ORLANDO, FLA.—Hotel industry veteran Brian Guernier LEED AP BD&C recently launched Pillow-Fresh in Orlando to provide the local hospitality industry with the knowledge and equipment necessary to implement pillow renovation as a means to save money and reduce landfill waste.
Changes in hotel bedding over the last 15 years has resulted in pillow proliferation in hotels. A typical hotel room has between six to 10 sleeping pillows, or roughly 2,100 pillows per 300-room hotel. At a weight of 2.5 lbs. per pillow this equates to roughly 2.5 tons of landfill waste every two years. Most brands require operators to change out pillows every two years. Multiply that by the estimated 120,000 hotel rooms in Orlando and that is an estimated 500 tons of waste annually. Pillow filling, whether down and/or feather or synthetic, will last much longer than two years, and throwing it away is unnecessary with the technology that is available.
Most hotel operators know that conventional laundering of pillows is both costly due to the excessive amount of drying time, and that washing eliminates the sizing in the pillow ticking, resulting in filling leakage over time. Plus, if a feather/down filled pillow does open in washing equipment it creates a huge mess plus a potentially costly repair.
Process Takes Just Four to Five Minutes Per Pillow
Implementing pillow renovation will allow a hotel to take a pillow at the end of its useful life, treat its filling with ozone and UVC to clean, sanitize and deodorize it, and then blow the filling back into a new cover. This process works with all loose filling pillows including feather/down, cluster fiber, gel, buckwheat, etc. This process takes approximately four to five minutes per pillow and costs as little as $5 to $6 per pillow to implement. It also reduces pillow waste by up to 85 percent.
Pillow-Fresh provides a property with several options to implement this service: a sale of the equipment; a short-term rental of the equipment; or an on-site/pickup service using Pillow-Fresh personnel on a price per piece basis. Pillow-Fresh plans to expand its service to markets throughout the country.
“As sustainability continues to gain momentum within the hospitality industry, our goal is to make pillow renovation a standard operating practice,” Guernier says.
Go to Pillow-Fresh.
