With more than 100,000 hotel rooms in Abu Dhabi and Dubai alone, how does the hospitality industry ensure daily fresh linen and clean towels for its guests? How do hotels across the country manage to supply thousands of crisp clean sheets for all those beds on a daily basis? How do they get fresh table cloths and napkins for every restaurant sitting, towels for all those bathrooms, and furnish them with five-star efficiency?
The answer lies in the UAE’s largest laundry — in Abu Dhabi’s Musaffah industrial area.
Since it opened in February of last year, the Bubble Laundry has washed, ironed and folded 45 tonnes of laundry each day.
That is the equivalent weight of six-and-a-half African elephants, and the business plans to expand to 65 tonnes.
Once a lorryload of hotel uniforms, bedding, towels and other laundry arrives at the loading dock, it is put on to trolley cages and each item is scanned.
Seamus Desmond, general manager, says: “All of the linen has a little RFID [radio frequency identification] chip on it, so we roll the cage through a scanner. This scanner then picks up every single piece that’s in the trolley in seconds.
“Those chips will tell you not only what’s being sent in and what’s going out, and whether they match, but it will also tell you how many washes the particular item has had, how many times it has been repaired, in the case of uniforms, and so on.”
In the washing area, staff load the laundry on to two conveyor belts, which travel to an automated sorting platform.
The items are separated by category into a series of bins, each holding 60 kilograms.
They then head to the bagging area, on another conveyor belt. The bags are transported to a storage rail system in the roof where they are opened and closed by robotic hand.
At the washing machine stage, the “tunnel washers” work together to wash two tonnes per hour.
Bags are dropped into the chutes every two minutes, and each wash cycle has 14 stages.
The laundry exits through a hydraulic press, which squeezes out water to a moisture content of about 45 per cent.
The linen is then dried, in six double-batch driers that can dry 120 kilograms in less than 15 minutes. Five single-batch driers tend to the sheets.
The clean laundry is then deposited into coloured tubs and assigned a barcode which determines the type of fold requested.
Once each item is ironed, it heads to a folding machine and then a stacker, followed by shrink wrap.
On the way out, the laundry is scanned on a cage trolley and each customer’s batch items get a security tag.
The drivers return the laundry back to the customer and pick up the next batch.
Bubble Laundry provides a 24-hour turnaround to clients across the UAE, although it can also accommodate 12-hour requests — mainly from Dubai. About half of the intake is towels.
Hotel staff uniforms also have barcodes, which store information about the wearers, their employee numbers, how many times the uniforms have been washed and how many times repaired.
Uniforms can also be dry cleaned, pressed and fully finished.
Mr Desmond says: “They go up on to a rail system, through a drying tunnel and, if the finish is good enough for the customer, they’re automatically taken and put up on to the sort system.”
The rail system can hold 300 items at any time, and bundles uniforms in the order requested by the customer.
“We also do some baby carriages for Etihad. We dismantle them, take off the fabrics, wash them and send them back — every week,” says Mr Desmond.
The laundry industry is closely tied to the fortunes of the hospitality sector and is “not for the faint hearted”, he says.
It is capital-heavy and returns are not immediate. But he believes Expo 2020 should help.
“By 2020, Dubai will go from its current 88,000 hotel bedrooms up to 150,000, and Abu Dhabi will go from its current 27,000 to more than 40,000, so there is huge growth in this market,” he says.
Sustainability plays a key role in Bubble Laundry’s business model.
The large driers draw air from outside, heat it with gas burners and then send it through the loads, before ejecting it through a chimney.
“You don’t want to draw the air from the inside, which a lot of laundries do, because we maintain the temperature in the factory at 26 degrees Celsius,” says Mr Desmond.
“You’ll go to most other laundries and the temperature inside can be over 50 degrees, so it’s really uncomfortable for workers.”
A concern for workers’ welfare is not solely tied to the thermostat.
The laundry hosts regular “work councils” once a month, where representatives of each team meet to discuss environmental issues, health and safety, and their welfare.
The previous meetings’ minutes go on display near the entrance.
Aside from steam generators used to heat water, most of the machinery at the facility uses gas burners, which Mr Desmond says are more energy-efficient.
The chemical room has automatic lighting, run by the plant maintenance system, which controls all the facility’s water, gas and electricity supplies through a central computer.
“Our chemical room is different from most laundries, in that we have a bulk system,” says Mr Desmond.
Chemicals are pumped from the tankers into holding tanks, and are then redistributed through smaller pipes to the “day tanks”.
“It’s very finely controlled, so we get the exact quantities, depending on the wash or the product that we’re washing.”
Automating this process takes away unnecessary handling of such chemicals.
“In the next few months we are fitting a water recycling system, so the water that we send down the drain, we will take it back, recycle it, filter it down to drinkable quality and reuse that water again,” says Mr Desmond.
Bubble Laundry will also begin trials of the country’s first compressed natural gas lorry next week.
“If it is successful, we will put the whole fleet over to compressed natural gas,” says Mr Desmond.
The entire laundry operation employs about 80 people. Although much of the work is automated, Mr Desmond says there is a limit.
“Will there be a day that robots do it? It probably wouldn’t be cost effective,” he says. “You will always have the human touch: you will always have these guys that have to inspect, that have to tell if there’s a stain still left.”
halbustani@thenational.ae
