Is Dry Cleaning Actually Wet?

Spoiler Alert: No, dry cleaning isn't dry. Instead, it uses a petroleum solvent in place of water. Learn more about dry cleaning in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
it's Christian Seger. Have you ever wondered how dry cleaning
is actually dry? Well, you're about to know. You're about
to know how dry cleaning works a little bit. So
dry cleaning, here's the thing. It's not really dry. It's
actually using liquids. It just doesn't use water, and that's

(00:25):
why they call it dry cleaning, which, yeah, it's pretty stupid,
but look, that's just the case. In the old timey days,
dry cleaning used to use a solvent called kerosene. You
might light your heater with it in your home, especially
if you live in a rural area and you don't
have electricity. But people figured out that kerosene is not
that great for clothes, especially once we had something called

(00:49):
paar chloral ethylene, or perk in dry cleaning vernacular. This
is the solvent that's most commonly used today. It's probably
highly taught toxic. And there's a lot of dry cleaners
out there that you'll see say they use greener methods. Now,
when you see that, they're usually using liquefied carbon dioxide,

(01:10):
which is a lot greener than perk, and which is
again a highly toxic solvent, but it works. Now. A
dry cleaning machine looks a lot like a combination washer
dryer that you might see, you know, an industrial sized one,
and it is a finely tuned instrument. What the dry
cleaner will do is throw your clothes in there with

(01:31):
this perk or whatever solvent it is that they're using,
and they heat it to a perfect eighties six degrees fahrenheit.
Anything more than that it's just going to destroy your clothes,
and anything less than that it might not have the
cleaning ability that you wanted to have. And it's going
to agitate it and take the perk and filter it
out and reuse it. And then when it's finally done,

(01:54):
all of the perk is going to be captured and
reused and sequestered before they even to open the door,
because you don't want this stuff going into the atmosphere.
And then voila. You have a dry cleaned, wet shirt
that has been cleaned with industrial solvents, and that is
dry cleaning. And yes it's wet still, but at least

(02:16):
it's not water. Check out the brain Stuff channel on
YouTube and for more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how stuff works dot com,