Certification of laundries

wfk-seal for textile hygiene

The wfk-seal for textile hygiene attests that in your company the textiles will be reprocessed according to the state of the art and can therefore be used in hygienically sensitive areas like hospital and health care sector as well as food industry. It enables you to demonstrate the adequate hygienic reprocessing of the textiles to your customers and thus to strengthen the confidence in your services and products.

The judgement of the textile reprocessing followed defined criteria which will be proved in annual laundry visits. During the visit the following parameters will be checked:

• structural conditions
• general organisational conditions
• established management systems
• hygiene
• process engineering

Additionally internal controls for quality assurance are necessary.

Laundries and textile service enterprises which reprocess hospital textiles have to fulfil the requirements to the Robert-Koch-Institut (RKI) and have to establish a hygiene management system according DIN EN 14065 (RABC). For the reprocessing of textiles from the food sector a hygiene management system DIN EN 14065 (RABC) has to exist which fulfils the requirements of the IFS, the BRC and the DIN 10524.

wfk-seal for gentleness to textiles

The wfk-seal for gentleness to textiles is useful for companies which reprocess customer-owned textiles and can be awarded in addition to the wfk-seal for textile hygiene. With this seal you can demonstrate that the gentleness of your washing procedures is according to the state of the art.

RABC certificate

The wfk institute is one out of three independent institutes which are authorized by the intex association to perform investigations for the intex-RABC-certificate. By the separation between testing and certification organisation the highest possible degree of independency can be guaranteed.

The wfk institute organises once a year a workshop on RABC in which background knowledge and experiences from the implementation of the RABC system will be vividly imparted (http://www.wfk.de/en/knowledge-transfer/conferencesmeetingsworkshops.html).

wfk-hygiene certificate

The wfk-hygiene certificate is a certificate which can be awarded to a laundry if the conditions of the RKI guideline for hospital hygiene and infection prevention cipher 4.4.3 und 6.4 „requirements of hygiene on the textiles from health service facilities, the laundry and the conditions for giving textiles to laundries“(http://www.rki.de/cln_151/nn_201414/DE/Content/Infekt/Krankenhaushygiene/Kommission/Downloads/Altanl__Rili,templateId=raw,property=publicationFile.pdf/Altanl_Rili.pdf) are fulfilled.

The investigations will be performed at proper findings annually or otherwise biannually. If the above mentioned conditions are satisfied the wfk-hygiene certificate can be awarded.

The following table gives you an overview about the certificates and their conditions.

Further information is available from
Dr. Manuel Heintz, phone +49-2151-8210-190, m.heintz@wfk-iaf.de