By Douglas Fischer - STAFF WRITER

Tri-Valley Herald, Monday, July 30, 2007

SAN LORENZO -- No sign touts the pile of cash Song Lee spent to switch his modest dry-cleaning shop to green technology.

He simply pulled aside a long-time customer, a Berkeley police officer whose perspiration-stained uniform would be the bane of any cleaner, to ask if he noticed anything different.

``Yeah,'' Lee recalls the cop saying. ``It smells cleaner. There's no dry-cleaned smell. What'd you do? '' I spent $90,000 for you,'' Lee replied. Lee is part of a vanguard of clothing cleaners adopting new technology as California phases out the industry's chemical of choice, perchloroethylene, or perc, linked to a host of cancers, leukemia and other health problems. He's trying to get out ahead of a wave of green technology that threatens to wash away the mom-and-pop cleaner and reshape the industry.

Lee, owner of Hesperian Cleaners, spent his money on a new wet-cleaning system using water instead of perc. Other, more efficient systems launder clothing in liquefied carbon dioxide and cost upward of $200,000 a pop. That kind of cash is far beyond the reach of most dry cleaners running small plants tucked in strip malls or behind storefronts. What's more, no consensus has formed on what -- if any -- replacement technology works best. Nothing gets greasy, oily stains out of clothing like perc, and many shops, particularly in

Northern California, have been slow to embrace change. They do so at their peril. There's a risk, as regulators push the industry to clean up its act, that large companies will move in, sending the corner dry cleaner to join the butcher, the hardware store and the neighborhood grocer as relics of a bygone era. It is already happening overseas. Linde, a deep-pocketed European industrial gas giant, is franchising carbon-dioxide dry cleaning shops across Germany. Should carbon dioxide-based cleaning take root here, the corner dry-cleaning shop risks replacement by storefronts that ship clothes to a central plant. ``They're in seven countries and they're coming our way,'' said Frank Shaghafi, co-founder of Blue Sky Cleaners in Union City, where three carbon dioxide machines are doing a booming business. ``You're going to have a European company taking over our industry.''

Industry watchers caution that such dire predictions of consolidation have repeatedly failed to materialize the industry weathered both the no-wrinkle polyester craze of the 1970s and the casual dress wave of the late '90s. Americans, it seems, like their clothes professionally cleaned, want to know who's handling their laundry and show a fierce loyalty to their local cleaner.

Many acknowledge that California's $2 billion dry-cleaning market is ripe for thinning. The state's bid to rid the industry of a potentially carcinogenic solvent will likely precipitate a consolidation. The question, though, is whether it will spark a revolution.

Lynnette Watterson's San Mateo shop certainly isn't struggling. But she finds herself in a quandary just the same. Her parents founded Crystal Cleaning Center in 1963. Today Chanel dresses and floor-length wedding gowns crowd couture jackets on the flourishing shop's racks. Workers greet customers by name. And the workhorse her shop's sole perc machine, purchased in 1991 -- must be replaced in three years.

She could wait and buy any number of alternative and relatively untested technologies. But if she wants another perc machine, Watterson, former president of the California Cleaners Association, must buy now. No new perc machines will be allowed in California after this year. All perc machines 15 years or older must be replaced by 2010, and perc machines of any age must be gone by 2023, according to state rules. Southern California regulators give even less time.

``I'm just not sure what to do. It's very frustrating,'' Watterson said. ``I'm not too keen on investing the amount of money we would need to invest to buy something that's a gamble for our industry.'' Before the rules went into effect in January, Watterson's choice would have been reflexive: Perc. It remains the solvent of choice for 80 percent of the 27,000 or so dry cleaning shops in the nation. Perc saved the dry-cleaning industry 60 years ago, replacing explosive petroleum-based solvents that were industry mainstays in the early 20th century.

Perc provided operators with an easy-to-use, colorless, nonflammable liquid that lifts stains without penetrating a garment's fibers. For the first time, dry cleaning was not a fire risk, and small plants opened in apartment buildings, stores, neighborhoods. But perc is linked to leukemia and skin, lung, bladder and colon cancers, among others, according to the National Institutes of Health. Long-term exposure can damage the central nervous system, liver and kidneys. Vented to the atmosphere, it contributes to smog, although today modern dry-cleaning machines trap most of the perc in carbon filters and distilling tubes and return it, stripped of impurities, to the solvent tank. Use has dropped so much -- 80 percent from 20 years ago, by some estimates -- that the largest use of perc today is as a brake-cleaning solvent.

California's schedule has thrown a chill over the industry. Last month one of the leading trade associations, the Drycleaning and Laundry Institute, jolted industry by recommending that any dry cleaner in the nation looking to install a new dry cleaning system consider alternate systems first. ``It saddens me to see what California did,'' said Nora Nealis, executive director of another trade group, the National Cleaners Association. ``It's like punishing the children for the sins of the father.'' Perc's leading replacement represents little change and could even be seen as a step backward. It is a return to petroleum-based solvents similar to the explosive cleaners industry used in the 1920s and
'30s. These so-called ``high-flash hydrocarbon'' solvents, often marketed as ``organic'' and manufactured by oil companies, are far safer than previous incarnations, with higher flash points and used in more fully enclosed machines. For mom-and-pop operators, such products represent the least change. Machines cost about the same as a perc outfit, the same perc distributors sell the new solvents, and the technology requires few new skills. But cleaning cycles are twice as long, forcing cleaners to either buy a bigger machine or work a longer day. And critics tar hydrocarbon solvents as akin to washing clothes in gasoline. They note that the perc's petroleum replacement has many of the same problems: A hazardous material with unknown health risks that is readily evaporated and contributes to smog. Martin Gregson is group technical director of the Johnson Service Group in England, which runs 550 dry cleaning stores and faces a similar perc phase-out confronting California cleaners. He saw hydrocarbon solvents as the future and started switching stores. The conversion abruptly ended after a number of customers developed serious skin irritations. ``And by serious I say they were hospitalizations,'' Gregson said. ``It wasn't just a bit of a rash.'' The ensuing publicity threatened to kill Johnson's $180 million-a-year business, so the company jumped to the second leading perc alternative, a silicon-based solvent sold exclusively by Kansas City, Mo.-based GreenEarth. It is like washing clothes in ``liquefied sand,'' said GreenEarth president Tim Maxwell. The main ingredient, dimethicone, is the base for most personal care products, and the solvent breaks down to silicon dioxide, carbon dioxide, and water.

Like the high-flash hydrocarbons, GreenEarth requires no new training or radically different equipment from perc operators. And that perhaps explains its popularity: In use by 1,000 cleaners globally, 600 in the United States and more than 200 in California, according to GreenEarth.

In England, Gregson has 270 shops running GreenEarth and intends to convert his others from perc soon. But the future of dry cleaning may well be more radical. At a mammoth trade show in Las Vegas last month, the world's largest congress of clothing cleaners, much attention centered on a giant cube of stainless steel, tubing and tanks dwarfing other machines nearby.

It was the Solvair, a hybrid machine by Illinois-based R.R. Street & Co. that cleans first with an alcoholbased glycol ether (found in Pine Sol and antifreeze) then rinses with carbon dioxide. It sells for $150,000. Run cycles are half the time of a perc machine. Clothes need not be sorted beforehand. Stain pretreatment is unnecessary. Operating costs are a fraction of any other dry-cleaning method.

Street also sells perc and hydrocarbon machines. But the Solvair is the company's hope.``What we've done is introduce a technology that in the end of the day will obsolete our (other) businesses,'' said company president L. Ross Beard. Larger companies and chains using carbon dioxide technology are already starting to proliferate. Shaghafi started Blue Sky Cleaners from scratch two years ago. Today he has three giant carbon-dioxide machines in Union City, has another plant in Seattle and is expanding into Oregon and Colorado. He cleans with the same stuff that puts fizz into soda pop. Compressed to 625 pounds per square inch, carbon dioxide turns to liquid, carrying off dirt as clothes tumble in the washer. Except the liquid evaporates once pressure is released, leaving clothing cold, clean and dry.

``People are not aware of what they're wearing, and if they were, they might not be dry cleaning,'' Shaghafi said. ``You see a lot of dry cleaners saying they're `virtually non-toxic.'

``Well, if they're non-toxic, I'd like to see them drink their fluid. Because we can.'' Shaghafi is convinced the little guy doesn't stand a chance as industry goes green. The model of the future, he said, is one big CO2 dry cleaning plant in each city, with storefront shops shipping clothes to them. Costs to the consumer would even drop, given operating efficiencies and volume, he added. But then there's Lee, making a living cleaning his neighbors' clothes in San Lorenzo.

He's pinned his hopes on the oldest solvent known: Water. Adjust the water's Ph, control humidity while drying, and almost all dry-clean-only garments can be wet cleaned, Lee said. Lee is part of an outreach program run by Occidental College's Urban and Environmental Policy Institute in Southern California. Its aim is to convince more mom-and-pop owners to abandon perc and become wet cleaners. Lee originally resisted; now he's preaching the religion to others. There's a steep learning curve, he acknowledged. His system may cost half a CO2 outfit, but it still runs three times a discounted perc machine and about 20 percent more than a hydrocarbon or GreenEarth machine.

Yet Lee, who spent 25 years cleaning with perc, doesn't need hazardous materials permits from the regional air board or the county health department. Energy use is next to nothing. Even water use is down: Lee's old perc machine needed a heater to vaporize solvent from clothes and liquid-cooled chillers to recondense it to liquid.

``If we don't play it right, then our industry is going to be swept by franchises or corporations,'' Lee said. ``But the upper hand of wet cleaning, if the owner/operator learns it properly, is that they can sustain a business. ... That's why I'm working so hard to make this wet cleaning work.'' This, then is the future of dry cleaning. The industry will likely consolidate. The number of neighborhood shops will shrink even as the consumer's choices expand. ``There should have been a purge of industry,'' said Bill Fisher, International Fabricare Institute's executive director. ``It's still not happening, but Southern California will be the first place. People who are losing money rightnow will not be able to afford the $60,000 to $75,000 they need to put in new equipment.'' But you write off the corner cleaner at your peril, Fisher and others caution.

Blowing in the breeze behind Lee's Hesperian Cleaners is one reason why: A cart full of orchids. Lee takes the plants in, nurtures them back into bloom, sends them back out with the clothes. That kind of service is hard to beat. But Lee isn't taking chances. ``I really enjoyed perc,'' he said. ``It was the first chemical I ever encountered, and it was easy. Changing is hard.'' ``But change is good.''