National Clothesline

Recently, the industry has been making strides toward building up and maintaining an overall positive public image. Media headlines from all over are touting cleaners’ “Coats for Kids” campaigns and there has been a lot of coverage about the IFI Award of Excellence program and its prestigious membership. On a national spotlight, a drycleaner in North Carolina (see the front page) was featured on the CBS show Sunday Morning for engineering a two-day trip for 207 veterans to Washington DC so they could visit the World War II Memorial. It’s enough to make even the most jaded industry member feel a little pride.

Naturally, all that goodwill will inevitably be followed by a nice, brisk slap in the face. In fact, the latest insult to the industry has already come... in the form of a spray can, of all things. In Japan, C.C. Medico has developed a product called Spray Iron Dry & Wool which claims to be a groundbreaking drycleaning spray that can penetrate the fabric of business suits, remove creases, stains and odors immediately, and even kill germs and prevent static electricity brought on by friction.

Mr. Hamada Yoshiumi, director of C.C. Medico, says marketing the spray is their top priority and they predict sales will surpass the 360,000-bottle mark in the first year. A press release for the product claims: “Spray Iron is handy for travelling and for wardrobe storage between seasons. Dry cleaning is now possible in 30 seconds and each bottle of the 220 ml spray can be used for up to 5 to 10 sets of business outfits, saving much time and money from taking them to the dry cleaners.”

For now, the product will stay in Japan. It won’t exactly instill any fear for the industry over there, or, for that matter, in the states. Like many other home drycleaning products, it seems destined to fail. Ultimately, it will likely be labeled as a novelty item with a limited market. However, the insult lingers on. It’s extremely frustrating to drycleaners when a company claims a can of spray can do as much for people’s clothing as they can — even though they have tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and years of experience at their disposal. The notion is ridiculous and it should not deter cleaners from making strides toward a better future. If anything, it should provide them with more motivation to keep moving forward.

As regulators in both California and the federal government develop new rules for drycleaners who use perc, one of the more annoying things we noticed was their ignorance of the most recent and perhaps most complete study of the effect perc has on people who work in drycleaning plants.

We’re not sure which type of ignorance applies here. It may be the ignorance of simply not knowing. Or it may be the ignorance of knowing but choosing to ignore. In either case, we think the regulatory bodies should at least consider and evaluate the study into their respective rationales for placing additional rules on the use of perc.

The study, in case you missed it, was published earlier in the February 2006 issue of Environmental Health Perspectives. It was also summarized in a front-page story in the December 2005 issue of this publication. So while it is the most recent study on the topic of perc and cancer, it is not exactly brand-new. The Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board should have been able to incorporate it and address it in their recent rule-makings.

Sponsored by the Halogenated Solvents Industry Alliance and the Danish Medical Research Council, the study used data from four Nordic countries where detailed occupational and health records were kept. It also covered a time period in which perc was more widely used in those countries that it was in the United States. Among the study’s conclusions were that the risks of drycleaning workers for liver, pancreas, kidney and esophageal cancers were not significantly increased. The study found an elevated risk for bladder cancer but it seemed unrelated to to exposure. Thus, the study concluded that “evidence for an association between exposure to (perc) and risk of bladder cancer is equivocal.”

Before making decisions that determine the direction of an entire industry, regulatory bodies need to consider all the information available. There is no reason for this information not to be included in their assessment of perc that leads to the rules everyone must live with.