Page 5 - Mission Linen - Green from the word "GO"

the time of year, such as heat awareness, back safety, storing hazardous items, etc. Fleet staff have a separate program. Their focus includes developing defensive driv- ing skills and avoiding ergonomic inju- ries from lifting linen goods, or moving carelessly to and from the vehicle.
Along the lines of the hard-hat mandate, Milroy adds that all employees working in the soil sort area must wear full-cover PPE, regardless of what kinds of textiles they’re processing. “They get this weird thought of ‘We don’t have to be gowned up if we’re doing hotel, or if we’re do- ing kitchen (F&B textiles),” Milroy says, noting a requirement for head, eye and face covers, gloves gowns and shoe cov- ers. “Soil is soil. It doesn’t matter where it came from. But there is human con- tact with where that came from, and you don’t know what that human had or has.” The plant also has Healthcare Laundry Accreditation Council (HLAC) accreditation, and having extensive PPE in the soil-sort area is one of the require- ments for that program, he says. There’s little resistance to the policy because, as noted above, most hourly staff have min- imal industry experience. They haven’t worked in another plant where safety policies were less rigorous than those at Mission. Because of that, few employees question the requirement.
The plant’s Safety Committee meets monthly. It includes representatives from both hourly staff and management. Ideas for safety improvements are discussed during these sessions. “We’ll get one person from each department and then a management group,” Milroy says. “So we can all sit together and brainstorm. We’ve got a lot of stuff to talk about because the employees work the posi- tions. We can sit here as managers and tell them what’s safe and what’s not. But they’re the ones that are in the trench- es. They can tell us ‘This is unsafe,’ or ‘If we did this, this would help.’” Once suggestions for safety improvements are discussed during these sessions, Milroy or other managers work together to de- velop solutions. “We have those employ- ees and those department heads all sitting there and our engineering crew,” Milroy
says. “Then we can put our heads togeth- er and maybe our engineering crew can help design something so that we don’t have worry about that anymore.”
This proactive stance is important be- cause while the plant is highly auto- mated, processing flatwork still requires a significant amount of manual labor, particularly on the finishing side. Staff also work in close proximity to various large pieces of machinery. As production ramps up, the need for continuous safety monitoring will grow even more critical.
While technology aids safety by reduc- ing the need for physical labor, a related tech innovation at this plant includes the extensive use of security cameras. Mis- sion has installed 67 cameras that contin- uously record activity on the plant floor. If there’s a safety incident in the plant, there’s a good chance that one of these cameras will capture what occurred and assist in the effort to figure out what hap- pened and why.
PLANT WALK-THROUGH
Our tour of the plant begins in a large conference room with a panoramic view of the production floor. From there, we walk outside and around the plant to the soil loading docks. Adjacent to the plant is a small, box-like building that Milroy says was built to serve as a garage for ser- vicing the plant’s fleet vehicles. The plant currently is running four direct routes; it operates the same number of trucks. Mission Newark also services a depot in Santa Cruz, CA, that operates another eight routes. This brings the total num- ber of routes to 12.
That number is expected to rise as pro- duction expands, and in line with the plant’s “green” emphasis, one-quarter of the vehicles will run on alternative fu- els. Moving to the loading area (there are least 10 or more docks), we see met- al hooks that route drivers use to hang slings of soiled goods from their trucks. The hooks can slide around to the inside, thus simplifying the process of placing these items into carts.
Inside the plant, among the first things we see is a Republic trash compactor. Its use is part of the plant’s extensive effort to recycle cardboard, plastic, paper and other waste items. “They pick it up ev- ery couple of months,” Milroy says, not- ing that while the trash recycling doesn’t generate revenue, the hauler doesn’t charge Mission to remove it.
We next see a cart dumper from Kanne- giesser ETECH in the soil area. Employ- ees here separate large- and small-piece items and move them onto a conveyor that takes them to an upper deck desig- nated for F&B textiles. We watch as em- ployees sort goods into bins that identify specific items with a graphic image as well as words. This area has 28 chutes. Employees drop sorted goods into slings. When they reach a weight of 150 lbs. a software sensor automatically dispatches the slings to a storage area in the ceiling until they’re needed for washing.
Stepping to the wash aisle, we see two Pellerin Milnor Corp. PulseFlow® tun- nel washers. Each is equipped with 12, 150 lb. modules. The tunnels are de- signed to save water and average as little as .5 gallons per lb. Wash chemicals for these machines and other nearby equip- ment is provided through an Ultrax sys- tem from Ecolab Inc.
The plant has an array of Brim washer/ extractors as well. Slings move through the Kannegiesser ETECH overhead rail system and deposit their loads through a movable funnel attachment at the top of four 275 lb. washer/extractors and one 450 lb. machine. The washer/extractors are used for a variety of items, such as bath robes, that aren’t well suited to processing in the tunnels. The tunnels mainly are used for hotel and healthcare flatwork.
For small lots and stain-rewash items, we see five 125 lb. pony washers from American Dryer Corp. A few feet from the washer/extractors, we see a long sling suspended from the ceiling of the plant. Milroy describes this as a “manual drop zone.” As goods come out of the washer extractors, they move by conveyor and
28 Textile SERVICES § June 2018
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