National Clothesline

A public hearing on Jan. 18 could mark the beginning of the end for using perchloroethylene as a drycleaning solvent in New Jersey.

In a notice published Dec. 17, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection said it wants to completely eliminate the use of perc by January 1, 2021. Cleaners who operate plants in buildings that include residences would be on an even shorter timetable. For those locations, perc would be outlawed after July 27, 2009.

Further, all third-generation equipment would have to be replaced with fourth generation equipment by Jan. 1, 2010, or a vapor barrier would have to be installed to contain emissions from perc machines.

The hearing will begin on Friday, January 18 at 10 a.m. and continue “until the end of comments,” the department said. The department will accept written comments until Feb. 15.

The department estimates that there are 1,600 drycleaning plants and 1,800 drycleaning machines operating in the state. About 90 percent of the New Jersey drycleaning industry will be affected by the rules, the department said.

The greatest economic impact, the department said, will be the elimination of perc from drycleaning facilities in the same building with residences. Those cleaners will have less than two years to change their operations and, because of local fire codes, they are unlikely to have the option of switching to a hydrocarbon cleaning system.

NJDEP said it does not know how many such facilities there are in the state, but based on a survey of about 600 facilities, it estimates there are between 50 and 100 co-residential cleaning operations.

New Jersey is giving co-residential cleaners significantly less time to phase out perc than EPA did in new clean-air rules for perc cleaners that it adopted in 2006. The federal rules ban any new co-residential installations but give existing ones until 2020 to end their use of perc.

Many more cleaners would have to contend with the new rules for third-generation equipment. The department estimates there are 1,100 such machines in the state which would either have to be replaced by Jan. 1, 2010, upgraded with integral secondary control systems to fourth-generation standards or install a vapor barrier enclosure.

The cost of making these modifications, should the cleaner prefer to do so instead of buying a new fourth-generation machine or switching to another solvent, ranges from $5,000 to $12,000 depending on the age and type of machine, according to the DEP.

In this aspect New Jersey would be exceeding federal requirements, also. EPA now requires that all new drycleaning machines be fourth generation but does not impose any upgrade requirements for existing third-generation machines.

New Jersey’s proposal would also make it on track to become the first state to have no perc drycleaning plants. While California was the first state to adopt a phase-out, regulators there gave cleaners until 2023 to eliminate the use of perc in rules adopted last year.

NJDEP estimates that the proposed rules would result in an annual operating cost increase of less than $1,000 for most drycleaning plants. Some may see increases of as much as $5,000 while others could actually realize lower annual operating costs due to lower waste disposal costs.

“The total annual cost to the drycleaning industry as a result of the proposed rules is anticipated to be less than $2 million,” NJDEP said. “The average facility should incur a cost of less than $1,500 a year.”

That cost is justified, the department said, by the benefit to the environment of fewer perc emissions, the reduction of hazardous waste containing perc and the reduction of future soil and groundwater contamination.

The department said it expects that some smaller drycleaners will respond to the rules by stopping on-site cleaning and becoming drop-off locations. Others will switch to non-perc cleaning technologies.

The department listed several “acceptable, cost effective, non-toxic alternatives” to perc, including hydrocarbon, volatile methyl siloxane (GreenEarth), carbon dioxide, and professional wetcleaning.

As in California, New Jersey regulators conceded that substituting hydrocarbon solvents for perc would lead to an increase of volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

The department estimates that if all of New Jersey’s drycleaning plants switched to hydrocarbon, there would be a VOC increase of less than 0.7 tons per day, or 225 tons per year. However, it is not expected that all cleaning plants would switch to hydrocarbon, making for a smaller VOC increase.

“This impact is negligible and will be more than offset by the reduction in health risks due to the reduced emission of perchloroethylene,” the department said.