United States of America
The Circuit Court
of Public Opinion
for the Consumers of America
The Drycleaners of America, )
Plaintiff )
)
vs. )
)
The EPA, Greenpeace, )
and those groups )
who would banish )
perchloroethylene, )
Defendant )
Proposing a motion to cease and desist
harassment of the drycleaning industry
L et me present a case for the drycleaning solvent known as perchloroethylene, hereafter referred to as perc. I will prove to you that there is no logical reason for the defendants to demand that the use of perc be discontinued. One must examine their motivation and unproven claims that perc is a danger to the people who work with this product and the public who benefits from the clean garments this product provides.
Drycleaners in Germany are now processing 70,000 pounds of textiles per drum of perc. Drycleaning the same amount of fabric calls for some 7,000 gallons of pure, filtered perc that is flushed through the garments on a continuous basis. The solvent from each load is drained and then extracted. There would normally be a holdup of about 35 gallons per 1,000 pounds of fabric when we start the reclamation and drying process of the garments.
By the time we have finished reclamation and drying, we find we have to replace only about 96 ounces of perc to make up for the lost solvent. Most of the lost solvent is retained in the residue of the constant distillation of the perc with some loss in the filters. Practically none of the solvent is left in the garments. This is a requirement for processing in Germany.
Perc lends itself to easy distillation at relatively low temperatures and between distillation and filtration, drycleaning solvent can be kept at maximum clarity and purity. When the still is drained, there is some solvent held up along with the non volatile residue and the small amount held up in the filter powder or filter cartridges. The waste material is stored in hazardous waste containers for removal by authorized waste cartage companies.
It has been documented that wool was made into clothing and was being washed 8,000 years ago in Mesapotamia. 7,827 years later, a Frenchman by the name of Jean-Baptiste Jolly was alleged to have accidentally discovered that he could clean garments using camphene. His discovery took place in the year 1823. That discovery precipitated the term "drycleaning."
The process gradually went from camphene and spirits of turpentine to a combination of petroleum solvents. The original plants were highly flammable and were restricted to industrial zones. When 140-degree F. petroleum solvent came into being, this reduced the zoning restrictions.
Hotels, valet shops and tailor shops were in search of small machines that could be used on the premises. This led to the use of a solvent known as carbon-tetrachloride. Carbon-tet was considered highly toxic but not flammable. The garments were air dried after extraction. Even though carbon-tet was considered toxic, I know many operators who worked with this solvent after World War II with apparently no ill effect.
Finally, about 1945, perchloroethylene hit the market. Package plants started opening up everywhere. Some of these plants had no perc reclamation facilities and operators were exposed to heavy doses of perc fumes. If it did affect the operators who inhaled these heavy concentrations of perc fumes, I never heard of a health problem.
In the early 1950s, I serviced hundreds of plants in the New York City area that used nine-pound machines sold under the trade name of Sec-O-Matic. These cleaning machines were top-load washers with agitators. After draining and extracting most of the solvent from the garments, the clothes were hung in an open cabinet with an exhaust fan to circulate air through the garments.
There was no solvent recovery after extraction. Perc was cheap and the best mileage a cleaner could expect was 50 pounds per gallon of perc. Compare this to the state of the art plants in the U.S. that are now cleaning 700 pounds to a gallon of perc.
If perc is a serious health hazard, this would be evidenced by the Workers' Compensation insurance policies. This led me to call Peter Ruden, vice president of American Insurance Agency of Illinois. His company insures the majority of all drycleaners in the Midwest with its bailee and workers' compensation policies. He is also active in drycleaning affairs and held the position of president of the Chicago Cleaner's Guild for many terms. His company works with the Illinois State Fabricare Association.
I asked Peter for comparison rates for worker's compensation insurance between the drycleaning industry and other fields. Insurance actuaries study the past performance of claims and risk factors of every industry. From this, they establish the workers' comp rates.
Most drycleaners use perc as their principal solvent and perc is a known killer, according to those who would ban the product. My conclusion is that if perc is indeed a deadly chemical, the workers' comp insurance rates would be out of sight.
Insurance companies live in the real world and use historical evidence in setting their rates. They are the ones who have to pay out hard cash and they make sure the premiums charged are in excess of their claims.
Peter gave me the latest rates that became effective on January 1, 1996.
You will be interested in seeing how perc compares to gas stations and restaurants.
The rates for laundry operations are higher than the rates for drycleaning plants.
So what does all this say? It says that based on claims and experience over many years, the insurance companies consider drycleaning plants as a relatively safe environment and don't consider perc a health hazard at all.
Drycleaning plants in Germany produce 70,000 pounds of cleaning per drum of perc. A drum of perc contains 51.6 gallons. 70,000 pounds of cleaning is now standard in Germany and it should be the eventual goal in the United States.
We should not be wetcleaning garments that would clean and be finished better, safer and far more economically in perc. Perc is one of the best degreasing agents known and a great many clothing stains are grease and oil related.
Not only are perc and the detergents used in cleaning plants in America producing outstanding soil removal, but the solvent is perhaps the greatest recyclable compound known to man.
And that, members of the jury, is the future.
What do you think happens to that 3.4 ounces of perc? Where do the 3.4 ounces go? Are they lost with the still residue or spent filter powder or stripped cartridges?
The minute amount of perc that is still contained in still residue or spent powder goes in hazardous waste containers. But for argument's sake, let's assume that these few ounces stay in the plant as a hazard to the employees and evaporate during the finishing process. Is this a danger to anyone? I think not. Could this possibly be a danger to the outside world? Of course not.
I realize that most perc plants in the country are not getting 70,000 pounds, but most are using dry-to- dry, closed-circuit machines and are getting from 30,000 to 40,000 pounds per drum of perc. This should meet all safety standards, especially since nobody ever proved that perc, used in a controlled atmosphere, is harmful.
Most up-to-date plants in America are now using about 6.8 ounces of perc to clean a 35-pound load. We sure have come a long way from the days when we only got 2,500 pounds to a drum and then 5,000 pounds when we installed reclaimers. Now we're up to about 35,000 pounds to a drum. I have known scores of people who worked at the 2,500-pound-per-drum level and are enjoying good health in their senior years.
Now, after 8,000 years, we seem to have a new product and process to solve all our environmental problems -- water. Water has always been around. That's how people cleaned fabrics since the beginning of time. So what's so new about wetcleaning?
In 1947, when I was attending the National Institute of Drycleaning (now the International Fabricare Institute) three-month General Course, we spent a lot of time learning the mysteries of wetcleaning. Not washing, you understand. Even back then, our instructors made a point to have us call this water process wetcleaning instead of drycleaning. We were told never to refer to this process as washing but to always use the term wetcleaning when explaining to a customer why a garment had shrunk. Wetcleaning still shrinks clothes.
At NID, we learned how to use all the oxidizing and reducing bleaches. We learned how to prepare digestive baths with controlled temperature. And we did a lot of hand-washing of men's pants that were stiff at the knees from perspiration.
Most of you reading this article don't know about pants-stretching machines and the shrinkage problems we had, even when we wetcleaned pants by hand, brushed with neutral soaps and rinsed, extracted and air dried. And you certainly don't know about the finishing problems we had. It took an hour to properly finish four pairs of pants. The cotton pockets and waist bands had to be hand ironed and the pants legs had to be lined up, by the inseam, as the only guide for putting in the crease. After wetcleaning, there were no creases in wool pants left to follow.
The charge system and special detergents that could carry minute particles of water as a co-solvent were introduced to the industry about 1950. This revolutionary process removed perspiration and water soluble stains and eliminated the need to wetclean most pants.
I'm reading all the articles about the great success with wetcleaning and reports that some plants are wetcleaning as many as 30 percent of all their garments and reporting satisfactory results. They are doing this to comply with the public's opinion of ecological drycleaning. Don't you think these cleaners, who are praising wetcleaning, would rather dryclean most of these garments? I think they would if it were not for the public's belief in the propaganda that created an outrage of using environmentally unsafe products.
The industry has caved in to the claims of environmentalists who loudly condemn perc and claim that it's killing babies.
Greenpeace has a stake in this battle. They need a cause to scare people into donating funds to their organization. They chose to go after chlorine and picked the drycleaning industry as an easy target. The public is familiar with drycleaners and their scare tactics has brought unnecessary havoc on our industry.
If our politicians and industry leaders would stand up for the safety of perc and not cave in to the hysterics of these self-serving groups, we could continue to improve our methods and dryclean billions of pounds of fabrics and keep the public clean and impeccably well groomed.
Don't concern yourself with the welfare of Greenpeace. They will just find another cause and continue to raise funds in the neighborhood of $60 million a year. In my opinion, they are mercenaries and, like mercenaries, they fight for money, adventure, and power to control others and the cause be damned.
If we stand together and defeat all the untruths about the hazards of perc, Greenpeace and their kind will quickly find another cause, perhaps the problems of waste water, which could be an offshoot of our caving in to their demands. Then they'd offset that by finding alternative methods to avoid the use of water for cleaning purposes and we'd be forced back into perc or some exotic chemical that would raise the price for cleaning a suit or dress considerably.
Let's examine water as a replacement for perc. It takes about 70 gallons of water to wash 35 pounds of fabric. That constitutes 8,960 ounces of water to the 3.4 ounces of perc to clean the same amount of fabric.
Using perc and filtration, a plant will flush at least 200 gallons of clean solvent through the garments and will wind up reclaiming all but 3.4 ounces. What other product exists where you can recycle the use of hundreds of gallons of anything and wind up recovering all but 3.4 ounces?
Water has to go somewhere and it presently goes into the sewer systems of the country. The engineer in charge of the sanitary district of a group of communities in my area tells me that they are at 95 percent capacity. What do you think will happen if all the cleaners in this area were to wetclean instead of dryclean?
And what about the states that periodically suffer from water shortages? What is Greenpeace's answer to that?
In Illinois, there is a law requiring steam carpet cleaners to dispose of their waste water in special depots and if they fail to comply, they face heavy fines and jail. Is there any difference between the water coming from laundry washers and the water coming from dirty carpeting?
How long would it take the bureaucrats who write mandates to come up with the need to purify the waste water before disposal to the sewer system?
IFI, NCA, FLARE, and the Federation of Korean Drycleaners Association all signed a partnership with Greenpeace and the others to encourage and support the development of programs to help clothing care professionals evaluate wetcleaning for a greater range of garments and to adopt and provide wetcleaning services that meet their needs and will assist those presently in the clothes care industry to survive and prosper in the face of heightened regulatory pressures.
This is a one way partnership
I read Bill Seitz's viewpoint on signing the alliance with Greenpeace, The Center of Neighborhood Technology, The Union of Needletrades and Textile Employees, and the Massachusetts Toxics Use Reduction Institute. Here's Bill Seitz's documented viewpoint:
"The parties do not agree on many of the critical issues to sign off on the Professional Wet Cleaning Partnership. The reasons for hesitancy are as follows:
- The parties do not agree on many of the critical issues regarding the safety and dangers of perchloroethylene.
- The main emphasis for our industry is to wetclean as many garments as possible, reducing the amount of perc used. Will reduction be an acceptable solution?
- There was no guarantee that the negative publicity that the environmentalists are releasing will necessarily cease or even be reduced."
My opinion is that you can't form a partnership with people who are your enemy and out to destroy your credibility. Greenpeace even declared that they refuse to agree to stop their negative publicity.
Regardless of the reduction of perc, I feel the environmentalists will continue their lies to scare the public and continue to raise funds for their present cause because this is their lifeline to keep their jobs and income and power.
I disagree with my good friend, Bill Seitz, that the industry should wetclean as many garments as possible and reduce the amount of perc used. He goes on to say, "Will reduction be an acceptable solution?"
Of course not.
I don't think the negative publicity will be reduced, not as long as the public can be convinced that perc is a hazard to their health and environmental groups can use this propaganda to continue to solicit funds for their cause.
The hazards of perc used in a controlled situation has never been proven, other than in laboratory tests by administering large doses of perc into tiny rodents.
If there was a carcinogenic problem with perc, this would have been proven over the past 50 years by statistics of people who worked with perc in heavy doses, starting in 1945, some 50 years ago. That includes me (I'm now 71), Bill Seitz and Ray Colucci, who are my contemporaries, and thousands of others who have worked in areas of heavy, air-laden perc and somehow survived.
The enemies of perc would hate to see perc usage discontinued for any reason because they would have to find a new cause. Ask yourself what motivates them to fight progress and clamor for the drycleaners of the world to discontinue perc and ban chlorine. What reason can the Needle Trades union have for wanting perc discontinued? Perhaps they'll answer me with some cooked-up excuse to take the place of their real motivation. Speaking of motivation, what motivated me to write this piece?
I'll tell you. I think we're fighting a bunch of self-serving bureaucrats and mercenaries and I hate to see them win. I spent my life in the drycleaning business and it hurts me to see our industry hijacked by people who never worked around perc but have taken it upon themselves to be saviors of the public at large.
Fifty years ago, at the end of World War II, ours was a great country with freedom for all and the opportunity to pursue success and happiness. I fought for that cause with the U.S. Marines during World War II. Now the very freedom I fought for is being eroded in many ways by a government of bureaucrats who mandate all kinds of regulations resulting in business paying a terrific price.
We, the small business people of America, are the backbone of our country
We are the producers of America and provide most of the jobs and taxes required to keep the government going and growing and growing. Those who don't produce dictate policy and write mandates to give themselves and their agencies more power at the expense of the producers of this country.
The same goes for the environmental groups who go from cause to cause and take satisfaction in raising funds for their causes to save endangered species, the ozone layer, the whales, the spotted owls, wetlands, and any other cause they can use to keep raising funds.
They may save all these things but they are killing off another species. They are killing off the producers, the hard working, risk-taking entrepreneurs who supply more jobs than any group in America. We are the people who have made this country great.
They are the counter-productive do-gooders who smugly convince themselves they are doing good deeds. They are inadvertently taking the incentive away from the most needed people in America. We should seriously analyze their motives and prove that they aren't what they would have the public believe.
These groups do not produce products or services but simply tell others what to do and get their funds and power without being productive members of society. This aggravates me and I'll do anything I can to see it changed.
If we cave in to these parasites, we will have lost another battle against freedom and truth and everyone will suffer. The consumer they claim to protect will wind up paying higher prices for drycleaning and a poorer quality of cleaning.
And with that as my closing statement, ladies and gentlemen of the jury of public opinion, I rest my case.
Acknowledgments I wish to thank a number of people in the industry who read a draft of this report and offered their suggestions and comments. They all agreed that it should be published. The list is numerous and I appreciate their help. They are: Dave Spensley of Price-Rite Cleaners in California; Dr. Manfred Wentz of R.R. Street & Co., Chicago; Paul Kokerbeck, Chicago, CEO of Fluormatic drycleaning machines with a master's degree in engineering; Frank Kean of Kean's the Cleaners in Baton Rouge, LA, and a member of FLARE Advisory Board; Harry B. Eddy of New System Laundry and Cleaners in Portland, ME; Bob Stewart, vice president and general manager of Kirk's Suede-Life, Chicago; Bill Seitz of the Neighborhood Cleaners Association in New York, NY.
Date created: 6/30/97