Super Green Clean - The pitch

Save the planet, your time, and your wallet with Super Green Clean. We clean your clothes using practically no water, or energy, and save you money at the same time.

Super Green Clean - The fun part

The fun part with this project is finding and eliminating waste. The cleaner business is fairly mature so creating a successful business will require increasing margins by reducing costs. The biggest cost, as stated above, is going to be labor. A smart way of scheduling the effort of hourly workers could be an amazing cost saver.

Super Green Clean - The growth potential

If SGC serviced all of San Francisco, and 25% of the residents signed up, SGC would have 150 million dollars in revenue per year. If it went national, it could be easily ten times that.

Super Green Clean - The monetization

Making this idea take off will require an intense focus on waste, especially human effort.  Super Green Clean is really designed for city dwellers who probably don’t have a washer and dryer in their apartment or condo.  This means that the potential customer will either have access to a bank of washers and dryers in their building or use a public laundromat. In either case, they will probably pay about two to three dollars a load and need to do about two loads a week or about fifteen pounds of clothing. In the Bay Area people can use Purple Tie, which costs $1.69/lb or about $25 per week. This is a little more expensive than most people are willing to pay for laundry. Super Green Clean (SGC) will need to aim for $1/lb. The warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that you are saving energy and water won’t be enough for everyone to want to use this service.

If a week’s worth of laundry is two loads or 15 pounds, then SGC’s costs for a week’s worth of laundry should be about ten or twelve dollars.  SGC uses very little water and electricity, and probably less than 25 cents worth of detergent per week’s worth of laundry. The dominant cost is labor. Minimum wage in San Francisco is $10.55/hour this year plus employer payroll taxes, which adds at least 7%. So the minimum cost for hourly labor would be around $15 per hour. So, from getting the clothing from the customer drop off location (more on that later) to SGC and back to the drop off location, there must be less than one hour of labor per week’s worth of clothing.

The cost of collection can be reduced by having a small number, four or five, drop off spots within a half mile of the SGC location. The drop off spots would work sort-of like Amazon’s Lockers. Customers would drop off their laundry in a SGC bag, which will have a QR code for billing at the scheduled drop off location. A SGC employee would then go to each of the drop off spots and return to the SGC location with all of the QR-coded bags. If the locations are chosen intelligently, and there are on average at least 10 bags per drop off location, then the transport of the clothing could cost as little as  0.05 hours (or half an hour per trip). I’m assuming that the drive to the drop off location would be used to return clean clothing as well.

Once the clothing reaches the SGC location, then the clothing needs to be sorted and put into the washing machines, transferred to the dryer, and finally folded.  The first step should take only about a minute. Moving clothing to the dryers will take more time as it requires putting clothing on the wire forms. This could take five or ten minutes. The last step, folding, will also be fairly time consuming. It will be important to improve the time it takes to fold by making mechanical tools (like those used to fold t-shirts in retail stores) or simple human-aided robotic solutions.

If the employees are hourly, then other cost saving techniques can be used. Hourly workers need a steady rate of work to do. Otherwise, they just sit idle and waste money. Moving dryered clothing to a holding area waiting to be folded would free up the dryer space and allow the workers to get the clothing when they have a break.

Another way to manage worker load is to have three cleaning plans: same day, next day, and two day. If a customer has time flexibility, then they will pay less per pound.

Super Green Clean - The idea

Washing machines can use up to 40 gallons of water per load. Washing loads on hot water can spend 0.5 kWhs and the dryer can use 5 kWhs. The amount of water usage can be reduced significantly by designing the washer and dryer to be water and energy efficient.

This will require designing the washers and dryers from scratch. The main theme will be reuse. Large tubs of water will be stored behind the washers. The well-insulated tubs will be kept at different temperatures: hot, warm, and cool. The water will be mixed with the minimum amount of soap necessary to get the clothing clean. After the washing is done, the soapy water is removed and the soap and other contaminants are removed from the water, either mechanically (e.g. reverse osmosis [RO]) or chemically (e.g. distillation). The water goes back into the tub of the same temperature. Potentially, in the case of using RO to clean the water, very little heat and water would be lost in this process.

What’s left in the washer is clean, but wet clothing. The next step is to wring out as much water is possible before drying. For sturdy clothing spinning at a high velocity can remove a significant amount of the water.  For less sturdy clothing like wool sweaters, this isn’t an option. After all of water that can be removed in the washer, it’s time to dry.

It’s possible to make drying clothes significantly more energy efficient.  The way the clothes get dry in the dryer if through evaporation. It’s possible to get fast evaporation without as much heat if you can expose all of the clothing’s surface area to the air and use convection to dry the clothing.

The way you would do this is by hanging the clothing on flexible wire frames designed for different clothing articles, t-shirts, jeans, underwear, etc. Once on the wire frames, it will look like a group of invisible people, each wearing single articles of clothing. All of the wire frames will be put in the ‘dryer’. This dryer is a large tube that would look like an elongated donut, the clothes are placed in one part of the donut with all of the holes facing one direction. On the part of the donut without clothes is a de-humidifier, a small heater, and a fan. The fan blows dry warm air through the clothes. Because the clothing has all of it’s surface area exposed to the flowing air, the clothing will dry as almost as a fast as in a conventional dryer.  I think this new dryer design could reduce energy usage by a factor of ten.

Super Green Clean - The motivation

There few appliances that we buy that get less useage over their lifetimes than clothes washers and dryers.  There are two things that cause many people to shy away from using a laundry service: cost and convenience.  One thing that they probably don’t think about is how much water and energy they are using while washing clothing. The real cost to the wallet and planet are larger than they appear.