns.
One of the biggest contributors to Global Warming is the release of GHG’s or Green-House Gases into the atmosphere as a result of our activities. Carbon Dioxide is the big one. Everything we do that uses energy made with fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, releases Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere. This is a result of the combination of Oxygen and Hydrocarbons in the burning process which produces Carbon Dioxide. The more energy we use, the more Carbon Dioxide we release (or cause to be released) into the atmosphere.
Traditional laundering methods on average consume 3 gallons of water with each pound of linen processed. In a typical laundry, 70% of that water is heated. For every 1,000 pounds of linen, you will use 3,000 gallons of water of which 2,100 gallons will be heated. Assuming the incoming water temperature is 60-degrees and your target temperature is 160-degrees, you will heat 2,100 gallons of water by 100 degrees. 8.33 Btu’s will heat one gallon of water by one degree. 2,100 gallons x 8.33 x 100 = 1,749,300 Btu’s used to heat the water for every 1,000 pounds of linen processed.
In a typical laundry, the amount of energy required to dry the linen is roughly equivalent to the amount of energy required to heat the water. Most dryers and ironers also use Natural Gas with the same problems of creating GHG’s and contributing to Global Warming just like heating the water. If it takes roughly 1,749,300 Btu’s (1.75 million Btu’s) to heat the water to wash 1,000 pounds of linens, on average it will take 1.75 million Btu’s to dry the linens. That means processing just 1,000 pounds of linen with traditional laundering methods will consume over 3.5 million Btu’s to complete the job. That is an absolutely enormous amount of energy required to wash only 1,000 pounds of linens. A 1,000 room luxury hotel can create 30,000 pounds of linen or more per day to be washed. This includes linens from pool areas, exercise rooms and kitchen/dining and room service operations. Imagine how many pounds of linen are washed in Las Vegas or at Disney World each day! In Las Vegas alone there are more than 140,000 hotel rooms. It’s almost more than you want to consider.
Natural Gas is used to supply heat for most laundry operations and the volume of gas consumed is usually expressed as cubic feet (cf) or thousand cubic feet (1,000ft3 or MCF) of Natural Gas. It is relatively easy to determine just how much carbon you release into the atmosphere using fossil fuels like Natural Gas. The Department of Energy of the United States has created a chart of Carbon Equivalencies that shows just how much Carbon on average is released into the atmosphere from burning a given volume of various fossil fuels.
Burning Natural Gas releases approximately 120.593 pounds of Carbon into the atmosphere for every 1,000 cubic feet (1,000 ft3) of Natural Gas consumed. Or, Natural Gas releases 117.080 pounds of Carbon per million Btu’s of heat created. The above example of 1,000 pounds of linen processed will release approximately 409.62 pounds of Carbon into the atmosphere! That’s for every 1,000 pounds of linen processed. Imagine how much Carbon is released into the atmosphere in Las Vegas each day just from washing all the sheets, towels, rags, robes, napkins, table cloths, mats, mops and other linen items. Easily more than one million pounds of Carbon are released into the atmosphere in Las Vegas from textile care operations alone each day. Now add that to the amount of Carbon released supplying electricity for all the lights, TV’s, Air Conditioners and computers and Carbon released from all the motor vehicles and you can start to imagine the scope of the problem.
Global Warming is being caused in part by all of the Carbon being released into the atmosphere in the form of Carbon Dioxide Gas (CO2). Carbon acts like a heat reservoir by reducing the amount of heat the Earth can radiate back into space at night. Our Planet and all life enjoy the perfect balance that has been created over millions of years where just enough heat is retained and just enough heat is radiated back out into space each day. Our addition to the volume of Carbon suspended in the atmosphere as a component of Carbon Dioxide Gas is disturbing this balance and contributing to a rise in the overall average temperature of the Planet. A rise in Global temperatures will have many far-reaching effects, some of which we won’t even be aware of until it is too late to stop them.
We can do something about this dooms-day scenario by simply turning off the lights and TV when we leave a room, keeping doors and windows closed, adding or improving insulation, reducing the amount of energy we waste on non-essential uses and converting to an ozone standard in the commercial laundry industry. Truly an opportunity exists with ozone laundry technology to turn the tide of this impending Global catastrophe and because of the availability of Water Energy Green Laundry Systems, the time to do it is now!
Eliminate Hot Water
Proper use of ozone to wash linens requires that you completely eliminate hot water in wash cycles where ozone is used. Ozone is a gas and it must be dissolved into water at high enough concentrations to be an effective cleaning agent for linens. For ozone to be dissolved into water efficiently and effectively, a sophisticated set of requirements must be met including eliminating heat. It is a natural physical property of ozone to require low temperatures to be dissolved effectively into water. The colder the water, the more efficiently ozone can be dissolved into it. Ozone’s affinity for cold water is a fact of physical science and cannot be changed by any mortal.
Ozone laundry systems become very effective at cleaning linens once dissolved ozone concentrations reach 1.5 to 3.0ppm (parts per million). This effectiveness is directly related to the ability of ozone to create OH molecules (Hydroxyl Radicals) with small amounts of alkali instead of the normally high levels of alkali used to create an extremely high pH level in your wash wheel. A high level of dissolved ozone cannot be achieved when you use any hot water at all because ozone is an unstable molecule and heat only serves to accelerate the disintegration of ozone back to Diatomic Oxygen and Molecular Oxygen. You absolutely must have measurable levels of dissolved ozone in your wash wheel to accomplish the level of cleaning you desire – the level of cleaning traditionally achieved by using very hot water and a lot of chemicals.
Ozone is so effective that even a tiny amount of dissolved ozone or dissolved Oxygen left when it breaks down can possibly give your chemicals a little boost similar to what is observed when using Oxy-Clean® in your washer at home. Maybe this explains reports of limited effectiveness achieved with some of the run-of-the-mill ozone laundry systems on the market.
With the emphasis today on addressing climate change and Global Warming, the objective has become to eliminate all unnecessary uses of energy. Turn off the lights, turn off the TV, close the door, adjust the thermostat, carpool, combine trips, ride a bike, etc. have become the mantra of informed and responsible citizens. Our daily lives are full of opportunities to reduce the amount of energy we consume and therefore reduce the impact on our Planet as a whole. What many don’t realize is that there are also ways for certain people to reduce the drain on Earth’s resources and impact on our climate thousands of times more than the simple measures we all know about. Commercial laundry managers can drastically reduce or even eliminate the need for energy to heat the enormous volumes of water used in their facilities each day. Heating the water in a typical laundry for a hotel with 100 or more rooms will use an enormous amount of energy and cause the release of tens of thousands of pounds of Carbon into the atmosphere year after year. By converting to a Water Energy Green Laundry system, a laundry manager can continue to meet strict quality standards without consuming exorbitant amounts of energy heating water.
By switching to an ozone laundry standard, you can cut your hot water usage by 90% and your dryer energy usage by 50% (explained below). This reduction in resource consumption will be a dramatic indicator of just how green your laundry facility has become. Guests, Mother Nature and your bottom line will thank you.
Shorter Wash Cycles
By eliminating some of the steps in a wash program, you eliminate the time required to complete those steps. Our ozone laundry systems allow you to shorten wash programs by a minimum of 30% which accelerates your production by the same amount. This translates into a sizable water and labor savings.
All newer commercial washers have electronic controls that allow you to create the type of washing cycles you need. When you switch to the ozone standard, you create a new program specifically designed to take advantage of the benefits of ozone. Typical wash programs fill the washer up to 10 times and more to process a load of linens. That’s why it takes an average of 3 gallons of water to clean each pound of line. Some washers can hold over 100 gallons per fill and a 300 to 400 pound load of linen can take up to 1,000 gallons or more of water to wash. Each fill has a very specific purpose. Usually, the first fill or two is used to flush out the solid material and send it down the drain. The next fill is used to add ‘Builder’ which raises the pH of the wash liquor up to above 11 on the 0 to 14 scale, with 7 being neutral. A pH of 11 is very high on the scale. The mixture in the wash water becomes very caustic. Most chemical suppliers will tell you this is done to help swell the fibers of the cloth to release the dirt, etc. The fibers do swell but only as a result of the extremely damaging effects such a high pH has on the fabric. The truth about what is going on is that extremely high pH is required to bring about the creation of OH molecules from water or H2O molecules. One of the Hydrogen atoms gets ripped-off the water molecule and voila, you’ve got a Hydroxyl radical to do your ‘dirty’ work. You add the detergent or surfactant to help dislodge soil, oils and greases from the fabric and encapsulate it. When the water goes down the drain, so does the dirt.
Our ozone laundry systems have a built-in booster pump to rapidly fill the washers each time they need water. A washer must be filled 5 to 10 times for each load of linen. Say you do 10 loads in each washer in the laundry, each day. If it takes 45-seconds to fill the washer for each cycle and the washer fills 6 times for each load, at the end of the day, you’ve waited about 45 minutes on that washer to fill. If you have low water pressure and don’t have a booster pump, it might take 3 or more minutes to fill the washer each time. If your washer takes 3 minutes to fill each time, at the end of the day you’ll have waited a full 3 hours on your washer to fill.
Shorter Drying Times
Ozone laundry boosts extract efficiency and lowers water retention. Less water in the linens going to the dryers means it takes less time to dry them. This adds up to a huge savings in labor and energy.
Water hardness is most often caused by Calcium and Magnesium being dissolved in the water. These dissolved minerals along with Chlorine and other chemicals present in tap water and chemicals used on linens to increase their sheen and to repel soil all cause fabrics to be Hydrophobic. This means they repel water. That’s not a good thing when you need to wash them using water. Chemical companies have developed detergents using powerful wetting agents that work well in water having these natural disadvantages. These chemicals cause fabric to act like a water magnet. Although these chemicals have worked well to improve the quality of textile care, they cause more water to be retained in the linen after extraction. More water in the linen means more time and energy are required to dry them.
Dissolved ozone in your wash will eliminate the need for wetting agents and greatly reduce the amount of chemicals you must use. Dissolved ozone acts like a water softener because it breaks surface tension on water. This neutralizes the tendency for water to bead instead of penetrating cloth. This softening effect boosts chemical performance and reduces chemical demand. Ozone also oxidizes or hydrolyzes Calcium and Magnesium which greatly reduces their hardening effect on the water. This greatly boosts chemical performance and reduces chemical demand. (This also greatly reduces the accumulation of minerals in linen which causes them to look dull and dingy over time) Ozone also neutralizes Chlorine and its water-hardening effects. This boosts chemical performance and reduces chemical demand. Fewer chemicals, softer water and no wetting agents mean better rinsing and more efficient extraction. More efficient extraction means less water remaining in the linens. All together this means measurably shorter drying times for your linens and a big savings on labor and energy when you switch to an ozone standard.
Commercial washing machines for years have offered a spin or extract cycle with about a 110 g’s of force to extract the water in the linen before sending them to the dryer. As we are so used to in Today’s World, things get better over time. Modern washers can provide 350 g’s of extraction force and more. This is such an incredible amount of force that it can get your remaining water weight down below 40%. With ozone, the same force can get your water weight down below 20%. Below 20% is better because it gives you the least amount of water to evaporate in the dryers. Your sheets can go directly to the ironer without pre-conditioning first in the dryer – saving more energy. Usually sheets need to go into the dryer for a few minutes to remove enough of the remaining water so they dry thoroughly in an ironer. Water Energy Ozone Laundry Systems deliver all of these drying advantages saving you substantially on labor and energy.
It takes 2,000 Btu’s to evaporate one pound of water from linens. Most linens coming out of a slow speed extract washer using traditional chemicals will retain at least 80% or more water weight. That means 100 pounds of linens will have at least 80 pounds of water in them. That means your dryer will need to consume a minimum of 160,000 Btu’s of energy to get them dry. With a high-speed extract machine using the proper chemicals and ozone you can get out a lot more water. Your remaining water weight would be down around30% which would mean that you would need only 60,000 Btu’s or a little more than 1/3 of the energy required in the typical scenario to get your linens dry. Even using ozone with slow-speed extract machines will allow you to reduce your remaining moisture content.
A dryer cycle that is typically 45-55 minutes can be reduced to 27-33 minutes simply by reducing the remaining water weight (water retention) by 1/3. A reduction of 2/3 in water retention would shorten this cycle to below 20 minutes. You can clearly see how a reduction in water weight in linens coming from a washer/extractor will greatly reduce the amount of time and energy required to dry them.
A Water Energy Green Laundry System will cut your moisture retention by as much as 75% depending on your laundry’s current level of modernization. That’s what building a green laundry is all about.
Reduced Water Footprint
Water Energy Ozone Laundry Systems will allow you to reduce the amount of water you use each day to process your linens. A 1,000 room hotel with traditional laundering methods will use close to 100,000 gallons of water per day to clean its linens (3gal/lb, 30lb/room). For comparison, an 18-wheeler tanker truck on the highway holds a maximum of 9,000 gallons of liquid. That means a 1,000 room hotel will use enough water to fill more than 9 of these 18-wheelers each day just to wash the linens. By switching to ozone, you will reduce your water consumption by a minimum of 30% over traditional methods. That translates into saving a full gallon of water on each pound of linen processed.
This savings is achieved by the elimination of steps in each wash cycle. When you replace chemicals with ozone, you don’t need to have a program step to add that chemical and you don’t need a program step to rinse it out. Each chemical you eliminate allows you to also eliminate 2 fills of the washer. If you normally used 100,000 gallons of water to process your linens each day, by switching to ozone, you can reduce that by at least 30,000 gallons. That’s enough water saved every day to fill up a typical residential swimming pool!
With the World’s fresh water supply comprising only 3% of the water on the Planet and 1?2 of that being locked up in the ice on Antarctica, we see just how important it is to save every last drop possible.
Water Energy Green Laundry Systems with Green Water Reuse allow you to cut your net water use by 50% or more depending on the type and amount of soil loading you have. If you wash only light to medium-soiled linen, you’ll receive the biggest water savings. Environmentally Friendly and Sustainable laundry. These big water savings will allow you to earn coveted points toward US Green Building Council LEED certification.
Huge Labor Savings
Labor is arguably one of if not the most expensive component of any operation including commercial laundry. Many advances have been made over the years in automation technology to speed up a laundry’s production rate and reduce the amount of labor required. A Water Energy Ozone Laundry System when integrated properly can drastically reduce the amount of labor required to process linens as compared to traditional methods.
Ozone laundry wash cycles are measurably shorter than traditional wash cycles due to the fact that some of the old, necessary steps in the wash process have been eliminated. This advantage is more thoroughly detailed in the ‘Shorter Wash Cycles’ and ‘Reduced Water Footprint’ sections. This reduction in wash cycle times accelerates the work flow and production rate which translates to a savings on labor. The faster you can complete the day’s production requirements, the less hours of labor you will need to do it.
Production in the dryers is also accelerated due to there being less water remaining in the linens coming out of the washers. This is explained more thoroughly in the ‘Shorter Drying Times’ section. Shorter drying cycles also translates into a savings on labor. Some drying times can be reduced by more than 50% which accelerates the production by the same amount. It’s not hard to see how labor savings can add up fast using an ozone laundry system.
Water Energy Laundry Consulting and Design relies on its vast experience to specify exactly how to build a laundry facility. Many things must be considered to design a plant that will deliver peak efficiency. One of the most important factors to consider is the orientation and placement of every piece of equipment relative to the rest of the equipment in the laundry. A properly arranged laundry plant will always deliver the highest and most efficient throughput. High efficiency in a laundry will serve to increase PPOH or Pounds per operator hour. PPOH is one of the most important statistics you can calculate for your laundry facility. This value represents just how much linen each operator can do each hour. You take the volume of linen processed, divided by the number of hours needed to process it divided by the number of employees you have doing the work. The higher the number, the higher efficiency you have in your laundry. The higher the number, the lower your labor cost is. PPOH is absolutely a function of how well your laundry is designed. You want employees to be able to accomplish the work with the least amount of movement to do it. This is achieved by strategic placement of the laundry equipment within the laundry and this is achieved by having many years of experience with how to design a laundry for optimum efficiency.
No matter how efficient your equipment is and how much energy you eliminate from the process, your biggest savings by far will always come from reducing the number of hours or amount of labor needed to process your linens. That is a very hard fact. We all know how modern advances help to reduce the amount of labor required to deliver a product. Better equipment and computer controls have enabled companies to provide higher quality products and services with less and less labor. Your laundry is not any different. Labor is your most expensive component.
Non-Invasive installation
Water Energy Ozone Laundry Systems only connect to the existing water lines going to your washers. Our equipment can be installed next to the washers or in the next room if need be. We will never drill a hole into one of your washers or connect to any other piece of equipment in your laundry with one of our ozone laundry systems. There will be no recirculating pumps, lint screens or shock-hazard contraptions sitting behind your washers because we don’t need them. Our systems deliver active, dissolved ozone to the wash wheel in concentrations of 1.5 to 3ppm and higher where it begins to work immediately.
Water treatment is the backbone of the ozone laundry process. The objective is to get the proper dose of dissolved ozone to the wash wheel when needed – at the beginning of the wash cycle. Our ozone laundry systems’ primary role is to produce water with a high level of dissolved ozone and have enough of it available at all times to satisfy washer demands. A washer properly outfitted for use with a Water Energy Green Laundry System will have 3 water inlets. One of them specifically for the water with dissolved ozone. When the washer needs more ozone, it opens the valve connected to the ozone laundry system. You teach the washer how to do this when you create the wash programs. This separation of equipment and the laundry room can save floor space in tight laundries and it can give you added security if your laundry is run by people you want to keep away from the ozone equipment.
Attractive Benefits Without Big Changes
An ozone laundry system can deliver an array of attractive benefits with virtually no noticeable changes in standard procedures. The laundry employees will simply enter a different code into the electronic control panel on the washer to start a wash with ozone – that’s it. The big change in operations will be the accelerated rate of production. Linens will complete their wash cycle more quickly so they will need to be transferred to the dryers/ironers sooner. Then the linens will come out of the dryers much sooner so they can progress to folding, ironing, bundling, wrapping, weighing, etc. much sooner. When all is said and done and your operation has adapted to the accelerated workflow, you will find that your biggest savings is on labor. You will be able to do the same volume of production in much less time overall.
Green Chemicals
Ozone is truly a green laundry chemical. Ozone is a clean gas made entirely of pure oxygen which is available all around us. You won’t have to store large amounts of hazardous chemicals on site at your facility any more. Big reservoirs of Chlorine, Alkali and Acid are no longer needed because ozone will be doing most of the dirty work. The detergent you use should be a biodegradable surfactant that will easily break down in the environment or can be easily removed by our water reuse system. The use of our ozone laundry system will cause your wastewater quality to go up a million-fold and every living creature on the Planet will be better off for it.
High concentrations of dissolved ozone will lead to the creation of Hydroxyl Radicals or OH molecules at a pH as low as 8 instead of the astronomically high 11 normally seen in traditional laundering methods. This fact is the Holy Grail of laundry wastewater treatment. You get an equal or greater amount of cleaning power as with the traditional soup of caustic chemicals without all the chemicals! You only need a tiny bit of alkali to increase the pH enough to create an OH molecule and get your linen clean.
| Oxidizing Agent | Oxidizing Potential |
|---|---|
| Fluorine | 3.06 |
| Hydroxyl Free Radicals | 2.80 |
| Atomic Oxygen | 2.42 |
| Ozone | 2.07 |
| Permanagenate | 1.67 |
| Hypochlorous Acid | 1.59 |
| Chlorine | 1.36 |
| Molecular Oxygen | 1.23 |
| Bromine | 1.09 |
| Hypochlorite | 0.94 |
An OH Radical is #2 on the scale of most powerful oxidizers in the Universe. The only compound more powerful is Fluorine gas and it is highly toxic. You could never use it for anything relating to laundry. Therefore, Hydroxyl Radicals are the safest and most effective things to use at removing stains and odors and for killing bacteria and viruses. When a high dose of dissolved ozone is delivered to your wash wheel, you will actually have 4 of the top oxidizers on the list working for you. Hydroxyl Free Radicals, Atomic Oxygen, Ozone and Molecular Oxygen will all be present and active.
Ozone is a triple Oxygen (O3) molecule and is highly reactive on its own. As ozone breaks down, it releases a single Oxygen atom (O1) and Molecular Oxygen (O2). These single oxygen atoms instantly bond with the first thing they come into contact with. This means they instantly neutralize stains, odors and biological contaminants. These free Oxygen atoms also bond with Hydrogen Ions provided by the alkali and form Hydroxyl Free Radicals (OH). When you have ozone applied in the proper concentration, you get a quartet of powerful and environmentally friendly agents working together to clean your linens.
Chlorine Bleach oxidizes Carbon molecules much more slowly than and not as completely as Hydroxyl Radicals and ozone. In the process it also creates a dizzying array of toxic chemicals called Disinfection By-Products (DBP’s) including Formaldehyde and Chloroform. These DBP’s are part of a family of nasty chemicals called THM’s or Trihalomethanes (halogenated compounds) that you want absolutely no part of if at all possible. There is no question that these compounds are carcinogenic. Chlorine is also the single most damaging element to the Earth’s ozone layer and our use of it should be curtailed wherever possible.
The old staple Chlorine is located at #16 down the list of most powerful oxidizers and that’s what we’ve always depended on to get our whites white and our germs killed. The reason people haven’t used ozone much before is because it is much harder to generate, dissolve in water and make use of as opposed to Chlorine. You just pour some Chlorine in very hot water and that’s it. With ozone, there are many issues to address when using it in your laundry. Our 20+ years of experience working with ozone at NASA and 10+ years working with ozone in the laundry industry has given us the expertise to do it very effectively, efficiently and dependably.
Adopting a Water Energy ozone laundry standard in your laundry will allow you to reduce your total chemical costs by 50% or more. You will eliminate most of your alkali, only use a fraction of the detergent you were using before and do away with Chlorine and acid all together. You don’t need the acid because you have eliminated most of the alkali. Normally after you’ve raised your pH above 11 with plenty of alkali (as described earlier), you would use acid to bring the pH back down to a more hospitable level – one that the public sewer utility will allow you to send down the drain. A wastewater plant operator will not allow you to discharge water with such an extremely high pH without buffering it first with acid. This process is similar to adding acid to a pool to bring the pH down closer to neutral. If laundry plant operators do happen to send these ‘spikes’ of caustic water down the sewer, certain impact fees or fines could be levied against their laundry. Wastewater from a laundry with a Water Energy Ozone Laundry System is of vastly higher quality than wastewater from a traditional laundry operation and will NEVER incur any impact fees. Elimination of those fees (or the possibility thereof) could pay for your ozone system many times over.
Green Wastewater
A typical laundry produces wastewater that is high in BOD (biological oxygen demand – food for bacteria) high in COD (chemical oxygen demand) and low in DO (dissolved oxygen). This is to be expected with the nature of the soil and chemical contaminants found on dirty linen. The soil consists of body oils and other secretions, food and other organic waste, organic stains like blood and grass stains, etc. Chemicals found in a laundry’s wastewater include the strong alkali described above, hefty amount of chlorine bleach, lots of detergent, acid, fragrances, softeners, and more. All of this adds up to mean the wastewater coming from a typical laundry is not very nice. The high BOD, COD and low DO are all counter-productive to what they are trying to accomplish down at the local wastewater treatment plant. They are trying to lower the BOD and COD and raise the DO so when they discharge the water, it won’t damage the receiving stream’s water habitat. Or put more simply, it won’t kill the fish! The negative factors of a laundry’s wastewater (BOD and COD) support the growth of algae in rivers which consumes all of the dissolved oxygen (DO) and thereby suffocates the fish. Who would have known! So, laundries must go to expensive measures to ‘buffer’ their wastewater and reduce its negative aspects before releasing it to the sewer. If they don’t, in some cases the laundry owner can be charged additional fees by the sewer provider or fined for unacceptable wastewater discharge. Some companies pay a lot of money in fines or impact fees because of their poor quality wastewater.
With a Water Energy ozone standard in your laundry, the ozone replaces most of the chemicals needed to provide a superior finished product. Ozone, being made purely of oxygen, first oxidizes and destroys odors, stains, bacteria, viruses, parasites, cysts, oils and greases and reduces them to carbon dioxide, inert material and water. Think about it, all organic substances are made of long-chain carbon molecules. Stains, odors, living organisms, oils etc. are all made of these molecules. Water with high concentrations of dissolved ozone is full of Hydroxyl Radicals and on contact, they clip the molecules and instantly attach to the Carbon to form something else, the most of which is CO2 or Carbon Dioxide gas. This Carbon Dioxide gas floats harmlessly into the air – the same gas that comes out of a newly-opened soda or out of your mouth when you breathe. What is left is certainly not a stain or odor or living organism.
These Hydroxyl Radicals are OH molecules that have an insatiable desire to bond with something else. Each time they do, they are delivering oxygen to the material that creates the BOD (biological oxygen demand) and neutralizing the oxygen demand. What a win-win situation. The OH is happy and now the wastewater people are happy. Also, any remaining ozone, oxygen or OH molecules after all the work is done simply raise the DO (dissolved oxygen) content in the water. Wow, that’s a win-win-win situation there and the fact that this is all superlatively green in nature (adding oxygen to the environment instead of who knows what chemicals) you’ve got a win-win-win-win situation!!! There aren’t too many of those in this Old World these days.
Now that you’ve eliminated the BOD & COD and raised the DO, your laundry wastewater will actually benefit the process down at the local wastewater treatment plant.
Green Air
Eliminating Chlorine and other harmful chemicals and reducing the amount of detergent used to process your linens will greatly improve the air quality in and around your laundry facility. Eliminating the use of Chlorine means the elimination of huge amounts of VOC’s coming from your laundry! No more acid and greatly reduced alkali means your linens will last much longer and not shed as much lint in the dryers. This will greatly reduce the amount of airborne particles coming from your dryer vents which will greatly reduce the volume of particulates in the air. Particulates are a major source of pollution that pervades our environment today. You won’t be able to see the improvement to your air quality but knowing you aren’t discharging the typical load of environmentally hazardous chemicals to the air will give you peace of mind and much cleaner air.
Greatly Extend the Life of Valuable Linens
Reap huge savings by extending the life of your valuable linens from 2 to 7 times. A Water Energy Ozone Laundry Standard will greatly extend the life of your valuable linens by eliminating the harsh chemical treatments found in traditional wash chemistry. Ozone very effectively oxidizes soil, oils & greases, bacteria, viruses and other contaminants in your linens without the need to subject them to the typical hellish mixture of chemicals in the washer. A pH of 11+ is enough to cause permanent injury to your eyes, skin, hair, etc. so you can imagine what it is doing to your fabric. Huge swings in pH cause untold wear and tear on your expensive linens. Very high pH causes fibers to swell unnaturally which leads to cracks in the fibers themselves. These cracked fibers shatter and are carried away by your dryer. Your expensive linens are being reduced to fuzz every time you wash them.
With ozone, your pH stays near neutral and that’s exactly what your body is and your linens are – neutral. By eliminating all of the harsh chemicals in the wash, you eliminate the harsh residue in the finished product. In laundry, you never actually get everything out in the rinse. A rinse simply serves to dilute the contaminants. When you add a lot of alkali and then acid to neutralize it, that doesn’t mean it just disappears, actually it creates a mineral salt that remains in the fabric. The rinse cycle only reduces the concentration of this residue, it does not eliminate it. These residual salts are made up of crystals deposited in the fabric and their sharp edges accelerate the destruction of your valuable fabrics during the drying process. This mineral salt also remains in the towels and sheets after drying and ends up on your body when you use them. Most of us don’t stay in bed long enough for the mineral salts to cause any real damage to our skin but bed-ridden patients in Nursing Homes and Hospitals are subject to skin eruptions, boils and other skin ailments that lead to bed sores and have a negative impact on their overall health. When you adopt a Water Energy Ozone Laundry Standard, you truly eliminate the chemical residues in the finished product because you’ve eliminated the chemicals altogether.
Safe for Organic Linens
Keep your expensive ‘Organic Linens’ organic. Traditional laundering methods used on certified organic linens will render them un-certifiable. The chemicals used in traditional laundry chemistry will leave inorganic residues in the fabrics and will cause your organic linens to no longer be considered organic. A Water Energy Ozone Laundry Standard will assure that your organic linens remain organic and healthful with no chemical residues.
Use Less Chemicals
Ozone enhances the power of detergents by breaking water surface tension and nullifying the water-hardening effects of Calcium and Magnesium. Ozone makes water soft without the use of traditional water softening equipment. Your laundry detergent will go a lot farther. When you first switch to a Water Energy Ozone Standard, unless you have brand new linens, you will have suds whether or not you add any soap for the next 4 or 5 times you wash them. There is so much residual soap and chemicals that you will be amazed at how many suds you get without adding any soap! This should clearly illustrate just how much soap remains in your linens with traditional laundering methods. Switch to ozone and greatly reduce the amount of chemicals needed to provide superior results. Stop all those chemicals from getting on your guests or patients. The linens smell and feel like new instead of having that ‘odd’ smell and scratchy feel characteristic of towels in a hotel or hospital.
Superior Finished Product, No Chemical Residues
Your linens will feel and smell fantastic! With all the focus on comfy bedding in hotel rooms these days, why wouldn’t you want the outdoor-fresh smell of linens processed in a laundry with a Water Energy Ozone Standard? Stop producing flat, crusty-feeling towels with chemical-smelling residues in your laundry. Ozone is 100% natural and it’s Nature’s way of cleaning the Earth. Why not insist on it in YOUR laundry? Towels laundered with ozone will be 30 to 50% fluffier. This is because all of the chemical residues that tend to make fibers stick together are eliminated Of course that means you will need more space to store and distribute linens but the bottom line is that your guests will have much fluffier towels to wipe their faces and other body parts with and that will be a better experience for them. Soon, customers are going to demand linens of this quality and greenness. Converting to a Water Energy Ozone Laundry Standard now will put you ahead of the curve and the competition when your guests realize your high-quality linens are the product of an extremely ‘green’ laundry practice you have adopted in your laundry.
Safer, More Sterile Linens
The use of ozone in your wash process will assure the elimination of biological pathogens and countless other chemical contaminants from your finished product. Ozone and its related companions are at the top of the list of most powerful oxidizers. Organisms have no chance of ever developing a resistance to destruction by ozone. Ozone blasts a hole in the cell wall or other containment mechanism of a pathogen and destroys it instantly. Older methods of sanitation using less effective sanitizing agents paved the way for the development of hard-to-kill microbes like MRSA/drug-resistant staph and other Hospital-acquired infections now spreading through the general public. Chemical disinfection agents must first be absorbed by a pathogen to kill it and incomplete sterilization is expected. You never get 100% and sometimes you don’t even come close. The bacteria that do survive and their offspring are more resistant the next time we attempt to kill them.
US EPA recognizes ozone as the safest disinfectant that provides highly effective disinfection to achieve high log inactivation not achievable with chlorine, UV or chlorine dioxide. Reference the following chart:
| Ozone Level | Contact Time | Bacteria Species | Percent Removal |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.009 ppm | < 1 min | E. coli | 99.99% |
| 0.099 ppm | < 1 min | Staphylococcus sp. | 99.99% |
| 0.099 ppm | < 1 min | Pseudomonas Fluorescens | 99.99% |
| 0.21 ppm | 5 min | Legionella pneumophila | 99% |
| Ozone Level | Contact Time | Virus Species | Percent Removal |
|---|---|---|---|
Reference |
|||
| < 0.8 ppm | 5 min | Poliovirus 2 | 99.9% |
| 1.7 ppm | 5 min | Coxsackie Virus B3 | 99.999% |
US EPA also recognizes Ozone as being able to achieve high levels of Cryptosporidium and Giardia inactivation as well as virtual elimination of Clostridium difficile or ‘C. diff’ or ‘C. difficile’ spores.
Water Energy Ozone Laundry Systems are optimized at a dissolved ozone concentration of 1.5 to 3ppm. Every system is originally set to this range but the ultimate choice is yours. You have direct control over the amount of ozone you want in your washers with a digital readout that shows the dissolved ozone concentration going into your washers down to .001ppm accuracy. Our systems are capable of delivering 5ppm dissolved ozone and more if your application requires it or if the Infection Protocol Department demands it.
A dissolved ozone concentration of 1.5 to 3ppm virtually assures complete inactivation of all potentially harmful pathogens from all of your linens. We have 5 years experience with a Hospital in Northern Louisiana that had a perfect record of absolutely no biological activity on swabs taken on newly-washed linen by the Infection Protocol Department in the Hospital – 2002-2007!