Sustainability Certifications: Raising the Bar for the Laundry Industry
Article by Girbau: Across industries, sustainability frameworks are redefining what responsible business looks like in practice. Initiatives such as BCorp and the UN Global Compact set globally recognized principles for environmental protection, human rights, ethical conduct, and transparency, encouraging companies to integrate sustainability into governance, strategy, and long-term decision-making.
In the laundry and textile-services sector, these principles are increasingly translated into concrete operational expectations. Industry-led programs, such as those developed by the Textile Rental Services Association (TRSA), focus on how sustainability is applied on the ground—through resource efficiency, hygienic processing standards, and continuous operational improvement.
For commercial laundry providers and textile-service companies, this evolution has direct business implications. Sustainability credentials are no longer peripheral; they are becoming a prerequisite in tenders, supplier evaluations, and long-term contracts, particularly within hospitality, healthcare, and large institutional markets.
Certifications play a critical role in this shift by converting sustainability commitments into measurable, comparable performance indicators. They provide a common reference point for buyers and suppliers, enabling objective evaluation, credible benchmarking, and greater trust across complex supply chains.
A coordinated push
The hospitality industry is playing an active role in pushing this shift forward. Large hotel groups and service brands are aligning with shared frameworks to evaluate their suppliers’ sustainability performance. One of the most impactful initiatives in this space is EcoVadis, a global sustainability rating platform that evaluates companies across environmental, social, ethical, and procurement criteria to provide standardized, third-party verified performance scores.
Achieving a high EcoVadis score (or even a medal) becomes a competitive differentiator, a mark of credibility for hotel clients, healthcare facilities, and corporate customers. In 2025, Girbau received an EcoVadis Gold Medal, ranking in the top 4% of companies evaluated globally.
In 2023, Ecovadis launched HARP, a collective move by leading hotel groups and global procurement organizations to raise the sustainability bar across the hospitality supply chain. Founding members include major global players — all committed to using the EcoVadis methodology to rate and improve supplier performance.
The shift towards certified sustainability impacts every link in the laundry value chain. Initiatives like HARP within Ecovadis further encourage collaboration across the market ecosystem, aligning incentives, raising standards, and driving systemic change with measurable impact.
On the island of Fernando de Noronha, where natural resources are limited, Atlantic Laundry Noronha has implemented Girbau solutions to provide a fully sustainable laundry operation optimising water and energy use, reusing over 90% of the water consumed and significantly reducing carbon emissions. Discover how!
For more informatin visit https://www.girbau.com/, email girbau@girbau.com.