National Clothesline

As the new year begins, the same old resolutions return. On January 1st, most of us promise to start living better and stop our unhealthy habits — always with the best of intentions in mind. We truly believe that this year is going to be different. This year, it will work. Except, more often than not, this year will turn out just like last year. Why? No follow-through.

The irony is that the new year is the time when most drycleaners stop doing some of the things that brought them so much success late in the previous year. After all, the industry positively stands out the most when countless cleaners participate in Coats for Kids, or other similar early winter drives for the less fortunate. So many drycleaners selflessly give their services away for free. Inevitably, however, once the new year begins, the community drives soon end and cleaners go back to business as usual. It’s human nature. During the holiday season, people give gifts and charity away without a second thought. When the season ends, people focus back on themselves, asking how can I improve my life this year?

For cleaners, the answer to that question is to keep up the unselfish work. Once the coats are cleaned and distributed, that job is done. Yet, it would still behoove plant owners to come up with other ways to support their community throughout the year. When spring arrives, they can collect and clean gently-used prom gowns for teens who can’t afford them. In the summer, kids everywhere play organized sports leagues that could benefit from the free services of their local cleaners. In the fall, it is a sensible time to organize food drives for those who have less to be thankful for. Regardless of the season, cleaners can offer to clean flags or military uniforms for free. Or, you could be a little more creative. In San Diego, for example, Relaxx Dry Cleaning has recently offered to clean Chargers’ jerseys for free until the end of the NFL playoffs. Brilliant.

These ideas are a great way to bond a community. Of course, the great idea is just the first step. People mostly make resolutions only at the start of the year, but communities tend to need help in all 12 months. For cleaners, it becomes a matter of mustering up the energy, time and resources to continue doing your part, and, more importantly, the will to follow through. After all, most of us can afford to break a promise to ourselves, but it is far more costly to break one to customers.

The California Air Resources Board has a clear purpose in mind as it heads into a public hearing this month on the future of perc. The very specific intended consequence of the proposed plan is to eliminate perc as a drycleaning solvent. There seems little use arguing against this plan at this point. Board members seem to have had their minds made up on this course of action even before a public hearing it held on this same issue last May. At that hearing, the board’s staff presented a somewhat more reasonable approach to reducing perc emissions into the air that Californians breathe. (Said emissions, by the way, have already been reduced by more than 70 percent since 1993.) But the governing board wanted to go all out for a complete elimination of perc and told the staff to come back with a plan to do so.

The board’s single-minded pursuit of a perc ban will surely have other consequences, both intended and unintended. First of all, there is the impact on the drycleaning industry in California, which consists of many small plants operating with two or fewer employees. Will they be able to pass on the cost of compliance by raising prices 50 cents or so a garment as the air board’s staff suggests? Or will they simply be forced out of business? The state has a program that offers grants for cleaners who convert their operations to a non-perc alternative, but this program is funded by a surcharge on perc purchases. So phasing out perc will also phase out the source of funding for the program.

That grant program currently only provides money for cleaners putting in liquid carbon dioxide or wetcleaning systems. Anyone installing hydrocarbon equipment need not apply because grants are not allowed for cleaning systems that emit smog-forming volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Likewise the grants are not available for GreenEarth systems because the state still has some questions about that solvent. Thus, forcing cleaners away from perc is likely to move them to other solvents that the state doesn’t necessarily like. It begins to look like the state is rushing to eliminate perc without being certain what it wants cleaners to use instead, and also has no plan in place to assist drycleaners who could otherwise go out of business.