Although Biohazard Laundry Poses Some Obvious Challenges, With the Proper Procedures in Place, It Can Become a Profitable Segment of Your Full-Service Laundry Operation
One of the biggest decisions you’ll need to make with regard to your wash-dry-fold and commercial accounts business is whether or not to accept garments and other items that may pose a biohazard risk.
If you choose to accept this type of laundry, you need to put some clear policies and procedures in place for how to handle these special loads. Strict guidelines are crucial for protecting your employees, as well as your bottom line.
For example, at my store, we don’t accept laundry from senior living facilities – so we try to minimize our exposure to biohazard items that way. However, we do offer pickup and delivery for a select group of home-bound seniors and disabled individuals.
In addition, we have a few homeless shelter accounts, and we frequently receive urine-soaked bedding and linens from these shelters.
Once you make that decision to accept items with a potential biohazard risk, the first thing you need to do is be sure your employees are OK with doing that kind of laundry and to equip them with the right tools to handle the job safely.
It’s not just how you wash these items, but also how you interact with it when it first comes in. At The Laundry Doctor, we use disposable gloves, which are very inexpensive. Anyone who is handling any potentially soiled clothing or other items are required to wear these gloves. We also have hand sanitizer readily available for our attendants.
Of course, we also want to protect our drivers. Therefore, we require those accounts that typically have soiled loads to place the items in plastic bags so that our drivers don’t have to touch it.
Bagging the garments also helps us back at the store. If they’re bagged in plastic, this really minimizes the contact our employees have with those items. Generally, we don’t sort this type of biohazard laundry as closely or as thoroughly as we would a normal wash-dry-fold load.
Frequently, we’ll just put on our gloves, open the plastic bag and shove the entire load into a washer with as little contact as possible with the garments. Then, obviously, once the load is clean, there shouldn’t be any risk from that point forward.
In tackling soiled or biohazard-type laundry, we treat certain loads with ammonia. We also use high-quality built detergents that have boosted pH levels to ensure that loads are clean and that all of the soil is removed.
When we receive heavily soiled loads from homeless shelters or home-bound seniors, we’ll also commonly use a urine treatment from Clorox. Initially, this urine remover was specific to drycleaners, but the formula has since been sold to Clorox, and it’s now very inexpensive. I buy quite a bit of it, and it’s available at most Sam’s Club locations.
As I’ve outlined, we handle a limited amount of biohazard laundry at my store. However, if you’re thinking about getting into this particular niche more heavily, you may want to consider charging extra for it.
A lot of laundry owner include a biohazard upcharge, which can be implemented as a flat rate per load and on a per-pound basis. I’ve seen $10 to $20 biohazard fees added to the cost of a soiled load, and I’ve also seen operators charge as much as an additional $1 per pound for handling this type of laundry.
If you decide on an upcharge, you should share some of that with your employees. After all, you’re putting your attendants at risk and, more importantly, you’re putting them into a situation where they might not feel as appreciated when they’re doing that kind of work.
You should do something for your employees who handle biohazard loads. Whether it’s a bonus program or some other incentive, you need to make sure your employees know you appreciate their work on this type of laundry.
The next step, as we’ve done at The Laundry Doctor, is to develop some specific processes and procedures – especially if you plan to handle nursing home laundry. A lot of laundry owners across the country are doing nursing home work. There’s certainly a strong demand for it. Although many nursing homes have their own in-house laundry facilities to handle the personal clothing of seniors, many of them don’t, and they’re looking for sources to handle it.
But you need to have strict procedures in place, and it starts with what we do by insisting on the soiled loads being placed in biohazard-safe plastic bags to protect the drivers and the employees at the store when handling these loads.
Also, gloves are a must. And, if you’re dealing with serious biohazard laundry, perhaps provide your employees with longer-than-normal gloves so that there’s just that much less of a possibility of any contact with the skin.
You also may want to get your employee vaccinated for hepatitis. I know a lot of laundry owners who have created immunization programs for their attendants. It’s a good practice, especially if your staff members are regularly dealing with biohazard-type garments.
Many self-service laundry owners simply refuse to tackle any type of biohazard laundry, preferring to not have that type of risk in their stores – and that’s certainly an acceptable policy.
However, for those of us who want to be of assistance to people in that kind of need or who want to create a market for that specific service, it’s wise to implement solid safety practices and procedures, as well as to properly charge these more challenging accounts and to compensate your employees for their work on this type of laundry.
