Earth Day brings many and varied opportunities to honor and appreciate our natural environment and take steps to protect it. Celebrations in our area ranged from urban gardening and farm-to-table cooking demonstrations to community-wide festivals, complete with live music, food trucks, pottery painting, and reusable grocery bag pick-up. While I love a good food truck taco while listening to a local cover band, I also feel compelled to recognize Earth Day by sharing my experience working with our new-ish client, Textile Rental Services Association of America (TRSA)—the association for linen, uniform, and facility services providers. You might wonder what linens and uniforms have to do with Earth Day… a few months ago, before Yes& started working with TRSA, I couldn’t have told you either.
As it turns out, while many of us take one day out of the year to think about reducing our environmental impact, minimizing our carbon footprint, limiting our water and energy use, and generally protecting our planet, TRSA and its members do this 24/7/365. And they have been doing so for over 110 years. This is a core part of their business. TRSA members operate commercial laundries; provide hygienically clean linens to hospitals and healthcare clinics; deliver tablecloths, napkins, and floormats to restaurants; and ensure hotels have plenty of clean sheets.
https://www.trsa.org/certification/clean-green/#requirements
This is not your local neighborhood laundromat we’re talking about here. These tend to be large operations with massive industrial machinery. Their practices can enormously impact how much water and energy is used and how much carbon is released into the environment while providing essential products and services we use every day. We all use and benefit from this ubiquitous but unseen industry. The healthcare sector alone processes millions of pounds of laundry annually, so how that laundry is collected, washed, finished, folded, packed out, and delivered to customers matters.
Enter TRSA and its earth-friendly practices, including its Clean Green Certification. Through this initiative, TRSA and its members demonstrate their commitment to sustainability and leadership in the industry. TRSA’s Clean Green certification requires suppliers to meet strict water and energy conservation standards and deploy best management practices (BMPs). TRSA verifies compliance with on-site inspections of facilities and requires documentation of their water and energy use and compliance with BMPs.
The result of TRSA members’ conservation efforts, including but not limited to those with the Clean Green certification, is billions of gallons in water savings annually and substantial energy savings compared to at-home or in-house processing. The Clean Green certification also requires companies to meet minimum standards for alternative fuel use and implement technology to reduce emissions for their fleet vehicles. Each of these efforts helps to reduce the environmental impact of essential products and services.
When TRSA needed to find creative ways to tell the story of its contributions to environmental conservation and other benefits of commercial laundry use, they turned to Yes& for strategic thinking and public relations services. Yes& proudly supports TRSA’s public relations and communications efforts by sharing news, messages, and key developments with various audiences to help them highlight the environmental, cost-savings, and other benefits of commercial laundry services in specialty media across the healthcare, food and beverage (F&B), hospitality, and industrial sectors.
From connecting TRSA members with customers who seek efficient, sustainable, and reliable products and services to informing federal and state decision-makers about the impacts of policy developments on the industry, Yes& works closely with TRSA leaders to amplify, reinforce, and share the association’s and its members’ stories. Enabling TRSA to reach customers and other stakeholders who make critical resourcing and policy decisions is important because increasing knowledge and awareness of these products and services can help us save Earth’s vital natural resources—not just on Earth Day, but every day.