washcyclelaundry.com
The laundry industry is infamous for its waste — using massive amounts of energy and water to clean clothes. A normal laundry cycle can average three gallons of fresh water per pound of clothes. What’s worse, laundry operations use large quantities of environmentally harmful chemicals.
Wash Cycle Laundry (featured in our February 2011 issue) is on a mission to reduce the industry’s harmful practices, and will now do so from their new facility on 16th and South streets.
Launched last December by Gabriel Mandujano, who studied urban revitalization at Penn and real estate at the Wharton School, Wash Cycle is not your mother’s laundry service. It’s, “a green, socially responsible business that aspires to radically reduce the water and energy consumed by the $20 billion commercial laundry industry,” explains Mandujano.
Mandujano’s commitment to sustainable workforce development is inspring. The question is what’s in store for the company?
“It’s still a baby, so it’s hard to know who it’s going to be when it grows up,” Mandujano says. “But if the laundry pick-up and delivery works here in Philadelphia, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t work in Brooklyn or D.C. or wherever.”
