Workwear as a circular service: watch the WCEF2026 session

Most plants still buy their workwear, store it, get it washed somewhere, replace it when it wears out and throw the old pieces away.

In this WCEF2026 accelerator session, recorded with three people from Lindström, you see what happens when a site stops owning garments and pays one partner for clean workwear that is ready at the start of every shift, with the examples and numbers taken from laundries and customer sites in India.

What you get in the session

Ulla Luhtasela, Director of Sustainability at Lindström Group, opens at the design table.

She explains how a garment has to be built if the zipper is going to survive industrial washing and somebody is still going to want to wear it in year four, why a customer hiring one new person can order one garment instead of a minimum run of several hundred, and how the second and third wearer of a garment are agreed with the customer before it is ever issued.

Lindström has around 20 million pieces in circulation in 24 countries. Close to 3 million of them were repaired last year rather than replaced.

Jayant Roy, Managing Director of Lindström India, takes you through twenty years of running the service in Indian plants.

You will see how RFID tags on every garment let an auditor check when a piece was issued, how many wash cycles it has completed and where it is right now. He also covers why uniforms that will not dry in the monsoon keep people off the production floor, and how garments handed back by a leaver go to the next person who joins.

The water recycling plant at the Chennai laundry cut fresh water intake by 55%, seven business units already run on green electricity with three more on the way, and 19 delivery vehicles have moved to CNG.

Together that is about 3,500 tonnes of CO2 out of the India footprint so far.

Manas Kumar, Director of Pharmaceuticals and Strategic Marketing at Lindström India, brings the customer side from pharma, food and high-tech sites.

He talks about stock nobody has counted and garments in use that nobody can trace, what changes when a cleanroom moves from disposable to reusable garments, and why an in-house laundry that worked well at the start struggles once the plant grows.

A professionally run wash gets a kilo of garments clean on about three litres of fresh water, against seven in a typical in-house setup. On a site that washes every day, that gap adds up.

As Manas puts it, sustainability becomes a by-product of a better operation.

Event details:

Recorded: Friday 18 September 2026
Format: On-demand video
Language: English
Access: Free, fill in the form to watch