Afonwen Laundry is committed to minimising its impact upon the environment and in the process of applying for a Green Dragon award for Environmental awareness and developing an action plan to reduce its impact upon the environment, in a Welsh Assembly Government programme which encourages companies to set annual objectives for environmental improvement specific to our business. We're committed to achieving the premier gold star status in the next couple of years.

Linen hire and laundry provision is, by its very nature, a recycling business in that we are one of very few suppliers to the hotel industry that constantly collects, re-washes and returns the same product time and time again. In fact, we've been recycling linen since 1935, long before it was even fashionable to go green!

As one of the largest independent laundries in the United Kingdom we are also very proud to have completed in the autumn of 2007 the construction of a £650,000 waste water treatment plant. Afonwen is believed to be the only laundry company in the United Kingdom to take direct responsibility for treating all of its waste water to internationally recognised standards.

So clean is the quality of the water after it has been treated at our Waste Water Treatment plant that we have a special license enabling us to discharge our treated and clean effluent direct into the Irish Sea, without any involvement of our local water authority. We believe we are also the only commercial laundry in the UK allowed to directly discharge its effluent into the sea.

Under the terms of our discharge consent, we have to ensure the composition of our discharge achieves no more than 40 milligrammes per litre of biochemical oxygen demand and 60 milligrammes per litre of suspended solids. All highly technical stuff and loads of analysis goes on all day in order to ensure we are only discharging water to the highest possible standards.

Put simply, we bring our waste water up to a level approved by the latest European Union Coastal Waters discharge directive, ensuring we are minimising our impact upon the environment to an incredibly high standard. We have automatic monitoring of all water discharged to ensure we comply and regular independent audits by the Environment Agency for Wales, with whom we work closely.

We believe we are the only laundry company in the United Kingdom to be achieving this standard and we challenge the rest of the industry to join us in achieving this goal.

Our commitment to the environment does not stop there.

• We monitor and control, independently auditing every month the chemicals we use to ensure we only use what is essential to give a good service;
• We use modern, environmentally friendly, washing machines that minimise water consumption and achieve high quality wash cycles;
• We monitor religiously every week our energy consumption including gas, electricity and fuel for our distribution fleet, to ensure we are only consuming what we need to;
• And, of course, we are recycling everything that we can.

We also passionately feel that all customers and potential customers should ban the use of paper napkins and paper tablecloths throughout their businesses. They look cheap and nasty and, in our opinion, are far worse for the environment than a proper napkin which can be recycled time and again with good quality starch added too!