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I've never been too into dry cleaning, but not for any environmental reasons—mostly because I always forget to pick up my clothes until weeks later when I realize they're missing. But for the last few months, I've been dutifully dropping off all my husband's dress shirts on a rotating schedule at the dry cleaner across the street from our house. I work from home, so I can (and sometimes do) wear sweatpants all day, but he works in an office. He needs his clothes spotless.
Or at least, I had been making my weekly stop there before I was reminded of all the chemicals used in dry cleaning—including the especially harmful perchloroethylene (aka, perc), which is where those supposedly "clean" clothes get their icky smell. In addition to damaging the earth, perc can build up in your body, and has been associated with increased risks of cancer, fertility problems, and skin irritations. So I look around for a local dry cleaner that uses an alternative method—newer equipment, or liquid carbon dioxide in place of the chemical solvent—but with no luck.
But then I take a closer look at the tags on Mike's shirts, and, wait a second: they are all 100 percent cotton, they are all designed to be wrinkle free, and none of them say anything at all about dry cleaning. What?! I call him at work (this counts as an emergency, I think) and he sounds only slightly ashamed to admit that he only gets things dry-cleaned because he's too lazy to iron. Well, I'm not too lazy to iron, so from now on, we'll be contributing a little less perc to the environment.
More about dry cleaning:
Clean Your Clothes Without Harming the Planet
Empty Your Closet of Wire Hangers
Are There Green Dry Cleaners?
Fred Butler and the Future of Dry Cleaning
Top Green Laundry Tips
Free Paper Eco-Hangers Replace Wire Hangers
Buy the Book!
Ready, Set, Green: Eight Weeks to Modern Eco-Living
Blythe Copeland is a freelancer writer living on Long Island. Read more about her foray into the green life in her previous columns as she follows the plan set out in the book Ready, Set, Green: Eight Weeks to Modern Eco-Living.
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