Our Environment
Our Environment
Engergy
As a steam-heated laundry, we use minimal electricity and to maintain a constant supply of power during outages, we have a newly installed automatic switch over diesel generator. This alternative source of electricity ensures that the Coral Clean factory will be able to render services to all our clients despite the current unpredictable supply of electricity from Eskom.

We are currently using 2 forms of energy:

1. Electrical power to drive all the motors of the machines.

We are extremely efficient in our use of electrical power in order to reduce our Eskom dependency and costs (Eskom has recently indicated that energy prices will increase, 
at least, on average 16% p.a. over the next five years – this is more than double after 5 years) as much as possible and to prevent any ‘shut downs’ in times of Eskom’s power outages, but also to reduce our carbon footprint. We are investigating further alternative power options (inter alia generators) in order to ensure 100% Eskom power independence.

2. Thermal energy of steam to generate heat for the washing, drying, ironing and finishing.

We have 2 coal/charcoal/biomass fired boilers. We also have 1 “energy recycling” units in action. We “harvest” most of the energy from our tumble dryers exhaust air, in order to pre-heat the supply to the dryers. We also use heat-plate exchangers to “harvest” energy from our condensate return to pre-heat our main wash water for the washing machines. We estimate this as a 30% saving on total energy used.

We are also currently investigating a joint-venture with the Centre for Renewable and Sustainable Energy Studies of the University of Stellenbosch in making use of Solar Energy to assist in our energy supply.
Water Recycling
Water is one of our most important natural resources and we foresee an increase in its value to our operations, from a cost perspective due to supply, as well as determining the quality and cost of our chemistry.

We have recently installed a water recycling plant which allows us to recycle ±70% of our current water usage. The water recycling plant makes use of reverse osmoses technology which provides us with high quality water, on par or even better than what we are receiving from the municipality. This will also improve our energy consumption, as well as our chemistry.
Chemicals
Our choice of chemicals underscore our drive to be as environmentally friendly as possible throughout all our processes. We also do not make use of chlorine bleach in our washing process bay – we use peroxide instead. Chlorine bleach contains hypochlorite as the active ingredient and has several disadvantages to the environment. Hydrogen peroxide is a good oxidizing agent, and the reduced product is water which is non-polluting, i.e. it is environmentally friendly.
Total Carbon Footprint
We believe CoralClean, currently, has the smallest carbon footprint in the South African laundry industry due to our alternative forms of energy supply, our energy efficient mechanisms and our water usage. As discussed above, we intend to improve this even more.
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