National Clothesline

The countdown on a 15-year phase-out of perc in California drycleaning plants got officially underway when the California Air Resources Board gave final approval Jan. 25 to amendments to the state’s Air Toxics Control Measure.

Under the new rule, no perc machines can be sold in California after this year. Existing machines can continue in operation for a period, depending upon the age and type of equipment and location of the plant.

The first round of mandatory machine replacements begins in 2010. As of July 1 of that year, no perc machines can be operated in co-residential facilities. That date is also the deadline for removal of any converted drycleaning machines — vented machine that have been modified to closed loop.

Also by that date, any perc machine that is 15 years old or older, as well as any machine for which the age can ’t be determined, must be removed.

Thereafter, all perc machines will have to be removed when they become 15 years old. Under that schedule, there will be no perc machine left operating in California by Jan. 1, 2023.

The statutory phase-out continues a seemingly voluntary phase-out that California cleaners have undertaken in the past few years.

According to the CARB staff, perc has been declining in market share in California, dropping from 86 percent in 2003 to 70 percent in 2006.

During that same period, the market share of hydrocarbon machines has increased to 21 percent. the remaining 9 percent is a mix of GreenEarth, wetcleaning, Rynex, PureDry and CO2, according to the CARB staff.

Cleaners who need to remove perc machines will be able to replace them with any of a number of alternatives. However, concern was raised at the Jan 25 hearing that wider use of hydrocarbon drycleaning machines could lead to increased emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), another area of air pollution regulation that has CARB ’s attention. The CARB staff estimated that replacing all perc machines with hydrocarbon units would increase VOC emissions by 1.2 tons a day statewide.

Some commenters urged the board to phase out both perc and hydrocarbon solvents. Indeed, the CARB staff had offered an alternative that would include the double phase-out but did not recommend it due to increased cost to the industry of implementation.

Board members seemed wary of encouraging more hydrocarbon use, but rejected calls for its phase-out, too. But the future remains unclear.

“Conceptually, it seems awkward for me to say that it's okay to use a machine that produces smog-forming byproducts which further downstream create ozone, ” said board member Henry Gong, Jr. “If we gradually phase out the perc machines, the use of the hydrocarbon machines will probably go up. ”

“I'm not comfortable that if I were in this industry that I'd run out and invest in hydrocarbon, ” said CARB board member Ron Roberts. “I don't think that anything that we say here today is going to be much of a promise, and I think that it's just a question of time when they're faced with some of the same issues. ”

Indeed the board did not formally promise not to phase out hydrocarbon machines in the future.

Instead, a resolution was adopted stating that CARB would “consider the full useful life of equipment in any future rule-makings for this source category. ”

The “full useful life” question was another issue before the board. Environmentalists lobbying for a faster phase-out wanted the board to set the useful life at 10 years.

Mei Fong, CARB air resources engineer, said the 15-year useful life allows drycleaners to recover the costs for purchasing and operating an alternative system and also allows time for non-toxic and non-smog-forming technologies to gain general acceptance.

CARB staff also resisted a call from environmentalists to establish a 300-foot buffer zone between a perc plant and any residence, business or “sensitive receptor” such as a school or medical facility and to remove perc from all those locations by 2010.

Fong pointed out that about 98 percent of all drycleaning facilities are located next to businesses and about 64 percent are within 300 feet of a residence. Thus, a 300-foot buffer would affect virtually every drycleaning business in the state.

While perc opponents were unable to convince CARB to toughen its phase out plan, perc proponents were equally frustrated in trying to talk CARB out of its proposal.

Steve Risotto of the Halogenated Solvents Industry Alliance, an association that represents perc manufacturers, said that CARB overstated the cancer risks from perc exposure. He cited a recently published study of Nordic drycleaning workers that suggests that perc is not a carcinogen. That study was not taken into consideration in developing the phase out proposal while earlier, less complete studies were.

Although Risotto had raised the issue of the Nordic study at a CARB board meeting last May when the board called for a complete phase-out, not all board members seemed to be aware of it and no mention was made of it in the staff report presented to the board.

However, Dr. Melanie Marty, director of the air toxicology and epidemiology section of the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, told the board she was aware of the study and it did not change her evaluation of perc.

“This study is not a negative study by any stretch,” she said. “So I don't think it refutes anything that has been seen in earlier epidemiology studies. ”

“We have read it and considered it,” she added.

And the alternatives?

While several alternatives to perc are available, only two — wetcleaning and CO2 — have the explicit blessing of the state. A grant program, funded by a tax on perc sales, provides $10,000 to cleaners who replace perc equipment with one of those two alternatives. Other available alternatives are not eligible for the grants due to VOC and other concerns.

The challenge perc drycleaners face in choosing an alternative was raised by Jon Meijer, speaking on behalf of the International Fabricare institute at the hearing.

“Drycleaners need real answers to decisions about alternatives,” Meijer said. “They cannot afford to go to one technology and then five years later go to another technology. ”

A $10,000 grant wouldn’t go very far toward replacing a perc system with CO2, he said. And wetcleaning, based on IFI ’s analysis, is not capable of handling all of the garments that cleaners are called upon to process.

He also noted that the FTC’s care labeling rules do not allow for wetcleaning garments that have instruction for that call drycleaning.

Sandra Giarde, executive director of the California Cleaners Association, suggested that more help for cleaners should come from the state. CCA had previously proposed legislation that would grant tax credits for cleaners switching to non-perc alternatives, but that bill lacked support.

“What level of support is truly out there for cleaners to switch to alternative solvents? ” she asked.

Legislators, she said, “need to put their tax money and their legislative bills where their will is and see what they can do to assist cleaners, because nothing less is going to be viable. ”