After various discussions in class, one of the areas I realized that I could change in my own life to be more sustainable is laundry – using cold water, green detergents and reducing the use of my dryer by hanging clothes. The average American family of 4 uses over 1000 litres of water per day, with 21% going towards laundry, so these small, individual habit changes add up.
However, changing my laundry habits still felt like it had such a small impact – for example hotels and hospitality businesses make up 15% of all US commercial water use, with laundry being one of the top causes. After our class discussion about products as services I wondered if it could be applied to laundry and scaled to have a much wider impact. I was happy to learn about Xeros Cleaning Technologies, which is working to make this a reality.
Xeros offers a laundry service that includes their proprietary technology, installation, training, monitoring, detergent, and recycling. They use recyclable polymer beads with detergent that help pull stains off fabric and uses only 1/6 of the water used by traditional equipment. They currently offer these services to hotels and industrial laundry businesses – so far it has helped hotels to cut their water usage by more than 1 million gallons per year. What stood out to me was that they could help lower their operating costs by up to 50%, and they also offer to provide marketing support to communicate a business’s sustainability strategy to customers. Their full service model helps hospitality organizations to make a smooth transition to a more sustainable option and lowers the risk of adoption. In addition, the product-as-a-service model allows Xerox to control the recycling process of their chemicals and polymer beads in order to keep their product sustainable.
To me this was such a great example of adapting everyday product to be a service, executed in such a high quality way that adoption of sustainability makes perfect business sense. It will be interesting to see where the company goes next and how the cleaning industry will continue to innovate to become more sustainable.
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Kimberly Wong
April 1, 2017 — 7:50 pm
This is such an interesting concept! I looked into their website and it seems like they sell their own machines – I’m curious to know what happens to the old machines at these hotels/etc. when they switch over (or if it’s possible to switch over gradually if the machine breaks beyond repair).
In Vancouver, Habitat for Humanity has the ReStore, where old appliances from renovations can be donated and sold, with the proceeds going toward Habitat for Humanity. I think it’d be awesome if Xeros had a partership with an organization similiar to this to attempt to close the loop. Especially in the case of hotels, they must have very efficient, commercial grade machines that any average household would be lucky to have.
victoriayang
April 9, 2017 — 5:58 pm
That’s a great point – having a “disposal of old machines” component would definitely help to Xerox to provide a more complete transition process for hotels that want to switch to Xerox machines. It would also be a great new revenue stream to consider if they’re partnering with a recycling facility. Or, if they already have recycling facilities for their laundry balls, they may want to invest in a machine recycling facility that could also be used for their own old machines.