Dry Cleaning: Not Really Dry(!)

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They work with home builders and remodelers, designers, and homeowners to help make every project a success. Get started at Ferguson.com slash build. SPEAKER_13: Hey, everybody. We're back for the new year. We hope you had a great holiday. And while we know some of you got some stuff you should know, live tickets in your stocking this year, we know that there are still plenty of people out there in Seattle and San Francisco who can still get tickets. Yeah, our Portland show sold out. SPEAKER_14: So T.S. for those late comers, but you can still go to Seattle or San Francisco to see us. On January 24th, we'll be at the Paramount Theater in Seattle. And on Friday, January 26th, we'll see you guys in San Francisco at the Sidney Goldstein Theater for SF Sketch Fest. Go to stuffyoushouldknow.com or linktree slash sysk and you'll see all the info you need and links to buy tickets. We'll see you guys in a couple of weeks. SPEAKER_11: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. SPEAKER_14: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here and we are ready to martinize the heck out of you in one hour or less. Yeah, you like heavy starch? You a medium guy? You want a double crease in your pant legs? I had to look that up. Have you ever heard of such a thing? SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I got a triple crease. What are you talking about? SPEAKER_14: No, for real. Have you heard of a double crease before? I demand to know. SPEAKER_13: I don't think so because I'm not someone who often uses a dry cleaner. SPEAKER_14: You and a lot of people these days, pal, apparently the pandemic just crushed dry cleaning because people stopped going to the office as much, which means that they stopped needing clothes that required dry cleaning as much. But even before that, people had started to work from home a little more and the office SPEAKER_14: had gone much more casual than before. So dry cleaners have been hurting for a while. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I just, I don't have much of a need. If there's a particular stain or something that I'm really dying to get out of a piece of clothing, I'll take it into a dry cleaner. SPEAKER_13: But I was taught at a very young age how to launder and iron clothing. SPEAKER_13: But I also don't often have to do that because I rarely have to wear like, you know, a pressed dress shirt to a thing. SPEAKER_14: You don't put a double crease in your jeans? What's a double crease? So I looked it up. It strikes me as possibly kind of like a 1940s, you know, that wolf from the cartoons kind of zoot suit look. Maybe those would have double creases. The only thing I could find, there's a pair of Benetton pants for women that has a double crease. And I'm pretty sure I could find the second one. Not 100%, but I guess that's the thing that some people requested the dry cleaners. People who ain't quite right, I take it. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, my big dry cleaning sort of memory and story is that... SPEAKER_13: You have a dry cleaning story? Well not a story, but I just, you know, my best friend in high school Rad, the cartographer, hello Rad. SPEAKER_14: SPEAKER_13: He, his dad, Wayne, had a closet with like 25 light blue perfectly dry cleaned shirts, like 25 pink ones, 25 white ones. It was like a Patrick Bateman-esque closet. And I remember just going in there in high school and just being like, wow. SPEAKER_14: Were there like leather gloves and a knife stashed behind all this? SPEAKER_13: No, Wayne was a good guy. But anyway, that's my dry cleaning memory from high school. I have a stat here that's from 2017, there were, in the United States, there were 20,600 SPEAKER_13: dry cleaners. I've seen that as high as 30,000 now. SPEAKER_13: One thing I wanted to point out is that dry cleaners in the United States, 80% of their employees slash owners are ethnic minorities of the United States and majority of which are Korean Americans. SPEAKER_13: And all this, just to point out as we go along, we're going to talk about the expense of dry cleaning and changing your whole business because of government regulations and the fact that these ethnic minorities and small business owners, that can be a tough thing. SPEAKER_14: Yeah, I mean, there's definitely like a stereotype in the United States that dry cleaners are often owned by people of Korean descent or straight up Korean immigrants. And apparently in the 70s, that became a thing in the same way that we talked about Greek immigrants and their children running diners in the United States. That's true with Korean immigrants and dry cleaners. Apparently a Korean immigrant is 34 times likelier than the immigrant from anywhere else to open a dry cleaning store in the United States. And yeah, these are very small operations in a lot of cases. They're small businesses. And yeah, as we'll see, there's a lot of financial pressure on them right now that seems potentially fairly unfair. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, absolutely. And we're going to sort of go through the process of dry cleaning. We've gotten a lot of requests for this over the years. SPEAKER_13: My experience has been, at least around here, most of the dry cleaners are storefronts that will take your stuff. There are a lot of washers and dryers, like you can do laundry on site, but the stuff is sent out. It is not cleaned on site. It goes to a separate facility for the dry cleaning, then comes back, is on those amazing racks. I love those things so much. SPEAKER_13: That spin around. You know, all those clothes spinning around. Can't you just imagine like a ham hanging from each one in your kitchen? SPEAKER_13: I just, for some reason, I love it. But apparently there are some where they actually do this stuff on site. But the first thing we want to talk about is the fact that dry cleaning is not dry. It just means they don't use water. SPEAKER_14: That's a really important point. And I think we'll probably restate it multiple times throughout this episode just to make sure we're driving it home. Do we need to though? Yes, we do. Whether we need to or not, I insist. SPEAKER_13: Let's just hammer that simplistic fact home. SPEAKER_14: Yeah, it is weird. I think it's just kind of a remnant or a relic of the original interpretation of dry cleaning because it did make sense back in the day. Today it doesn't hold up. It's not dry at all. So everybody, I'm sorry to ruin your illusions. Technically it was Chuck who did that. But dry cleaning is fairly old. There was a man, a black American named Thomas Jennings who was a tailor in New York City who in 1821 got a patent for a process of essentially dry cleaning. He called it dry scouring that you could use to remove dirt and grease from clothing without harming the fabric, which was pretty groundbreaking. But it's lost to history. Apparently there was a fire. I want to do at least the short stuff on this, Chuck. There was a fire in 1836 that destroyed 10,000 patents. Basically all the patents from 1790 to 1836 gone in this fire. And that included Thomas Jennings' patent. So we're not at all sure exactly what the deal was. But we know that he was the first to come up with probably what would be considered dry cleaning. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. And Jennings himself could be a great short stuff because he is the first African American to receive a patent in the United States. And this was 40 years prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. And what's so remarkable about that is he was born a free man, but in the patent application you have to be a citizen of the United States. And they granted him that patent, thus recognizing him as a citizen of the United States, which was a very big deal at the time. SPEAKER_14: He also helped to organize something called the Legal Rights Association. Again, this is the 1820s, 1830s. And that group would challenge people in court, would file lawsuits against acts of discrimination in the 1830s. So yeah, he definitely does deserve his own episode, it sounds like, too. Yeah, we'll follow up. Okay. A couple of decades later, over in France, there is a man named Jean-Baptiste Jollie. Jollie like Jollie, it's a great name, all three names together with that nice round Baptiste in the middle. SPEAKER_14: He made dye, he was a dyer, a dyer maker. And he had a tablecloth that had an oil lamp knocked over on it. Luckily, it was probably not lit at the time or else it would have been a totally different story. But the flammable liquid inside, probably camphine, which is kind of like, it's derived from the same stuff that turpentine is made from. He found that where it had spilled kind of like cleaned his tablecloth. And he said, you know what, I think I might be onto something here. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, because that is, we sort of buried the lead. It's not dry cleaning because there is a liquid, but what the liquids are and always have been is some kind of solvent to clean your clothes. SPEAKER_13: Early solvents were very dangerous and flammable. Sometimes it was kerosene, sometimes it was gasoline. SPEAKER_14: I remember, I think it was, was it the Vassila axe murder episode where the rugs were super SPEAKER_13: flammable because they had been cleaned with gas? SPEAKER_14: I don't remember that. SPEAKER_13: I think that was it because I know at some point we talked about the fact that gasoline was used to clean stuff. And that's why one of these houses like went up in flames so quickly. There might have been the Hinterkafek murders. SPEAKER_14: Oh, was that a fire? SPEAKER_14: Oh, no, I'll bet it was the Sodder children, the missing Sodder children. There was a fire central to that one. SPEAKER_13: Okay, that may have been it. But I knew we talked about it at some point. They used, you know, like we said, kerosene, gasoline, turpentine, the resin of which is SPEAKER_13: terpene. And that is why when you go camping, you look for what's called like a lighters knot or fat lighter. And that is the very resinous interior of a pine tree, which is super flammable. And that really helps get a fire started. But all this to say is that stuff was pretty dangerous to use as a clothes cleaner. SPEAKER_14: Yeah, so much so that like dry cleaners would explode from time to time. So that dry cleaning facility that the storefronts would send their clothes to would be located on the outskirts of town because it was a very, very dangerous place. And after they started to move away from more flammable solvents, they replaced them with synthetic compounds, specifically carbon tetrachloride and trichloroethylene, which worked-ish. I think the reason that people were kind of bullish on them is because they didn't blow up. But there were a lot of other problems with them. Like just as an industry, the carbon tetrachloride corroded your machinery. The trichloroethylene was really harsh on your clothes. And both of them would give you cancer and disrupt your neurological system too. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, for sure. Before they tried these, they tried a kind of mineral spirit called Stoddard solvent, which I think that may have been flammable too. SPEAKER_13: But where they eventually landed is on something called perchloroethylene, or PERC, as we're going to call it, as everybody calls it. Is it perchloro? Yeah, it sure is. P-E-R-C. And that became sort of the go-to for a long, long time. It still is the go-to percentage-wise, and we'll get to all that later. But it was much safer to use. It did a better job of cleaning. SPEAKER_09: SPEAKER_13: The equipment was smaller. It was kind of better in every way as far as those previous alternatives. But as we'll see, it ain't so great. SPEAKER_14: One other thing that was so alluring about it is those dry cleaning facilities could come back into town now, and your little storefront could actually be the dry cleaning facility because it required such less floor space. And this solvent was just like a miracle. You could get people's clothes done in an hour. And actually, it was the guy who started one hour martinizing, who was a chemist, who was the one who went back and was studying perchloroethylene as a potential solvent and brought it into the dry cleaning industry and started one hour martinizing shops. And the reason they could do it in an hour, if you paid them enough, was because they had the facilities on site. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. And his name was Gabby Johnson? SPEAKER_14: I don't think so. SPEAKER_13: No? Is that Martin? SPEAKER_14: Yes. Okay. I can't remember his first name, but his last name was definitely Martin. SPEAKER_13: Because Johnsonizing just sounds dirty. It really does. Let me go out and Johnsonize. SPEAKER_14: It really does. Wow. Yeah. I'm blushing right now. SPEAKER_13: So like I said, we're going to talk more about the sort of the downsides of Perk, but even at the time when they were like, hey, this is so much better and safer, you're like, geez, working in this thing all day is like, my breathing is a little weird and my eyes are irritated and I get a little bit dizzy and stuff like that. Does anyone else see the elves? Yeah, everyone's like, yeah, but it's not flammable. SPEAKER_13: It's not turpentine or kerosene, so it's better. SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Some of these things, I think perchloroethylene is actually related in some way to chloroform. So these early workers, especially before we had any kind of handle on just how bad Perk actually is for you, we're handling this really tough stuff. And we'll definitely talk a lot more about Perk later on. But the, well, should we take a break and then talk about what happens when you drop your clothes off at a dry cleaning place? SPEAKER_13: I think so. SPEAKER_14: Okay. Well, everybody, we're going to take a break and then come back and talk about what happens when you drop your clothes off at a dry cleaning place. SPEAKER_07: Hello. Hello. Hello. SPEAKER_04: Yo. SPEAKER_07: I'm Andrew Gillum, former mayor in Florida and former Democratic nominee for governor SPEAKER_15: of Florida. SPEAKER_05: What's up, everybody? I'm Tiffany Cross. I am a journalist, television host. I am Angela Rye, politics and culture commentator. SPEAKER_03: This is a place where we can welcome you home because at Native Land Pies, we talk about the real things that really matter with real folks. SPEAKER_05: If I were to say to y'all right now, God is good. You would say all the time. If I said all the time, you would say God is good. Absolutely. We speak a language that you can't even learn through osmosis. Welcome home y'all. SPEAKER_16: Welcome home. 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We have to speak up. We have to share our experiences so we can help each other and learn from each other. SPEAKER_10: Listen to The Memory Whisperer on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. SPEAKER_13: Could I say something? Yeah. Before the break, you sounded like John Wilson. SPEAKER_14: Is that the guy who started one hour of martinizing? SPEAKER_13: No. Have you seen John Wilson's TV show, How To With John Wilson? SPEAKER_14: I can't say that I have. SPEAKER_13: That's great. It had a three season run and it's fantastic. Does he have glasses and kind of sandy blonde hair? SPEAKER_13: He has glasses, but he's never seen on screen. SPEAKER_13: So I'm not sure who that is then. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. No, sorry John Wilson. The show, but he also sort of talks like this as a narrator. Oh, okay. SPEAKER_14: Yeah, he sounds like my kind of guy. SPEAKER_13: It's very fun. It's a great, it's one of my favorite shows. So highly recommended. But this is not about John Wilson. This is about, although he may do a show called How To Get Your Clothes Clean. That's the kind of thing he does. SPEAKER_14: Uh huh, sure. SPEAKER_13: But when you drop your stuff off at a dry cleaner, and we'll kind of whiz bang through this first part because it's certainly not super interesting, but they're going to inspect your clothes. One reason they're going to do that is to see like where the lasagna stain is. Or if it's not stained, if it's just a regular old, hey, I'm Wayne Smith and I want to get SPEAKER_13: all my shirts perfect. SPEAKER_13: They are going to go over it so they can cover their own butts as far as when people come back and say, hey, the button's missing. They can say, sorry, sir, or ma'am, your button was missing when it came in here because we wrote it down and showed you. SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Peep the sticker, chump. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. SPEAKER_14: Is kind of what they're famous for saying. If they do find some stain that they're like, oh, I don't know about this one, it could be tough. As we'll see, the different types of stain require different types of treatments. They'll pretreat it. And then the dry cleaning takes place. And this is where the magic happens. I really feel like this is some good stuff here. SPEAKER_13: That's right. So here's what happens. Do we repeat the fact that it just means no water and your clothes are still getting wet? SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Say it again. I just did. Want me to say it another time? SPEAKER_14: Sure. SPEAKER_13: All right. No water. That's all dry cleaning means. SPEAKER_14: Yeah. It gets wet. Your clothes get super duper wet, soaked even, but not in water. Instead, in an industrial synthetic solvent perk, the perk that we've talked about. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. And they do this in huge machines. And these cleaning machines are not that different from just sort of your garden variety, industrial wet laundry machine, as far as I can tell. SPEAKER_14: Yeah. But they're what's called dry-to-dry machines, meaning that the washer and the dryer are housed in the same machine. It's the same drum. You put the clothes in once, they get washed, they get dried in the same little drum, and then you pull them out. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. It happens. The cycles are much faster. And there's all kinds of things that we'll talk about that make it different. But if you put it in there, it's still got a drum that's going to spin and jostle your clothes around. SPEAKER_13: Twenty to a hundred pounds, depending on how big the machine is. It is a stainless steel basket that's perforated for drainage and stuff like that. SPEAKER_13: It's super robust because perk is about 70%, 69% in fact, heavier than water is. Yeah. SPEAKER_13: So, this stuff's heavy. It's all just super juiced up motors, heavy duty equipment. SPEAKER_14: Yeah. And I mean, they shoot a lot of perk at this stuff. I think on the order of like 25 gallons an hour, they really Johnsonize the clothes with the perk. Right. But what's cool, you said that there's a lot of differences between these industrial dry cleaning machines and like say an industrial washer or dryer. And the key difference is that that perk, the solvent that you use as the cleaning agent, it's recovered to the greatest extent possible. We've reached what are called fifth generation machines. First generation machine was a washer and then over here was a dryer. And when you were dry cleaning something, you moved it from the washer to the dryer. You got perk everywhere. You got it all over yourself. You got it all over the floor and you wasted a lot of it. In some of the older machines, you would have to refill the perk that was used and recovered in this machine every couple of months. Now it's on the order of every couple of years. That's amazing. Yeah, because this perk doesn't really break down very much and it stays a viable solvent for years and years and years if you keep it in this closed system. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. And it separates from water as well, right? SPEAKER_14: Yes, because it's again, it's 70% heavier in the water. Water floats on top of it and most of these machines feature a little mouse that comes along with a tiny little snow shovel who's very happy to move the water out of the way with its snow shovel and water skis. SPEAKER_13: That's right. There are also things like carbon absorbers. There are inductive fans. They have these sensors that will lock everything if there is, if like if the perk level is too high, you can't even open it. So they got to get as much of that perk out of that thing before you open the door, which SPEAKER_13: has made things much, much safer. But again, perk has some dirty secrets that we're going to reveal later on. SPEAKER_13: But this thing is, you know, you're looking to get clean solvent by pumping out that perk through a filtration system, even though like you said, they're spraying a ton of that stuff in there. SPEAKER_14: Yeah, usually about 25 gallons a minute. So like I think there'll be 200 gallons over like an eight-minute cycle pumped in. And there's not 200 gallons of perk in there at any one time. As new perk is coming in, the old perk that's gone through the clothes already and is clinging to dirt is filtered out, right? So this is like this constant process of new perk, old perk, new perk coming in, old perk going out through these filters and everything. And then when the cycle's done and all the perk spun out and it's been removed from the basket, they heat the basket to vaporize the remaining perk. SPEAKER_14: And then that also gets captured because they run that through condenser coils to turn it back into liquid and put it back in the filtered perk reservoir. It's a pretty astounding machine that the dry cleaners use for this stuff. But it's really, it's just impressive like this, the leaps and bounds that they've gone through to figure out how to maximize the lifetime of a perk molecule and minimize the chance that it will be lost. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, for sure. Something I've done a lot of the past two days is watch dry cleaning videos. Oh, tell me you saw The One. SPEAKER_14: Well, I don't know. SPEAKER_13: What was The One? SPEAKER_14: It's called What is Dry Cleaning? How does dry cleaning work on YouTube? Did you see that one? SPEAKER_13: No. I've watched a lot of similar ones. I love processes like this. So I can watch things like this and stay riveted. I thought it was genuinely interesting. And one thing this article points out is that quality control can, you know, like how your clothes come out in the end basically. It's not just like, you know, they got the machine. So that's what it does. It's human beings that are overseeing this stuff and making sure that everything comes out exactly right if they are, you know, if they're doing it the right way. And I saw a lot of videos where owners and operators talked about how important it was to have humans inspecting each and everything that comes out and making sure it like passes their rigorous standards. SPEAKER_14: Yeah, because if you don't keep your filters clean, I'm guessing like after every cycle essentially that perk's not going to get filtered as much. And so you're going to be using dirty perk solvent and that has a really terrible effect on clothes. It can make clothes dingy, right? It can make clothes dingy over time. Perk interacts with colors so it can actually strip the dye from some colors and then bring it into other colors in the next load. If you have a good dry cleaner, they're going to clean their filters frequently. And if you keep up with that, then yeah, the quality is going to be through the roof essentially. SPEAKER_13: Absolutely. So if hopefully your quality control is through the roof at your local dry cleaner, they're going to take that garment out, inspect it, and then say sometimes, well, you know what? The machine and the perk did not get all the stain out, but I think I can do this with my own two hands. And so this is called post cleaning spot removal. And that is just extra post cleaning processes that is done by a person to make sure that stain gets out. SPEAKER_14: Yes, because in a dry cleaning facility, they have a whole array of solvents that are specifically for different types of stains. And apparently you can divide two stains into two general camps. You've got wet type stains, which are wet in nature like tea, wine, something like that. You have dry side stains, which are typically grease or oil based rather than water based. SPEAKER_14: And depending on those, you need either a solvent for the dry type stains or some sort of water solution usually with enzymes like shout or something like that for the wet type stains. And depending on that type of stain, they'll use a specific kind of solvent in the post spotting or the pre spotting. But that's why it's really important if you take your clothes to the dry cleaner, don't just throw the shirt at them and be like, peace I'll see you at five. SPEAKER_14: Like say there's this tea stain right here that I just find too stubborn to even begin with. I can't even bother with it. But can you please get this tea stain out? And they'll say, yes, you know, that's a wet side stain. You'll say, I don't care. Just get the stain out. And then you leave and say, peace I'll see you at five. But at least you've told them very rudely, you've told them about that stain and they'll SPEAKER_14: treat it accordingly. Yeah, as far as you yourself pre treating a stain, you know, if you ask your dry cleaner, SPEAKER_13: they're probably going to say that could make it worse, don't bother, or it doesn't do anything, don't bother. I mean, there are various sort of home recipes that you will find on the internet if you've spilled things like wine. SPEAKER_14: There's a lot out there. There's a lot of them. SPEAKER_13: So I don't know, I'm not going to give advice either way on that because I think sometimes that could help. But I don't know enough about it. It also could make the stain worse. So I'm not going to, I'm going to say, you know, you're on your own. SPEAKER_14: I found a short article on the internet, Chuck, that was by the Smithsonian's preservationists about how to remove stains. I'm like, okay, I'm pretty sure these people know how to remove old stains. So I would go with whatever advice they're giving. SPEAKER_13: All right. So in lieu of repeating it, you're just going to say, ask the Smithsonian what they think. SPEAKER_14: Pretty much. There's another thing I want to shout out, which appropriately is shout. Because if shout didn't exist, I would have to buy new t-shirts every week, essentially. I spill stuff on myself all the time. It's really strange. But shout works really, really well. And I love it. I love shout so much. And I went online and found that there's a shout, like ask shout how to treat a particular kind of stain. SPEAKER_14: And so there's like some different criteria put in and then shout tells you what to do, SPEAKER_14: what shout product will work or what, you know, whether you should try, you know, heat or whatever. And I thought that was a very helpful site as well. SPEAKER_13: We, I don't think I've ever used shout. Oh, it's so good. SPEAKER_13: Emily won't allow that in the house. SPEAKER_14: Shout specifically too. Shout. I'm not talking about any competitor. I'm talking specifically about shout. SPEAKER_13: What's your question? SPEAKER_14: I don't have a question. I just wanted to make sure everybody knows how much shout helps my life. SPEAKER_13: I got you. I thought you were asking if shout specifically was what Emily won't allow in the house. SPEAKER_14: No, no. But let's get to that. Why is Emily opposed to shout? Well, I mean, we've been all through this and Emily's all natural sort of movement. SPEAKER_13: Oh, the Kim's. SPEAKER_14: Sure. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. But regardless, that's fine. I've got some stain shirts probably as a result. Bring them to my house. SPEAKER_14: I'll secretly wash them with shout. I know. SPEAKER_13: Some stains won't come out. I mean, that's just the fact of the matter. A dry cleaner can do their very best. But if a dry cleaner can't get out of stain, that means that that stain is just forever there. SPEAKER_14: Yep. You just set that shirt on fire and say no one could love you now. SPEAKER_13: Exactly. To me, the finishing process is the most interesting because when you're walking through Wayne Smith's closet and you see all those shirts so perfectly pressed, a little stiff for me, but that's how Wayne liked them. I always was like, how in the world? Like what is going on there to get these things looking like that? Or that double crease. Sure. SPEAKER_14: He was one of those people. SPEAKER_13: This is all called the finishing process. And these are the videos that are a lot of fun to watch on YouTube, in my opinion. SPEAKER_14: Yeah, because it's pretty nuts. They have like a specific machine for each one of these things. And again, you kind of touched on it. Like this is a very automated process, but there's humans overseeing the automation at like every step of the way. So there's like people working in conjunction with machines. It's kind of beautiful in a way. What I hope the future is like rather than the machines just completely dominating us into extinction. But I saw some probably some of those same videos you did where they'll like take a shirt and then puff it up with air. Suddenly it's like an invisible persons in the shirt and then they're running like steam through it and getting like the press to it. It's pretty neat. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, it's amazing. They put it on this form called a shirt buck. Or it could be a double buck or a triple buck. SPEAKER_13: If there are several of these and it's basically like a almost like just a torso form. SPEAKER_13: And when they blast the steam in there, it's not like when you have a steamer at home, SPEAKER_14: like a home steamer and you have a something hanging and you're sort of gently steaming SPEAKER_13: it. SPEAKER_13: That's pitiful. It is blasting steam in there, like you said, to where it puffs up, whether it's pants or whether it's on a shirt buck. And while it is, they do this while it's wet, then they blow it out with that air in a very violent manner to where it puffs up. And at that point, the shirt looks really good to my eyeballs or the pants or whatever. But that is not it because they still go through a ironing process, whether it is a sort of an ironing board with a big large press that closes down like a coffin lid or a huge line of human beings with irons that are connected to a, had like a tube coming from the ceiling SPEAKER_13: into the back of the iron, which I assume is delivering steam. Those are awesome. So they didn't have to keep like refilling the iron with water. And they are, there are human beings ironing. I saw, in case it matters, the toughest thing and the most time consuming to press are chinos or any kind of cotton pants. SPEAKER_14: I would not have guessed. Oh, because they take another, like you can so easily wrinkle them while you're pressing one part of it. SPEAKER_13: I guess. It's got to be because that's my experience. SPEAKER_14: Yeah, but it's pretty amazing. SPEAKER_13: And that's when those things, and when there are interviews with these people, they're really, you can tell they're into making the stuff look perfect. SPEAKER_14: Yeah. I think we should say that I'm not sure if we've gotten across, but in the dry cleaning process, your clothes actually get wet. But in addition to that, there's a reason why a lot of kinds of clothes say dry clean only. It's because they're very delicate fabrics. They're fabrics that could shrink very easily. That's one of the big problems with water. Water penetrates fabric. And so it can actually collapse like the tension of the weave. It can cause like, in like wool. I saw that wool hair fibers have scales that the water basically makes stick together. And so water shrinks things. Dry cleaning solvents don't actually penetrate the fabric. They manage to get stains off, but they don't do anything that would cause like your shirt or your sweater or whatever to shrink. And they're much more delicate on the garment itself. Like yeah, it tumbles and all that stuff, but it's much softer, much more delicate. So there's a reason why some things say dry clean only. And that's essentially the point of dry cleaning is it treats fabrics much more gently in the process and in the types of chemicals that are used. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. I mean, even if you're just standard clothing, like the washing and drying process at home is just, it's rough on clothes, period. That's what causes a lot of like wear and tear on your clothes. It's not necessarily from literally wearing it, but just that washing and drying process is just, it's tough, you know? Yeah, no, it is. SPEAKER_14: Plus it's time consuming. Yeah. Do you ever do that, do you ever do that deal like when you were a single guy where you SPEAKER_13: would drop your laundry off and have someone else do it? I think I might have in college, although this could be one of those things where I'm SPEAKER_14: like making up a memory just to, you know, sound like a big shot, but I think maybe once, but no, for the most part, I would do it myself. Now Yumi's like, I got the laundry, I know what I'm doing. You just spray, shout on your stuff and I'll wash it. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I did it occasionally back in the day. When I was super broke, I would scrape up enough money to have someone do my laundry because it was just, there was nothing like it, you know? SPEAKER_14: That's awesome, man. I got one other thing. Do you have something else before we break? What other brand do you want to market? SPEAKER_13: None. SPEAKER_14: All right. Do they put plastic over your dry cleaning when you take it home? SPEAKER_13: Yeah, that process is even cool. SPEAKER_14: It is pretty cool. It's a machine with a human working with the machine, is it not? Okay. Yeah. So that's intended to get your stuff home, to keep your dirty, nasty Cheetos filled car from getting your new clothes clean, your new clean clothes dirty. When you get it home, you want to take it off. You want to take the plastic off and recycle it. You can recycle plastic like that, it's called plastic film, at your grocery store along with your plastic grocery bag. So don't throw it away, recycle it, but get it off your clothes immediately when you get home because it can actually really become harsh and just trapped in the clothing under the plastic. You don't want to just store your clothes in plastic in your closet. SPEAKER_13: If I walk into your closet and you got a bunch of stuff hanging there in dry cleaner bags, I'm calling the police because I'm in fear for my life. SPEAKER_14: For sure. Because there's probably a person in one of those bags too, right? Yeah. SPEAKER_13: You know who I never saw that in? You know whose closet I never saw that in? SPEAKER_14: Rad's dad. SPEAKER_13: Wayne Smith. SPEAKER_14: That's right. SPEAKER_13: No way. All right. Should we take another break? SPEAKER_14: I think so. SPEAKER_13: All right. We're going to come back and basically the rest of the episode is going to be about chemicals. SPEAKER_04: What is up with this cable news echo chamber, Tiff? SPEAKER_07: Hello? Hello. Hello. Hello. SPEAKER_07: Yo. SPEAKER_15: I'm Andrew Gillum, former mayor in Florida and former Democratic nominee for governor of Florida. SPEAKER_05: What's up everybody? I'm Tiffany Cross. I am a journalist, television host. I am Angela Rye, politics and culture commentator. SPEAKER_03: This is a place where we can welcome you home because at Native Land Pod, we're talking about the real things that really matter with real folks. SPEAKER_05: If I were to say to y'all right now, God is good, you would say all the time. If I said all the time, you would say God is good. Absolutely. We speak a language that you can't even learn through osmosis. Welcome home y'all. SPEAKER_16: Welcome home. SPEAKER_06: Listen to Native Land Pod dropping every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_10: Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all. And for millions of Americans, there is no greater unknown than what to do when faced with an Alzheimer's diagnosis. My name is Dana Torito and my podcast, The Memory Whisperer, takes a closer look at Alzheimer's disease and those affected by it. Like many of you, I've experienced the disease firsthand. I've been an advocate and care partner for decades and have written extensively about the subject. Each week, I'll talk to people who've been personally affected by the disease and learn how they coped with it. Folks like TV personality, Lisa Gibbons. Action is the antidote for fear. SPEAKER_10: And nursing dementia researcher, Dr. Fayron Epps. SPEAKER_02: We no longer can be silent. We have to speak up. We have to share our experiences so we can help each other and learn from each other. SPEAKER_10: Listen to The Memory Whisperer on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. SPEAKER_01: My name is Theo Henderson, host and creator of the podcast called We The Unhoused. My lived experience in houselessness is extensive. I was one of over 75,000 experiencing houselessness on a given night in Los Angeles. Here's the simple truth. Houselessness is everywhere. It affects over half a billion people in the United States alone. We The Unhoused will explore the senseless tragedy of displacement from the perspective of the unhoused. On my podcast, we're going to cover far more than my story. We're going to debunk the myths around houselessness. We're going to remember and humanize the community who have passed by spotlighting Houselessness Remembrance Day. More importantly, we're going to look at ways we criminalize the unhoused. Because if you can demonize them, you can criminalize them. Unlike the mainstream media's way of speaking over the unhoused, my podcast centers their voices in the conversation. Houselessness is not a monolith. Listen to We The Unhoused on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. SPEAKER_13: All right, we promised talk of chemicals. And that's what we're going to do because we're going to talk a lot about PERC. Just statistically, we can go ahead and throw out some numbers. Sixty to sixty-five percent of dry cleaners in the United States still use PERC. That sounds high. Fairly high. It's higher in Europe, about 85 percent. That's higher. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, that's a good average. I did see other numbers, but that looks to be about the average. And I also found this, that a lot of EU countries have mandated fifth-generation machines, although you could get a – there are allowances if you have a fourth generation, if you do all this other stuff. In the U.S., you can have – if you have a second-generation machine, there are no first-generation anymore, basically. SPEAKER_14: Yeah, that was the separate washer dryer, yeah. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. If you have a second-generation machine in the U.S., you can upgrade it – I'm sorry, you have to upgrade it to at least a fourth. SPEAKER_13: And if you have a third, it can actually be retrofitted to make it a fourth. But they're not selling or installing anything anymore unless it's a fifth generation. SPEAKER_14: I gotcha. Unless you like know a guy. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. And that's because PERC is a neurotoxin, and it causes all sorts of problems with people and the environment. SPEAKER_14: Yeah, we talked about how the stuff that PERC replaced turned out to be neurotoxins. Well, PERC's a neurotoxin too, which I mean just the fact that it's related to chloroform is probably something of a giveaway. But it's even worse than anyone thought. And in the 90s, the United States EPA started being like, hey, we've been studying this PERC on the side here, and it's actually really bad. It can do some magical stuff. Like for all intents and purposes, it's magic in the way that it can move through the environment. For example, when we talked about those transfer machines, Chuck, where you would take the wet PERC-laden laundry and move it into the dryer, spill PERC everywhere. Like we do at home. Lass the PERC. Exactly. But imagine it's PERC dripping on your floor. SPEAKER_14: That PERC is able to travel through concrete, through soil, and get into groundwater. SPEAKER_14: And even while it's getting into groundwater, other molecules of PERC are getting stuck in the little air pockets, vaporizing and spreading elsewhere, and then going up into neighboring buildings. And people are breathing it in there. And again, this is a neurotoxin. It's a carcinogen. And it is the thing that has fueled the dry cleaning industry for the last 80 years. And we're just starting to realize that if you have an old dry cleaning facility that you own, it's probably a superfund site. And you're going to have to spend an eye-popping amount of money to clean it up, or else you'll – I don't know about go to jail, but you certainly will never be able to sell the place. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. I was reading up on some EPA studies, and they followed a group of Cape Cod communities in this one study, because apparently there was a lot of PERC in their area, a lot of PERC – prolonged PERC exposure. And they found that it was in the drinking water in these Cape Cod communities. And in these communities, they found a host of pregnancy-related issues over the years, as well as an increased risk of bipolar disorder, illicit drug use, PTSD vision problems, and SPEAKER_13: some kinds of cancer. Wow. SPEAKER_13: You know, not going to say like every single bit of that is PERC, but this was a very long-term study over these communities that were kind of riddled with PERC exposure. And it's so bad that the EPA said by December 2020, it's legal to use it, but you can't be in a residential building. You can't be on the ground floor of a New York City apartment building and still be using PERC. SPEAKER_13: And states like California, of course, have completely banned PERC as of this year. Well, is this coming out next year or this year? SPEAKER_14: As of – yeah, it's coming out next year. So we're talking about last year. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, which is 2023. SPEAKER_14: Right. Yeah. So they said, we're done. It's over. Like, you can't use PERC anymore. Not only that, we're requiring you – again, remember these small business owners – to pay for these cleanups. Like I think the Small Business Administration passed a rule that said, if you own a dry cleaner or you own a building that has historically housed a dry cleaner, even decades ago, you have to pay an environmental consultant to come in and tell you whether your site's contaminated. And I think there was a 2002 Florida study. This is 2002. I couldn't find a more updated one. But it said that they found dry cleaner contamination had migrated offsite at 57 percent of contaminated sites. And a recent study by the EPA found that 75 percent of dry cleaning sites are contaminated and they think there's possibly 9,000 to 90,000 former dry cleaning sites that are contaminated as well. Wow. Yeah. And you have to pay sometimes a few million dollars to remediate this site. What's nuts, Chuck – I don't know if you saw in that San Luis Obispo article that even if you're a barbershop and there used to be a dry cleaning place in your building, in your shop, 20 years before, long before you ever came along and bought the place, you still have to have that environmental study run and then pay for any cleanup that's found. Wow. It's nuts. It's off the rails right now. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. And, you know, all the damage we were talking about, potential risks and damage to humans, that's not even covering the damage that it does to aquatic creatures and the fact that this runoff, once it gets into the groundwater and then the runoff in various bodies of water, really, really bad for basically anything in the water. SPEAKER_14: So a lot of people are like, well, I'm just going to close up shop. And they're like, you still have to pay for it. You know, like it's really a nightmare for people who are just – who own these dry cleaning places. And the reason why they have like a real chance or a case saying like, why should we have to foot this bill ourself is because they were following – like they often had to get permits in some states to use PERC in decades past. So the government gave them. Exactly. So they were following best practices. They were getting the permits they needed to to use PERC. And now that everybody's like, PERC's really bad, you need to clean it up. They're like, well, wait a minute. I need some help here. So I hope just for the small business owners' sake that there's a shift in, you know, who needs to pay for this because supposedly it's an $8 billion problem in the United States alone. SPEAKER_13: Wow. Yeah. So obviously with the problems of PERC and the shrinking numbers of people using PERC or dry cleaners using PERC, you're wondering probably, well, what are they using these days? SPEAKER_13: Green dry cleaning is a thing now that is becoming more widespread kind of slowly, I guess, but that seems to be the future. And there are currently four different methods of quote unquote green dry cleaning. And we're going to talk about those. I'm glad you said quote unquote. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. Because we're going to talk about some green washing terms here in a minute. SPEAKER_14: Yeah, big time. SPEAKER_13: Wet cleaning. We're there, everyone. It uses water. We're back to water. It uses water and these very specialized detergents that are basically just easier on your clothes. They're much milder. The EPA says it's, you know, you're not using hazardous chemicals. You're not generating hazardous waste. You're not generating air pollution. And you're not contaminating the water around you. You're not going to be a superfund site if you switch to wet cleaning. But that also costs money. And that's why places like King County, where Seattle, Washington is, is saying, hey, you SPEAKER_13: can get a grant to help cover the costs of switches like between 40 and 60 grand, depending on how big your operation is, of switching to this greener wet cleaning. SPEAKER_14: Right. And some people are like, it's not going to work as well as dry cleaning. And they're like, give it a chance. We've really made some advances. So the jury's out on wet cleaning. But I think just the fact that it's one of the actual green alternatives that is truly green and it isn't greenwashing, who knows? It might be the future of dry cleaning is wet cleaning, which I wonder if they'll still call it dry cleaning. I bet they will. SPEAKER_14: You think so? SPEAKER_13: Yeah, you can't. I mean, that's a there's such brand identity there. Yeah, for sure. SPEAKER_13: It's not a brand, but you know what I mean. Tell us about liquid CO2, because that's another good one, huh? SPEAKER_14: This one is supposedly totally non-toxic, environmentally friendly. And it uses liquid CO2, which, you know, like the power of oxy or how you use like baking soda and stuff like that. Carbon dioxide can actually lift stains off of fabrics. So this is a combination of liquid CO2 and gas CO2 that's used instead of solvents or I guess as a solvent in dry cleaning machines. SPEAKER_14: And the problem with these, there's very few problems. They actually use CO2 that's captured from other industrial sites. So the CO2 that's being used in this new generation liquid CO2 dry cleaning machines would have become air pollution otherwise. So they've figured out a way to divert air pollution into dry cleaning. SPEAKER_14: The real downside of it is it's really, really expensive to switch over to CO2 cleaning machines. I think they're about 150 grand each, which is like three times more than a perk machine. Yeah, like a Gen 5 perk. SPEAKER_13: Exactly. Band name? SPEAKER_14: Gen 5 perk, yeah, I think so. Again, one of your like early bands before you like really formed a good band name. SPEAKER_13: There's also one, this is the third one on our list called DF2000 hydrocarbon solvent. This is the one where they're using the term organic. They're saying this solvent is organic and that is where you got to get a little, things get a little tricky because organic is very much or very much can be a greenwashing word. I'm not saying that is in this case necessarily. No, it is. Okay, well, it's very misleading because organic means that it has what Green Earth, and we're going to talk about them in a second, Green Earth says that just means it has a carbon backbone, like gasoline is organic. SPEAKER_13: And when you see words like organic or biodegradable, like that doesn't mean that it's awesome. Things can biodegrade into a hazardous substance still. Yeah, so DF2000 is produced by ExxonMobil, if that gives you any clarity on whether it's SPEAKER_14: green or not. And even the container, it looks like a five-gallon jug of motor oil essentially. I think Conoco makes their own version, whatever. And it's a petroleum-based solvent, just like they used to use back in the day where dry cleaners blew up once in a while. If you're using a hydrocarbon solvent, you have to have an air pollution certificate. And it's cheap. Like the machines that use them are way cheaper than a liquid carbon dioxide cleaning machine. Currently, it's being touted as an organic green alternative. So some people are starting to use this. I would guess to their dismay five or ten years down the road, because there are actual like green alternatives, including liquid carbon dioxide and wet cleaning. SPEAKER_00: SPEAKER_13: Yeah, the last one on our list here is a silicon-based solvent. And the biggest, it's a brand name, the largest brand of green dry cleaning processes is called Green Earth, all one word, but still a capital G, capital E. And they use liquid silicone, which is odorless and colorless and apparently is a great carrier for detergents. Yeah, it's also inert. SPEAKER_14: So remember we said that Perc can interact with your dyes and stuff and cause fading. This stuff does not interact with the fabric itself, not chemically at least. So it doesn't cause any kind of fading or anything like that. SPEAKER_14: And it breaks down into sand and water and carbon dioxide when you get rid of it, right? The problem is that it releases dioxin when it's produced. It's a carcinogen. And I saw somewhere that it's been shown to be siloxane, has been shown to be carcinogenic in rats and possibly hepatotoxic, which means it affects liver function. So this one is very much touted as a green alternative, but the jury is definitely still out on whether it's non-toxic or not. SPEAKER_13: Yeah, you know there are actually people in the world, I call them that guy, that say things like, hey, just don't get any rats to work there, problem solved. SPEAKER_14: Who says that? Just people. Show them to me. SPEAKER_13: It's like it's been, you know, this has been shown to kill rats and you're like, oh, so don't get any rats around. No, I'm with you. SPEAKER_14: It's like, well, hey, how about you get a job doing that, working with it then, if you have no problems with it, Mr. Smarty Pants? SPEAKER_13: So I think we should repeat, the CO2, the liquid carbon dioxide cleaning seems to be the best, most green process, but it's just the cost of those machines. There's always a downside. SPEAKER_14: Yes, there's always a downside. I can't think of any wiser words to end this one on. SPEAKER_13: I got nothing else. I had to take my rug into a dry cleaner not too long ago down the street and they were very nice, even though they sent it to a facility and it took far too long to correct the stain on my rug in my new studio. And I was very mad because it was a brand new, I actually wouldn't have stained it. It had gotten wet and it smelled. It was like that sour, wet smell. SPEAKER_14: From being Johnsonized? SPEAKER_13: Yeah. Listener mail? SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Chuck said listener mail, everybody. So that means it's time for the listener mail. SPEAKER_13: This is from Natalie. Hey, guys, I'm a postdoc research scientist studying paleoclimatology and paleo oceanography. Wow. And that's from Natalie. Thanks, Natalie. SPEAKER_13: You guys always do a great job with your earth science episode. In the recent episode on plate tectonics, it was a bit of a missed opportunity, though, to highlight a cool gal who played a part in the acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics, Marie Tharp. She created the first world map of the sea floor and discovered the giant mountain range between the Atlantic Ocean that we now know as the mid-Atlantic range. That's pretty amazing because she is a woman in science. She had to fight a bit of an uphill battle to get her work accepted. She talks about how her initial interpretations were dismissed as, quote, girl talk. SPEAKER_13: She was confined to the background with her male colleague getting much of the credit for her ideas until more recently. Seems like a fun person and even mentions how she wanted to include mermaids and shipwrecks in the first map, but her colleague, Bruce Heezen, would have none of it. Come on, Bruce. That's fun. For sure. There's a great photo of her looking like a BA smoking a cigarette at her drafting table, and that is from Natalie. Thanks a lot, Natalie. SPEAKER_14: Yeah, it's kind of disappointing we didn't run across her in our research, but maybe we weren't looking in the right places, Chuck. SPEAKER_13: Well, it sounds like there's a pretty good reason for that. So hats off. Our beret is off to Marie Tharp. SPEAKER_14: Marie Tharp, look out for an episode on her at some point in time. Her and our friend Frederick Johnson. SPEAKER_13: Gabby Johnson? SPEAKER_14: No, not Gabby Johnson. You know, the guy who originally invented dry cleaning back in 1821. SPEAKER_13: Oh. Thomas Jennings. Yeah, we should totally do one on Thomas Jennings. SPEAKER_14: I was way off with Frederick Johnson. That's all right. SPEAKER_13: I think Gabby Johnson can teach you. SPEAKER_14: He's so too. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Natalie did, you can send us an email. You can send it to stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. SPEAKER_12: Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. SPEAKER_05: Do you feel seen or heard when you watch the news? SPEAKER_15: You mean like the news wasn't really for me? SPEAKER_05: Exactly. SPEAKER_06: Imagine me. SPEAKER_05: The news is made for the comfort of white people. That is the audience they want to curate. The native land pod? We're talking about the real things that really matter with real folk. SPEAKER_03: Welcome home, y'all. SPEAKER_06: Welcome home. Listen to native land pod dropping every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_00: The 1881 shootout in Tombstone, Arizona, known as the gunfight at the OK Corral only lasted 30 seconds, but the market left on popular imagination has held on for nearly 150 years. Why? Because Americans have never stopped being fascinated with the wild west. Grim and Mild Presents will travel into the unknown, the misunderstood, and the forgotten tales of America's westward expansion. Grim and Mild Presents The Wild West is available now. Subscribe on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more over at grimandmild.com slash presents. SPEAKER_08: This is Giselle and Robin, and we're the host of Reasonably Shady on the Black Effect Podcast Network. This is the podcast that you want to listen to, to feel like you're in the living room with your girlfriends, you're driving in the car with your girlfriends, you're having that good girlfriend talk. We do hot topics. We talk about reasonable and shady things. So get into it. Join us every Monday for Reasonably Shady and tune into the latest season of the Real Housewives of Potomac. Subscribe to Reasonably Shady on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.