I’ve been fretting about our dry cleaner for a while now. They don’t use PERC, they use something better than PERC, and they recycle this “better than PERC” solvent.
We have an organic dry cleaner near us. Well, near if you consider 7 miles near, when the regular dry cleaner is 2 1/2 miles away. I don’t consider that near. I wonder where I can calculate the environmental impact of using my cleaner vs. driving to the farther dry cleaner that uses better chemicals. I’m not smart enough to know how to do that on my own.
We are now saying “no bags” along w/ the no tags, no starch, and every other comment we make when we drop off clothing. They just give you the clothing without the bag, which saves the plastic. I’ve found a garment bag that my Aunt Eileen (yes, the namesake of the cake) gave me for either high school or college graduation. I’m not putting the dry cleaning in that to hang it in the car for road trips. We went to Las Vegas last week, and put the dry cleaning in the purple bag and hung it on the hook for the drive. This way we didn’t have the plastic, yet I wasn’t concerned about the clothing getting dirty or damaged in some other way. Thanks Aunt Eileen!
We’re also recycling our hangers. Our dry cleaner provides a hanger box for just this purpose. Once it’s full of hangers we take it back to them and get something like $5.00 off our next order. Works for me.
Back to the Organic cleaner. They pick up and deliver. If you do this, they don’t charge for this service, but you then cannot use any coupons. I got a price list from them, I need to get a price list from our regular cleaner and do the comparison. I’ll do that on Monday and report back.