From bed linen to patient gowns, and lab coats to surgical items, textiles are everywhere in the healthcare industry. They are an essential aspect to providing quality healthcare and also provide a huge opportunity to assess, and potentially improve, the environmental impacts of linen management.

According to the 2005 Comparative Operating Revenues and Expense Profile for the Healthcare Textile Management Industry, hospitals with more than 300 beds use between 21 and 22 pounds of textiles per patient day. This equates to more than 2 million pounds of laundry for a typical 300-bed hospital. Moreover, for those hospitals and healthcare facilities that are using disposable products, that’s a tremendous amount of waste destined for the landfill. Sometimes, contaminated disposables must be treated as regulated medical waste. This comes with added cost and environmental impact. Textile goods – both linen and disposable – have a significant environmental and fiscal impact on healthcare organizations. Administrators looking to reduce the amount of waste generated by their facilities, improve their environmental footprint, and strengthen financial sustainability should closely examine how they use and process textiles and when they decide to use disposables.  


Environmental Impact of Using Linen
Reusable healthcare textiles environmental impact considerations:


1. Materials: Are you buying or renting “environmentally preferable” products when available?
2. Water: How much water does it take to wash a pound of linen?
3. Fuel & Electricity: How much natural gas, oil, and electricity does it take to process linen?
4. Chemicals: What chemicals are being used to launder your linen? Are there safer alternatives?


Environmental Impact of Using Disposables
Disposable products used as an alternative to textile goods also have an impact on the environment:


1. Material: Is the material used to manufacture the disposable products made of recycled materials?
2. Water: How much water does it take to manufacture the disposable product?
3. Fuel & Electricity: How much natural gas, oil, and electricity does it take to manufacture and transport the disposable product to your door?
4. Chemicals: What types and volume of chemicals are use in the manufacturing process?
5. Waste: How much solid waste and how much regulated medical waste does the disposable product produce when it is thrown away?


Fiscal Impact of Linen & Disposable Textile Use
The choices administrators make regarding linen and disposable products use will affect the organization’s bottom line. Consider these costs:


1. On-Premise Laundry: If you operate an on-premise laundry, are you accounting for all of the costs necessary to run the facility, including all labor, benefit, water, energy, and merchandise costs?
2. Storage Space: How much space in the facility is reserved for storing reusable and disposable products? Can that space be reduced and used for revenue generation activities either by improving control of textile inventory or reducing the amount of disposable products in use?
3. Outsourcing: If you are operating an on-premise laundry, what savings would you realize by outsourcing and converting the laundry to revenue-generation space?
4. Disposal of Solid Waste/Hazardous Waste: How much does it cost per ton to remove disposable products as solid, hazardous, and medical waste?




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