Independent Uniform Rental Provider Ensures Effective Wastewater Recycling With Abanaki

Lord Baltimore Installs Model 8 Oil Grabber In Laundry

Lord Baltimore Uniform is an independently owned company based in Baltimore, Maryland. Owner and President Ken Gore, Jr. and his staff of 55 provide outstanding garment rental, linen, and dust control services throughout the Mid-Atlantic States. Lord Baltimore services companies of every size throughout Maryland, Washington DC, northern Virginia, Delaware, and southern Pennsylvania.

A large part of its commitment to excellence involves laundering a variety of items, including uniforms, linens, and mats. It currently processes around 2.34 million pounds of laundry per year, or approximately 9,000 pounds per workday. The 45,000 square foot laundry facility operates a single shift.

Cost and Compliance Challenges

Lord Baltimore Uniform, as with all industrial laundries, is a water intensive facility, with a usage rate of 2,750 gallons per hour. Consequently, it must balance the escalating cost of water and wastewater recycling against increasingly stringent government regulations and the trend toward tighter TPH restrictions from wastewater treatment facilities.

Or, as Gore succinctly puts it, he was looking to “maintain profitability and growth while keeping 500 gallons of oil a year out of the Chesapeake Bay wastewater plants.”

Adopting the Abanaki Solution

Charged with this formidable task, Gore began inquiring how other commercial uniform facilities manage wastewater recycling. The search led him to Abanaki Corporation, a national leader in oil skimming solutions. “A member of our cost group had purchased an Abanaki oil skimmer and was pleased with the results. We were able to see one of the products in action, at Gallagher Uniform in Michigan,” Gore acknowledges.

He contacted the company and began working with an Abanaki sales rep to determine the best skimmer for their needs. They chose the Abanaki Model 8 Oil Grabber and installed it in October 2004. As a flagship product, the Model 8 is one of the company’s most dependable and effective means of removing oil for wastewater recycling.

Designed to remove up to 40 gallons of oil per hour, the unit proved a good fit as a critical part of the water pretreatment system Lord Baltimore put in place. Like many laundries, the company operates a two-pit system: one for processing heavily soiled drain water and the other for clean drain water. In order to keep lint and solids from clogging the machinery, Lord Baltimore installed a baffled system over the 6000-gallon capacity heavily soiled pit, whereby laundry wastewater is pumped to an elevated station and run through a screen. The strained wastewater then flows into a holding tank where it is withdrawn by a feed pump. The Model 8 was installed in this tank, mounted near a clean water drain because it is here, where the liquid has sufficient dwell time, that the Abanaki unit can take advantage of the inherent tendency of oil and water to separate.

The Model 8 then utilizes a continuous belt and wiper to efficiently remove oil and other hydrocarbon contaminants from the surface. First the belt, operating on a motor and pulley system, runs through the wastewater. Then it travels over a head pulley and through tandem wiper blades where oil is scraped off both sides of the belt and discharged. The tail pulley has flanges that allow it to roll freely on the inside of the belt without becoming dislodged. It requires no bearings and does not need to be mounted on the tank. If turbulent conditions exist, an optional tether and cage assembly prevents the tail pulley from being dislodged.

Depending on the characteristics of the liquid, the Model 8 has been known to reduce oil content to less than five parts per million in water. Although it is too soon to calculate exact results at Lord Baltimore, Gore anticipates the Abanaki unit will help manage overall operating costs as part of an efficient effluent wastewater recycling system.

For now, he sums up his current satisfaction with the Model 8 in just four words: “It does its job.”