Cleaning Terry towels
We have white Terry towels that are laundered by an external contractor. The towels are being used in sanitation cleaning such as floors and walls and also used to clean food contact surfaces.
Do we have to color coded the Terry towels for sanitation or can it be all white?
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You should be fine with all white towels, I've always used all white towels for both food contact and non contact surfaces and have never had an issue in any plant I've worked.
So, a towel used to clean a floor is then used to clean a food contact surface?
How many uses does each towel get? One and tossed in the hamper, or multiple times?
No not the same towel, well not in my case at least, just white towels are used for all cleaning instead of having white towels for food contact surfaces and, lets say, grey for non food contact surfaces
I actually rarely see terry cloth used for sanitation and when I do the cloths are color coded - way too much chance of an issue.
Since they are used for both floors walls AND Food contact surfaces, I would definitely color code them unless you have a validated sanitation program you are confident about.
How did you control the towels in instances such as sanitation employee cleaning the walls or floor with the towels and the risk of line employees getting that same towel to wipe down a mixing bowl?
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when the towel was used once and you were done cleaning what you had to it was sent into the towel bin immediately
Still quite risky in my opinion....much less risk to have color coding. With all one color you are relying on employees to follow it always 100% of the time.
It can only take one instance of floor to FCS to ruin you or the company if you think about it.
Definitely not a fan of reusable cloths or towels as a general rule including in general maintenance applications.
As a minimum if you must use terry towels or washable cloths in your process I would want to see colour coded in a similar structure to brooms, brush ware and other sanitation equipment to segregate from floor use only only through to equipment cleaning. The other issue with towels being washed by a third party provider is how do you really know that they have been washed and sanitised to an appropriate quality level to ensure that they are also microbiological safe.
In our case we use a range of single use wipes (Tork brand) depending on our end use requirement such as simply cleaning spills to wash down of equipment. The ones we specifically use are food approved and low linting and either white or blue colours available from our supplier. To help save on costs we use the available dispensers so that the rolls don't get wet or contaminated and portion control.