Thursday, November 8, 2007

greener dry cleaner?

Admittedly, dry cleaning does not have many redeeming features. It's easy to list all of the environmentally detrimental steps involved in the process: First I load dirty clothes into my car and use fossil fuels to drive to the dry cleaners to drop off the dirty clothes, then the dry cleaner uses chemicals to clean my clothes, and when the clothes are clean, the cleaners swaths each clothing item in non-reusable plastic, and hangs each item on its own metal hanger, and finally, I use fossil fuels to drive back over to the cleaners to pick up my clean clothes. The whole scheme is no better then say, driving an RV cross country. (Well, maybe not that bad.) Short of not ever setting foot in a dry cleaner's again, is there any possible way to improve this environmental sink-hole? (There no green cleaners where I live.) I recently started collecting those flimsy wire hangers instead of tossing them out, and when I had filled a recyclable Whole Foods bag full of hangers, I brought my loot back to my dry cleaner, and he accepted my recycled hangers handily. I don't think that my dry cleaner is enormously worried about global warming, I think he likes the money he saves from not needing to buy new hangers, but no matter: I bring my used hangers back with every visit.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Redeeming features? Look a little deeper. First, your clothes are cleaned with a large amount of other garments, saving over say doing a load of wash of your own clothes which would take more energy, water, and contribute more pollution.
While I can't speak for your cleaner, there are some that care about all that you mention. Why? Hey, it's our planet too.
We need clean clothes, how we go about cleaning them is the point.
Cleaning in a green way takes more time and effort but the result is a matter of pride.

signed: The Green Belletrist: caring green cleaner. Go to: http://DistinctiveCleaners.Com

rlovinger said...

This may well save some energy otherwise lost but it assumes that anyone else who does this will have hangers as clean as yours. But if they use a hanger to dry someone's wet, dirty clothes before taking the hangers to the cleaners, that assumption is problematic. I think some cleaners won't take used hangers.

Greendoc said...

Thomas--Thanks for your perspective. I hope a green cleaners opens near my home in the future so I can take advantage of this more environmentally-friendly technology.