Dry cleaning can have a nasty impact on the environment. The chemicals used in the process can end up in the air and in the water, which means they are impacting not only the environment but our health. There are alternatives to traditional dry cleaning, one of which is GreenEarth which uses liquid silicone to clean your clothes. When silicone breaks down it creates sand, water and traces of carbon dioxide.
Other ways you can reduce the impact from getting your clothes dry cleaned are:
* Wear clothes more than once before you get them cleaned
* When buying clothes look for those that are not 'Dry Clean Only'
* Take your own reusable garment bags instead of getting the plastic wrap
Click here to find a dry cleaner in your area that is using safer products as part of their process.
While Green Earth is certainly an improvement over the industry standard solvent, perchloroethylene, it is by no means "green". The main ingredient of Green Earth is Decamethylcyclopentasiloxane (D5). Sounds natural doesn't it? Actually it is a man made industrial chemical from General Electric. While the basic components of the chemical may also make up sand, water and carbon dioxide to say it breaks down into those compounds is the same as saying gasoline breaks down into water and carbon dioxide. Doubt that the advertised breakdown occurs via normal degradation or the dry cleaner would have a lot of sand in his dry cleaning machine. If you are looking for a grren drycleaner you would be better served by looking for a cleaner that in fact uses a naturally occurring solvent. Processes that do this are wet cleaning which uses water as it's solvent or carbon dioxide dry cleaning which uses naturally occurring, odorless carbon dioxide. You can find the nearest CO2 cleaner by going to findco2.com.
ReplyDeleteWhile Green Earth is an improvement over perchloroethylene, to consider it "green" is a stretch. Decamethylcyclopentasiloxane
ReplyDelete(D5), the active ingredient in green earth is a man made solvent produced by General Electric and marketed by Proctor and Gamble. Having the same molecules as sand, water and carbon dioxide (SiO2,H2O and CO2) does not equate to "breaking" down to these compounds, no more than gasoline, a long chanin hydrocarbon, breaks down to water and CO2. The truth of the matter is if it did break down to these compounds, your dry cleaner would have an awful difficult time cleaning the sand out of his machines (Green Earth needs high heat to eveaporate out of your clothes and heat is one of the primary catalysts to decomposition there is). While it's a good product and certainly better than the solvent it replaces, Green Earth is practicing Green Washing, not Green Dry Cleaning.
The point I was trying to make from this blog was that there are alternatives out there to the traditional dry cleaning method. I don't see how GreenEarth equates to green washing when it is evident that their product is creating less of an environmental impact then traditional drycleaning.
ReplyDeleteThe greenest solution would be to not dryclean your clothes at all.
There are many other dry cleaning processes that are promoted as "Green" but all have issues with hazardous waste.
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