Do Las Vegas hotels (especially the ones on the Strip) have their own laundry departments where they wash and clean sheets and towels every day or do they depend on outside services to deliver linen on a daily basis?
The responses we received from four hotel-casino companies indicate that megaresort laundry is handled in a variety of ways.
Ever-helpful Boyd Gaming has a one-stop-shop solution. Preparing for its Echelon project (which didn't happen), in 2008 it opened its own 100,000-square-foot industrial laundry in Henderson, where all the linens and towels from its 12 Las Vegas properties are sent to be cleaned -- upwards of 75,000 pounds a day, every day. Starting a new laundry from scratch allowed Boyd to build an environmentally sensitive operation.
For example, the facility uses 1.7 gallons of water for every pound of laundry, compared with the three gallons of water for every pound that traditional laundries need. It also consumes 27% less electricity and 47% less natural gas than a similarly sized one uses, which helps it cut annual greenhouse-gas emissions by about 40%.
In addition, the center uses enzymes that break down bacteria and dirt better than conventional detergents, so the water is 120 degrees, compared to the 160 degrees in conventional laundries. Economizers that recapture the hot exhaust air apply it to the wash water, which also accounts for a large percentage of the savings in electricity and gas. And recycling the water saves 20 million gallons a year over conventional washing.
Boyd's facility, on Moser Drive, was the first LEED-certified laundry facility in the United States, a true feather in Boyd’s cap.
MGM Resorts International takes a two-track approach. “The company-owned and operated MGM laundry facility in North Las Vegas serves MGM Grand. Brady Linen Services provides laundry services for the rest of our major Strip resorts,” says MGM spokeswoman Yvette Monet.
Brady, in fact, is the major laundry player on the Las Vegas Strip. Its linens division processes upwards of 80% of the Strip's laundry (80,000 rooms) in six facilities. This adds up to a million pounds of linens, towels, and others per day, roughly 1.4 million pieces of laundry.
One facility that processes 400,000 in two eight-hour shifts uses three nine-module 250-pound "tunnel" washers and one eight-module 250-pound tunnel. One of the tunnels is designed for specialty items, such as shower curtains and mats. The plant also employs sixteen 500-pound and six 300-pound dryers, all equipped with "autolint" technology — a central vacuum that
collects the lint from all the dryers and gathers it in a central location.
To separate laundry from numerous different properties, the plant's sorting platform is one of the largest in the world, with 38 sorting compartments. A large electronic screen indicates what the item is, what property the item is from, where the item is going in the laundry, and how full that area is.
Brady Linen Services is a division of Brady Industries, which built the self-laundry facility for MGM Grand; it also built Caesars Entertainment's Central Laundry, which does the wash for all of its properties in Las Vegas.
Las Vegas Sands told us that it does its laundry on site, while Wynn Resorts completely outsources its laundry from the Wynn and Encore, presumably to Brady Linen Services.
Other properties we contacted didn't respond, perhaps not wishing to air their dirty laundry in public.
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Llew
Dec-27-2017
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Annie
Dec-28-2017
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