Going Green

By Bob Nieman | Apr 15, 2009

With oil prices breaking records seemingly on a daily basis and new evidence of supposed global warming being reported everywhere one turns these days, the “green movement” is rolling full throttle in 2008.

Today, green is the new black. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. All this attention to reducing, reusing and recycling is a good thing.

It’s just that… well… we were here first!

Yes, laundry owners were stewards of the environment long before Al Gore began his acting career. Indeed, laundromats have been quietly pioneering conservation of the world’s resources for decades.

It’s not that the industry’s concern for the planet has ever been 100 percent altruistic. Sure, laundry owners are in business, first and foremost, to make money – and they make that money, essentially, by “renting” water, electricity and natural gas to their customers.

Utilities comprise the single greatest expense in the operation of a self-service laundry. So who’s going to care more about energy efficiency and protecting our natural resources?

Leonardo DiCaprio? Tom Hanks? Or the laundry owner down the street with 40 washers and 40 dryers turning 16 hours a day?

Man on a Mission

“For me personally, I look at the future of our planet, where my 1-year-old daughter is going to live,” said Jason Wentworth of Enviromat, LLC, based in Portland, Maine. “I see it as imperative that everybody be thinking about ways that they can reduce their impact. Otherwise, our children really have no future – or at least a very troubled one. The childhood that I had, with relative planetary security, has changed rapidly, and that scares me. I want to do my part.”

In fact, Wentworth has instituted an array of green initiatives at his 1,100-square-foot laundry. Perhaps the biggest one for his business is the efficiency of the machines, both washers and dryers.

“When I outfitted this store five years ago, I looked carefully at everything on the market and chose the most efficient washers and dryers, from electricity, natural gas and water perspectives,” he said.

Enviromat’s also boasts a solar hot water system that covers the entire roof of the store and features 112 evacuated tubes. It provides about 35 to 40 percent of the business’ total hot water production, according to Wentworth.

“Originally, it was designed to handle 65 percent of our water needs, but then our store got busier and, of course, the size of the system stayed the same,” said Wentworth, who will be presenting “Going Green: A Case Study” at the 2008 CLA Conference in Chicago next month.

Beyond that, lighting has been a major green initiative at Wentworth’s store.

“We were very careful about designing a very efficient lighting system, which cut our total wattage used by 75 percent,” he said. “And the laundry is actually more pleasantly lit now. It is a little less bright. It’s more pleasant that fluorescent tube lighting. We have all compact fluorescent lighting in fixtures. It gives more of a café feel.”

Next in line for Enviromat is its recycling program. It’s one of the most visible – and important – parts of what the customers see. Wentworth added that his customers have been good about participating in these programs. The store has trash and recycling bins set up, each one clearly marked.

“We get very high compliance rates to our recycling program,” Wentworth said. “Most customers do read the signs.”

As a result, Enviromat fills, on average, only one 15-gallon bag of trash per week. “It’s not a lot of stuff, because our city has a pretty comprehensive recycling program,” Wentworth explained. “And we make the extra effort to deal with clothing that gets left behind and dryer lint.”

That’s right. Wentworth even recycles his store’s lint, sending most of it to a contractor who mixes it in with blow-in cellulose insulation.

Wentworth also suggests laundry owners investigate the possibility of offering their customers variable pricing for different water temperatures.

“Anyone who has a computer-controlled washer can change the vend prices for different cycles,” he explained. “This drives a lot more people toward the lower temperature cycles, which are perfectly appropriate for cleaning what they want to get cleaned most of the time. Plus, it makes customers pay the true cost of offering the different cycles. The hotter the water, the more it costs us – and the more they are paying.”

As a result, Wentworth has noticed that his customers overwhelmingly choose warm and cold water over hot water.

“It doesn’t change anything in terms of total water consumption, but it does change quite a bit, as far as the energy that goes into doing a particular load of laundry,” he said.

Another policy that sets Enviromat apart is the fact that it sells a variety of natural detergents. “For example, we don’t sell any chlorine bleach,” Wentworth said. “We only sell sodium percarbonate, which is a good bleaching agent. It has very low toxicity and is a lot easier to deal with than liquid bleach, which can be a mess and also hazardous. Sodium percarbonate is color safe. It’s definitely a lower impact product and has some better cleaning properties than chlorine bleach.”

Enviromat also offers an environmentally friendly ancillary option in the form of a drop-off wetcleaning service. While he also provided drop-off drycleaning, Wentworth noted that about 80 percent of his customers choose wetcleaning over traditional drycleaning.

“It’s a really popular offering that brings in a lot of new customers,” he said. “And I could probably run the 80 percent up to 90 percent or higher, if I was more aggressive. But I like to let customers be comfortable with the idea before they try it. I don’t do a hard sell on it. I market it as a healthy alternative to chemical drycleaning. If somebody comes to the counter and doesn’t understand the difference between the two, we explain it in as objective terms as we can. Then we let them decide.”

All of these green initiatives the Wentworth has implemented in his laundry business have provided an unforeseen benefit – quality attendants.

“We’ve attracted a large number of college-educated employees who come to us because of our mission,” he said. “They’re interested in working in a business like this and willing to work in what a lot of people would consider a fairly mundane job. If you can attract noticeably better employees who care more about the business, that’s a super benefit.”

But, above all, the biggest benefit for Wentworth is personal.

“I prefer to be running a business like this that has a benefit to people beyond just the customers coming through the door,” he explained. “It means something to me. It has a lot more value to me than working for a company that doesn’t focus on those issues.”

Recycling: ‘Mind-Boggling How Much I Accumulate…’

“I’m not trying to get on some ‘green kick,’” said Barron Perl, discussing the recycling program he has instituted at his 4,000-square-foot laundry is located in Wheeling, Ill. “I just think it’s good for the environment. I save a little bit on waste costs. We used to have two dumpsters, now we have one. That saves a couple hundred dollars over the year, but the main thing is that it doesn’t wind up in the landfill.”

Perl has been recycling corrugated cardboard for years at his other business – a foodservice venture called Deli Direct. Now with his laundromat, Dirty Duds, he’s also recycling soda cans, newspapers and other paper, and of course, plastic detergent bottles.

“I’ve owned the place about a year, and I would see my customers filling up my dumpster with jumbo-sized detergent and bleach bottles. It’s almost mind-boggling how much I accumulate in just a week. If I were to show you what I collect for a week and multiply that by 52, it would blow your mind. And it’s all non-biodegradable. It would just sit in a landfill.”

Taking his “green kick” a step further, Perl also has gone with all energy-efficient, fluorescent lighting in his store and is in the process of replacing his toploading washers with frontloaders, which use less water.

And, on the commercial side of Dirty Duds’ business, Perl now takes advantage of reusable cloth bags for laundry loads, as opposed to disposable plastic sacks.

“I might not save a lot of money doing some of this, but you’ve got to think about the big picture. It’s our environment.”

Homemade Solar Collector: ‘If the Sun Shines, I’m Saving Money’

“We need to save our natural resources as much as possible and try to help the environment by using as much renewable energy as we can,” said Lynn Millsaps, who owns two 1,500-square-foot laundries in Loudon, Tenn.

Millsaps is doing his part with a solar collector at one of his stores that he actually built himself. Basically, he added a 25- by 40-foot room onto the side of his laundry with a clear, plastic roof, which is similar to what you would find on a greenhouse.

“I put cider blocks and bricks, painted black, inside the room for the sun to shine on and absorb heat,” explained Millsaps, who has been in the laundry business for 30 years. “When customers are not using the dryers, the heat is stored in the cider blocks. But when somebody puts money in the dryer, air must come in from outside and pass through the solar collector to go into the back of the dryers – and this preheats the air going into the dryers.”

The highest temperature Millsaps has ever recorded inside his solar collector is 135 degrees.

“It’s impossible to figure how much savings there is because I don’t know how many days the sun’s going to shine,” Millsaps said. “But I know if I’ve got 135-degree air, or air going in that’s 10 degrees warmer than it is outside, I’m saving money – and I’m saving the environment at the same time.”

Millsaps added that there are certainly a number of areas where this type of solar energy simply wouldn’t be worth the cost or the effort. “However, in the West and the Southwest, a laundry owner could cut his heating energy costs to practically nothing,” he said. “Each individual store owner needs to evaluate his situation.

“My investment is long term. It’s not going to pay for itself overnight. But it doesn’t cost anything. It’s just sitting there – no fans, no motors, no compressors, no pumps. If the sun shines, I’m saving money.”

Wood Furnace: Waste Not, Want Not

“The cost savings of being green is probably the biggest reason to go green,” suggested Mark Wagner, who owns 2,400-square-foot Valley Laundry in Park Falls, Wis., about 50 miles south of Lake Superior. “And in northern Wisconsin, the wood cost is probably more affordable than in other parts of the country. It’s waste wood.”

Thanks to that waste wood, Wagner currently pays about $300 to $400 per month for natural gas. With the “wood power,” he estimated that his gas bills would probably triple.

Four years ago, Wagner was ready for some relief from the high natural gas bills he was paying. Living in the midst of Wisconsin’s Northwoods region, he found a solution using waste from the area’s active lumber industry. Wagner installed a large wood furnace and boiler, stoking it with wood waste he purchases from a local veneer mill. The unit now heats the laundry – and three adjacent buildings Wagner owns – and heats the water for the washers and the air for the dryers.

“It’s located about 300 feet from my laundromat, and all of the lines are insulated and buried underground that feed into the laundry,” he explained. “The first place they go when they enter the laundromat is to my back room. Imagine three radiators. When someone puts a quarter into a dryer, the vents open to let outside air in – that air is pulled through the radiators, pre-heating the air before it hits the dryers. That saves on natural gas consumption right there by pre-heating our air. From there, the glycol goes over to a heat exchanger and heats the hot water that is used for the machines. So, basically, we supplement our hot water cost. I think we’re hitting about 70 percent in the winter months.”

The system, which uses 70 to 80 cords of firewood per year, cost approximately $30,000 to install. And it not only takes care of Wagner’s laundromat, but it heats his real estate office as well.

In addition, Wagner replaced his store’s interior lights with 32-watt high-efficiency fluorescent fixtures, which are saving him about $50 a month on lighting alone. What’s more, he’s installed motion sensors on his lighting.

“We shut off half the lights when there is no one in the laundry,” said Wagner, who expects additional saving of $25 a month. “I would suggest every laundry owner do this.”

But the big winner for Wagner is still his wood furnace.

“Natural gas was 90 cents a therm last winter, and now it’s about $1.23 a therm,” he said. “If I didn’t have it, I don’t think I could survive. That’s probably my profit margin right now – having alternative energy.”

Water Reclamation: A 20-Year Plan

Although Michael Greene only recently opened 4,500-square-foot Green Apple Laundry in Seminole, Fla., he is taking a long view toward the self-service laundry business.

“I’m looking at a store that can be operated for the next 20 years or so,” he said. “So I have to take into account that, in Florida, fresh water is becoming scarce, and that is be being reflected in the prices we pay.”

Greene decided to insulate himself from those increasing water and sewer prices by including a water reclamation system in the design of his store.

“Initially, it was an economic decision,” Greene admitted. “After that, it’s the right thing to do. I’m a lifelong Floridian. I’ve seen the population growth and our watersheds not grow. Everyone needs to conserve our fresh water.

“We’re expecting it to recycle approximately 80 percent of our laundry discharge. The 20 percent that is lost is due to evaporation and a backwashing of the system; it backwashes all of the internal filters. It doesn’t use any chemicals.”

In addition to the water, Greene has noticed a rather substantial energy savings because he is discharging fairly warm water from the washers, which goes into the system’s holding tanks to get reprocessed. Of course, when the laundry is busy, those holding tanks are constantly turning over. As a result, Greene is filtering warm water, so his water heater doesn’t have to work as hard.

“Depending on the time of year, the reprocessed water can be 10 to 30 degrees warmer than fresh water coming in from the utility,” he explained. “That adds up.”

Greene also is currently evaluating the use of natural and hypoallergenic laundry detergents and softeners in an effort to reduce his dependence on petroleum-based products.

“That’s for a combination of reasons,” he said. “First, I’d like to begin using those in my wash-dry-fold and commercial business. Next, depending on the economics, I might make it available for my coin laundry customers as well. Lastly, this would mean putting less complex materials into my recycling system. That’s a win across the board.”

Greene plans to promote his business philosophy by eventually reaching out to some of the more active environmental groups in the county – for example, perhaps agreeing to host a meeting or two of the local chapter of the Sierra Club at his laundry.

“It’s just to get some awareness out there, and see if that drives some additional business,” he said. “Certainly, the marketing side of being green is harder to quantify over time. But if you can justify being environmentally friendly on the economics alone, then it’s the right business decision.”

Energy-Saving Strategies

“Even with the rebirth of solar technology, you still, at some point – if you’re going to have hot water for your laundry – have to rely on some source of fossil fuel,” said Jeff Deal of Hamilton Engineering.

Fortunately, today’s high-efficiency condensing combustion water heaters have the ability to reach efficiencies close to 100 percent.

“That doesn’t meant that they operate at that level all the time, but they have the ability to go that high,” Deal explained. “And quite often the savings to the laundry owner are in excess of 35 percent.”

The other side of the coin is that this technology, according to Deal, is absolutely as green as one can get while still using fossil fuel.

“Unless we come up with a new fuel, this is it,” he said. “It’s not like a computer, where you can buy one today and tomorrow there’s one out there that’s twice as good.

“It has taken us roughly 120 years to get here. And we’ve eliminated the possibilities of becoming more efficient with that type of fuel.”

Of course, some common strategies to keep your water heater at its most efficient include: properly insulating the system, keeping the water temperature as low as possible (120 is widely considered to be the industry norm) and turning the system off when your store is closed; however, you’ve got to have some means of turning it back on if it gets too cold over night.

Although solar power is being used successfully in a number of coin laundries across the country, a couple of other green technologies at least worth mentioning are cogeneration and geothermal power, keeping in mind that any types of laundromat applications are still many years off.

Cogeneration is the use of a heat engine or a power station to simultaneously generate both electricity and useful heat. Conventional power plants emit the heat created as a byproduct of electricity generation into the environment through cooling towers, flue gas or some other means. However, cogeneration captures the byproduct heat for industrial heating purposes, either very close to the plant, or – especially in Scandinavia and eastern Europe – for distribution through pipes.

It is a thermodynamically efficient use of fuel. In separate production of electricity, some energy must be rejected as waste heat. But, in cogeneration, this thermal energy is put to good use.

Geothermal heating, on the other hand, has been used since the time of the Roman Empire as a way of heating buildings and spas by utilizing sources of hot water and steam that exist near the Earth's surface. Some areas, including substantial portions of many western states, are underlain by relatively shallow geothermal resources. Similar conditions exist in Iceland, parts of Japan and other geothermal hot spots around the world.

Where such geothermal resources are available, it is possible to distribute hot water or steam to multiple buildings. This technique, long practiced throughout the world in locations such as Reykjavik, Iceland; Boise, Idaho; and Klamath Falls, Oregon is known as geothermal district heating.

“Most returns on investment for those things are about 10 years,” said Deal, who has installed geothermal technology in greenhouse industry applications. “I don’t know that we’ll see that in the coin laundry industry in the near future.”

What we are seeing in self-service laundries far and wide is an emphasis on the type of store lighting being used.

“Some laundry owners have figured out that lighting is a big deal,” said Doug Dickson of Puget Sound Energy. “There is a huge difference among the different types of fluorescent lighting. If you have older T-12 fluorescent lighting with magnetic ballasts, this is the perfect opportunity to change to new technology, T-8 fluorescent lighting with electronic ballasts. Your lighting quality will stay more consistent, your cost of operation will decrease and your customers will leave believing that doing their laundry at your store results in their clothing being bright and clean.”

Due to its extreme energy efficiency, updating to T-8 lighting with electronic ballasts should pay for itself within three to four years, according to Dickson. And often your utility companies will help pay your for the upgrade in lighting.

Another area Dickson suggests laundry owners upgrade is in their restrooms.

“If you have public restrooms, make sure you get a low-flow toilet and install .5 gallon per minute aerators on your sinks,” he said. “A .5 gallon per minute aerator reduces the amount of water that gets used in that sink by at least 75 percent, and it still gets the job done.”

Your laundry’s beverage vending machines are another target for possible energy savings, Dickson said.

“You can purchase a vending machine controller,” he explained. “You might have to pay about $200 for it. But, for instance, if you’re on the East Coast, where energy is very expensive, you’re probably going to save more than that in the first year.”

The devices feature an occupancy sensor that scans for people in the area, so that when somebody comes into the store in the morning, the sensor “sees” them and the vending machine operates normally. However, when it doesn’t see anyone for a certain amount of time, it calculates the temperature inside the machine, and it spaces out the amount of time between when the machine turns on and off, while still keeping drinks cold but not using more energy than necessary.

“It works like a thermostat,” Dickson said. “At night, during closed hours, you can save a lot.”

And, of course, similar occupancy sensors are available for lighting as well, Dickson added, especially in low-traffic areas like offices, restrooms or behind the dryers.

“Often, back behind the dryers, there are lights that get turned on automatically and stay on all day,” he said. “You don’t need that. Those sensors are an easy, low-cost thing to do.”

Again, Dickson stressed that all of these energy-saving strategies might be eligible to rebates. So stay in touch with your utility companies and see what kind of help they can offer you and your business.

“The most important thing is to be confident that, as an industry, we are behind the market,” Wentworth said. “By that I mean there are a lot of customers out there who care about businesses doing more for the environment, and their expectations are quite high and evolving quite fast.

“I think you can be very confident as a business owner that you will attract more customers if you do more to reduce the environmental impact in how you run your business – and you won’t turn anybody away,” he added. “In five years, I have never heard or overheard anything negative from my customers about the stuff we’ve done.

“There is no down side from an operational perspective, and there are a lot of people out there who are more attracted to – and want to support – a business that’s doing more for the environment. And that is only going to increase as people become more aware of the challenges that we face globally to try to improve our environment before it’s too late.”