The Central Maryland Correctional Facility, located in Sykesville, Maryland, processes about 2.2 million pounds of laundry every year. Typically, these loads consist of towels; bedding items such as blankets, sheets, and pillow cases; inmate and some staff clothing; and a variety of what are termed “everyday” items, which could be anything from cleaning cloths to the mop heads used for mopping floors.

Like most correctional facilities, Central Maryland has a myriad of concerns when it comes to laundry, including such things as inmate safety—since inmates are typically tasked with performing laundry duties—inventory, fabric longevity, and worker productivity. And because inmates often operate thedry cleaning machine, the machinery and cleaning products involved need to be easy to use and operate and require minimal training.

As you can imagine, cleaning 2.2 million pounds of laundry can be a major undertaking. In addition, it requires huge amounts of chemical detergents, which we now know have the potential to pollute waterways, negatively impacting aquatic life and causing considerable environmental damage. Further, the use of some chemical detergents can negatively affect human health.

These concerns have motivated Green Seal—a nonprofit organization that helps consumers and industrial washing machine identify products that are safer, healthier, and more sustainable—to create a new standard for these products known as the GS-51 Standard for Laundry Care Products for Industrial & Institutional Use. This new standard is designed to specifically address concerns regarding laundry products (including detergents, laundry additives, fabric softeners, and other laundry products) for industrial and institutional locations such as correctional facilities.

While the actual ingredients in laundry detergents can vary, some detergent manufacturers have already taken steps to make their detergents more environmentally responsible. “But still, many laundry care products, especially those used in institutional and industrial settings, have a fairly large list of industrial extractor and ingredients,” says Linda Chipperfield, Vice President of Marketing and Communications for Green Seal.

“GS-51 enhances the safety of laundry care products by prohibiting these chemicals and ingredients,” says Chipperfield. “Water quality is protected, helping to prevent the harmful accumulation of chemicals in waterways, and volatile organic compounds are also limited, helping to prevent ground-level ozone air pollution and protect the health of users, in this case, the inmates working in [the correctional] laundry facilities.”