(classical music)
- Have you ever wondered
how dry cleaning is dry?
Well, I'm Josh Clark
and this is Brain Stuff
and you're about to know.
You're about to know how dry
cleaning works a little bit.
So dry cleaning is not really dry.
It actually uses liquid.
It just doesn't use water.
That's why they call it dry cleaning,
which is pretty stupid,
but that's 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,
not that great for clothes,
especially once we had something
called perchloroethylene
or PERC in dry cleaning vernacular.
This is the solvent that's
most commonly in use today.
It's probably highly toxic
and there's a lot of
dry cleaners out there
that you'll see say that
they use green methods.
When you see that, they're
usually using liquified CO2,
which is a lot greener than PERC,
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,
an industrial sized one, and
it's a finely tuned instrument.
What the dry cleaner will do
is throw your clothes in there
with this PERC or whatever
solvent they're using,
heat it to a perfect
86 degrees Fahrenheit.
Anything more than that's
gonna destroy the clothes.
Anything less than that,
it might not have the cleaning ability
that you want it to have.
And it's gonna agitate it
and take the PERC and filter it out
and reuse it and then
when it's finally done,
all the PERC's going to
be captured and reused
and sequestered before
they even 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's dry cleaning.
It's wet still, but it's just not water.
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