Environmentally Friendly Dry Cleaner Option in Austin
Austin is a city rightfully proud of its natural resources and we try hard to do the right thing around here when it comes to being conscientious stewards of our environment. It occurred to me this afternoon as I popped into my local dry cleaner that we are very lucky to have a non-toxic cleaning option here in Austin. I'd like to give Ecoclean a shout out!
After dropping off my husband's shirts (I am constitutionally incapable of ironing), I had a quick chat with Michael Loyd, the manager at Ecoclean, located at 2915 Guadalupe Street in central Austin, just at the northernmost tip of the Drag.
"What makes Ecoclean different from a conventional dry cleaner?" I asked.
"The single biggest difference," Michael explained, "is that we don't use a chemical called perchloroethylene."
"Per-what?" I sputtered. "Can you please spell that?"
"Just write PERC," Michael suggested.
I learned that PERC is the primary ingredient used in dry cleaning and that it is a great solvent for the yucky job of cleaning clothes. There is only one tiny problem. If PERC enters the body through PERC-contaminated air or consumption of PERC-contaminated food or water, it gets stored in fat tissue. Once that happens, depending upon the severity and length of exposure, PERC can cause health problems ranging from minor dizziness and headaches to potentially fatal liver and kidney damage. Worse, PERC is a known carcinogen, having been shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals that repeatedly breathed PERC in air.
Why should we care? Conventional dry cleaning processes vaporize PERC and release some amount of it into the atmosphere along with other carbons. Unless you've been under a rock the last decade or so (and missed Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth) you know what a no-no carbon releases are.
Theoretically, conventional dry cleaners use reclamation equipment to recycle their PERC and thereby prevent all of it from entering into the environment. However, as I understand it, reclamation is not a 100% failsafe process and dry cleaners are allowed, by law, to emit some PERC into the environment. That PERC then enters the air and our water supply and, unfortunately, perhaps our bodies.
Environmentally friendly cleaners, however, simply don't use PERC at all. They just say no. Instead, places like Ecoclean use an old-fashioned phosphate-free soap and water solution that is watershed friendly. In fact, Ecoclean's cleaning solution is so non-toxic that it simply rinses down the same city pipes as my dirty bath water. Michael Loyd was proud to inform me that Ecoclean's runoff water has a pH balance of 6.5, pretty darn close to distilled water's perfect pH balance of 7.
"What's the catch then?" I asked. "Is it more expensive to use this service than a conventional one?"
"I think our prices are comparable," Michael said. "Some items here are slightly more, others slightly less. But, overall, I think we're very competitive."
We have so many decisions to make as citizens of the earth. Now that I understand a bit more, in my own unscientific way, about the dangers of PERC, I will no longer take for granted that we have an environmentally friendly dry cleaning option here in Austin. (Michael is unaware of any other non-PERC dry cleaners in Central Texas, though he says that there are eco-friendly cleaners in California, Oregon and New York.)
We consumers make a big impact with our collective decisions. I, for one, will continue to take all my dry cleaning to Ecoclean. I feel good about doing my part to stop PERC from leaching into our environment.
Call Michael Loyd at (512) 236-8645 if you want more information about Ecoclean's services.
