Raskone

Responsibility also for the environment in cleaning heavy dirt and oil

Raskone is a company providing repairs and services for commercial vehicles with locations around Finland. Raskone offers maintenance for lorries, vans and trailers as well as material acquisition services mainly for work machine equipment and commercial vehicles. Raskone employs almost 700 people.

Raskone’s need

In repair and service operations, textile materials must be durable and strong. Workwear circulates regularly in the laundry so must endure maintenance. Workwear must also reflect the company image, be functional and match the corporate look.

In garage operations, a lot of difficult dirt is accumulated on the textiles, some of it hazardous waste. Raskone has focused its textile acquisitions on Lindström whose solutions help it get workshops operating ecologically in clothing, mat and towel maintenance.

Raskone Ltd has set environmental responsibility as a key goal alongside the quality and service goals. Raskone believes that customers expect and require companies to increasingly observe the environment and its protection in their operations so environmentally-friendly solutions in textile acquisitions have also been observed.

Solution

Lindström takes care of Raskone’s workwear and protective clothing, rental mats, shop towels and hygiene products nationally. Raskone has been Lindström’s customer since the 1990s. Lindström’s vehicles visit Raskone’s locations weekly bringing clean textiles and taking used textiles for washing and maintenance.

The scale of collaboration is considerable because Raskone has 7,000–8,000 pieces of workwear alone. The workwear collection was renewed in 2014 when Raskone was revamping its look.

Well-planned use of mats efficiently absorbs dirt from outside. In the garage and service station facilities, difficult dirt, such as oil and grease, is cleaned with Lindström’s shop towels and absorption mats. The absorbency of a recyclable shop towel is considerably better than that of a disposable towel. The dirt and hazardous waste on the products are processed responsibly at Lindström and, on request, the customer can get a waste report on the services stating the amount of hazardous waste accumulated in the laundry of shop towels.

Hand towels are also recyclable cloth towels. The cloth towels that Raskone uses produce 2 kg of waste per towel once the roll has been exhausted. With a similar amount of wiping using disposable paper, the waste generation would be approximately 80 kg.