Disney World is a massive vacation destination.
The four theme parks themselves make for a big enough feat, but it’s the twenty-plus
resorts on property and their thirty-six thousand hotel rooms that really make the place feel
like its own world.
That many hotel rooms mean a lot of bedsheets and towels, not to mention the uniforms
for tens of thousands of cast members who work at the resorts and the parks.
So when all is said and done, how do you wash all of that?
How much laundry is Disney doing?
The answer is a lot, with a lot of cast members making it happen.
Disney touts that on an average day they’re washing two-hundred and eighty-five thousand
pounds of linens, and dry cleaning anywhere between thirty and thirty-two thousand garments.
For a sense of perspective, if you did five loads of laundry a day, every day of the year,
it would still take you over a decade to finish a day’s worth of laundry at Disney World.
So obviously Disney isn’t using the local Orlando laundromats to get the job done.
In fact, they’re not even taking it off property.
Disney does all of their own laundry in-house, at not one or two, but up to four different locations.
Their textile service building is a two-hundred thousand square foot laundry facility, making
it one of the largest in the world.
It’s capable of processing anywhere between two to two-point-three million pounds of textiles
per week during peak season.
The facility uses something called tunnel washers.
Imagine these long machines with a corkscrew-like system of chambers.
The linens go in one end and into a chamber and after the chamber finishes its task, whether
it’s pre-wash, wash, or rinse, the linens are then pushed into the next chamber when
the entire thing rotates.
It keeps doing this until they’re finished being washed and then they pop out the other end.
The water used during the process is drained out so that it can be treated and cleaned
and eventually reused.
This design allows for a near-constant flow of washing.
The entire process is computerized, and the machines can be customized to have up to 20
compartments, and depending on the model can handle batches between 55 and 220 pounds.
From there the linens go to a dewatering press.
The name’s pretty self-explanatory, but it’s basically a machine that compresses
the batch of linens into a big puck shape and in the process squeezes out most the water.
After that, they go into large batch industrial driers which are twice as tall as the average
person and, depending on the model, can handle up to 600 pounds of laundry at a time.
Finally, just before the linens are completely dry, they’re put into large ironing presses
that finish drying the sheets, removes any wrinkles, and fold them up so that they can
be put back in a cart and shipped back to their resort.
Disney’s Costume Specialty Plant, as the name implies, primarily services the tens
of thousands of cast member costumes that require regular cleaning.
The sixty-thousand square foot facility houses around one-hundred and twenty employees who
clean over thirty-thousand costumes a day via both dry and wet cleaning.
In order to organize all of those outfits, the facility has a computer-operated rail
system that brings the costumes to where they need to go in order to get cleaned and picked up.
And the RF chip and barcode system on the garments allows them to see which pieces are
at the laundry and what’s been checked-in and checked-out.
Their newest location, the Resort Linen Plant, also know as the Fourth Laundry Operation
opened in 2015 and is a one-hundred and twenty-eight thousand square foot building that services
much of the linens for Disney World’s value resorts.
Since it’s a newer building, on top of the more traditional machinery used elsewhere
like the tunnel washers, it also features more cutting-edge technology, such as air
suction tubes that transport the linens and machines that can automatically sort, separate,
and fold them.
Would love to have that in my apartment… probably can’t afford it.
No, I know I can’t afford it.
Last but not least, surprisingly, is their Food and Beverage Facility.
At twenty-five thousand square feet, it’s the smallest of them, and by the name you can tell
it’s primarily a facility for the resort’s food and beverages.
According to a 2012 interview with the TRSA, the Textile Rental Services Association, the
location also houses large scale 100-150 pound washers, a tunnel washer, and five driers
for all of Disney World’s cloth napkins.
It’s there where a team of five cast members on two shifts would work full time, feeding
the 32 variants of napkin colors into the machines.
We usually don’t think much of it.
We head out to the parks and come back to a clean room with fresh sheets.
But to make that happen requires some pretty impressive technology, and most importantly,
hundreds of cast members.
They work at locations that act as hidden gears that are turning every single day
in order to keep one of the largest vacation destinations running smoothly.
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