Detecting infection

As we become more and more enmeshed in the global economy, discerning buyers have a much wider range of potential suppliers for their textiles, many of which end up in the UK High Street.

Many of the textiles produced around the world are of a high standard and one would be hard pressed to find any significant faults or problems with them

However, there are still a great many inferior textiles supplied to the UK. When problems arise with these, the launderer or cleaner bears the brunt of the customer’s complaint.

The way a garment is labelled influences the customer’s perception, but this view is not necessarily accurate. For example, because a shirt that is described as “Made in Italy” and supplied by a “designer” house will not necessarily be perfect.

This month we also examine hygienic cleanliness in the laundry and washing processes.

Hygienic cleanliness is a key issue within our industry; the health and safety of the laundry employee as well as the customer who use the laundry services depends on this.
One aspect of health and safety is the removal of any harmful micro-organisms that may come in on the soiled textiles or be added to the textiles leaving the laundry.
An easy and economic way of checking the hygiene standards your laundry produces is via the use of contact dipslides. Such dipslides are not designed to be highly accurate or to identify what specific types of micro-organism are present. They will only pick up one bug in a thousand but this will give you an assessment based on the number of colonies grown over a 3-5days period when the dipslide is incubated at 35-39C.
Recent work in several plants has confirmed that the wash processes are all reaching the required 71C for 3 minutes (and longer) and in some instances, injections of peracetic acid are being used as a sour and of course, peracetic acid is a very good disinfectant. And yet when we complete the contact dipslide assessment work there have been an increasing number of situations where very high levels of micro-organic activity is being achieved in the final rinse water and on the damp items after the moisture has been reduced by either hydro-extraction or membrane pressing.
Of further concern is the high level of fungal growth, especially on membrane press baskets and at the unloading end of the CBW.
The industry is currently not sure where all of these micro-organisms have come from and detailed examination work is still required. In several instances it has been identified that the incoming water supply was contaminated - and only a brief inspection of the water storage tank found dead birds and small mammals decomposing.
These were introducing potentially harmful contamination into the rinse water and re-infecting the work that had been so carefully decontaminated during the main hot wash stage of the process.
With summer well on the way, storage tanks will increasingly become a major potential source of re-contamination. The water will be warmer and wild animals will look for easily available sources of water. Once they fall into the tank, they cannot escape. They drown and then rapidly decompose in the warm water and make your water supply foul.
Check your water tank at least once weekly and ensure all loose debris, litter and any other undesirable items are removed, including any dead animals. It may also be worth treating the tank with small amounts of hypochlorite bleach, which can most effectively be done on a Friday afternoon, so that nothing grows in the tank over the weekend.

Antiseptic ointments such as “Savlon” used in the home and “Hibisoap”and “Hibiclens” used in the hospital, contain chlorhexadine as its active disinfecting ingredient.
Chlorhexadine has been around for a long time and most launderers avoid the use of hypochlorite bleach on articles contaminated with chlorhexadine as the stain will turn to a tea/coffee coloured stain and then the only way of removing it is with a pair of scissors!
When we received a bundle of towels for fault appraisal, on first inspection they were all exhibiting the typical stains caused by chlorhexadine.
However, closer inspection identified a range of marks and types of soiling that would normally have been removed had the towels been given a good, well balanced wash process.
Testing for chlorhexadine was inconclusive, so the towels were cut in half (with the owner’s consent) and subjected to a hot wash at 75C using a good fully built synthetic detergent (SABS 1044 type 3) plus 5g/kg of sodium percarbonate.
After one wash the results were startling. Most of the soiling had been successfully removed, the towels were beginning to lose their dingy appearance and almost all of the chlorhexadine stains had disappeared.
The washed half of the towel was cut in half again and one portion given the same wash process as on the first occasion. There was a significant further improvement and all the staining had been removed.
Further investigation confirmed that due to costs pressure constraints, the launderer had not only reduced the wash temperatures significantly but had also cut his chemicals usage levels and reduced the process time to produce the result now seen here.
Where it is readily accepted that our industry is in a very price competitive market place – reducing costs to become more competitive by cutting detergent, temperatures and wash times is not the solution.

Just because a garment is sold as an Italian designer shirt does not mean that it will not shrink nor contain the defects that are commonly found with its cheaper counterparts.
The picture shows what was originally a 16in collar that fitted the owner perfectly until it was washed. A new unwashed original “spare” collar is a full centimetre longer than the collar attached to the shirt.
In this case, there was nothing wrong with the shirting material. It was the interlining stiffener used in the collar that shrank, not the fabric, as shown by the bubbling and puckering on the reverse side of the collar.
This is a manufacturing defect and the shirt should be returned to the manufacturer to resolve.
On a temporary basis, it is possible for a launderer to “stretch” the collar virtually back to its original size by pressing it for a couple of seconds on the reverse side to heat the fabric thoroughly but without drying it completely. Whilst hot, the collar should then be stretched and quickly placed the correct side up onto the collar press to be fully dried.
This will often recover almost 100% of the shrinkage. However, on a hot day, when the wearer starts to perspire and the collar gets damp, it will start to shrink again. It certainly will shrink when it is next washed, possibly by even more than when it was washed the first time, making it even more difficult to stretch back to its original size.
There was also a problem with a food splash down the front. The wash process had successfully removed most of the soiling, but there were still some light brown/orange spots which the launderer was having difficulty in removing.
Looking at these spots under ultraviolet light indicated a high protein presence. On a white fabric this type of marking should have been easily removed with application of a very mild hypochlorite bleach solution.
When a couple of drops of very dilute 0.5% hypochlorite solution were placed onto one of the marks, immediately the pink dye started to turn white. The dye recipe, unlike those on most modern shirting materials, was very poor and could not withstand even the mildest application of common bleach.
These stains were finally removed via the use of a hot wash in sodium perborate (sodium percarbonate would have worked just as well) which successfully removed the stains, without causing any further dye loss.