The Green Factories
Our Green Factories are a revolution in the large-scale ecological care of everyday clothes.
Until now, the linen industry has had systems for treating the robust linen of professionals (hotels, restaurants, work clothes, etc.). This linen, designed to be "brutalized" during its maintenance, is generally made of white cotton and of robust construction. It does not require any delicacy.
This is not the case for home linen, which poses challenges due to its delicate construction and the large number of colours and materials used for its aesthetics.
Maintaining this delicate laundry to industrial proportions has required our engineers to innovate in many areas of technology to create tools that can preserve the garments during the care cycle.
While the laundry industry commonly uses aggressive chemical compounds such as bleach or soda, we have implemented environmentally friendly processes on an industrial scale using eco-labelled detergents.
After the filtration of process water, we are progressively moving towards total recycling of the water used, thus allowing the total elimination of the discharge of detergent residues and microplastics from the environment.
This is a revolution in the approach to clothing care because until now environmental pollution was implicitly considered a necessary and unavoidable evil to ensure daily hygiene and health.
Until now, the linen industry has had systems for treating the robust linen of professionals (hotels, restaurants, work clothes, etc.). This linen, designed to be "brutalized" during its maintenance, is generally made of white cotton and of robust construction. It does not require any delicacy.
This is not the case for home linen, which poses challenges due to its delicate construction and the large number of colours and materials used for its aesthetics.
Maintaining this delicate laundry to industrial proportions has required our engineers to innovate in many areas of technology to create tools that can preserve the garments during the care cycle.
While the laundry industry commonly uses aggressive chemical compounds such as bleach or soda, we have implemented environmentally friendly processes on an industrial scale using eco-labelled detergents.
After the filtration of process water, we are progressively moving towards total recycling of the water used, thus allowing the total elimination of the discharge of detergent residues and microplastics from the environment.
This is a revolution in the approach to clothing care because until now environmental pollution was implicitly considered a necessary and unavoidable evil to ensure daily hygiene and health.
The first Green Factory is located in Saint-Ouen l'Aumône (Val d'Oise), about 30 kilometres from Paris. In the future, Green Factories will continue to be located in suburban business parks.
A first technology demonstrator, UPAR I, was commissioned in 2014. It was shut down in 2019, having successfully served as a laboratory for new ideas for the care of delicate laundry on an industrial scale.
Decided in 2018, the UPAR II "Green Factory" programme was completed in May 2021, despite a development affected by the Covid crisis. More than a demonstrator, it is the first production tool for the large-scale processing of everyday clothing.
