How Dry Cleaning Works

Dry cleaning is not actually clean -- instead, it uses a petroleum solvent in place of water. Learn more about dry cleaning in this HowStuffWorks podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:28):
I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, what is dry cleaning?
What actually happens when you take something to be dry cleaned?
When you wash your clothes at home in the washing machine,
water is the solvent used to do the cleaning. Water
is cheap and easy to get, but water has some problems.
Many types of fabric, for example, do not handle water

(00:50):
very well. Woolen water don't mix, and then there are
many types of stains that water isn't particularly good at removing.
And then there's fading water in the chlorine it contains
confide certain colors. In dry cleaning, a petroleum solvent is
used instead of water. It is dry only in the
sense that it's not wet with water. Instead, it is

(01:14):
wet with solvent. In the early days of dry cleaning,
this solvent was often kerosene or gasoline deodorized. Of course,
today the industry uses a solvent called perchloroethylene almost universally.
The clothes are washed in this solvent inside a seal
dry cleaning machine. Then the solvent is recovered in an

(01:35):
extractor so that it can be reused and so that
it doesn't evaporate into the air and cause pollution. Once
the clothes are cleaned, they're pressed so they look like new.
There's a fair amount of controversy around perchloroethylene or PERK
and its health effects. Some dry cleaners are now using
liquid c O two instead. Do you have any ideas

(01:56):
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