The easiest way to clean the red wine stain from your cocktail dress or the mud which that awful driver installed on your wool coat is dry cleaning. But what are the effects from your stainfree clothes?
Even if you haven’t read dozens of materials dedicated to this topic, you can imagine that dry cleaning is an efficient and yet quite harmful for the environment. Chlorinated solvents used on regular basis for the process of dry cleaning are toxic, have volatile nature and resistance to degradation, which means they float in the air and the chemical pollution they create may persist for decades.
Ecological dry cleaning is now a thing! In Watford (that’s in the UK, as the name suggests) was established VClean, the first dry cleaning facility (worth a couple of millions of British pounds) using ecological chemicals.
Here is the strategy that VClean suggests for reducing its environmental impact:
>>Minimise waste by evaluating operations and ensuring they are as efficient as possible, including continual revision of delivery routes, packaging and tailoring methods.
>>Minimise toxic emissions through the selection of environmentally friendly cleaning chemicals and switching to the wet clean system, which only produces water as waste.
>> Actively promote recycling both internally and amongst its customers and suppliers, including changing all packaging to biodegradable materials.
>> Source and promote a range of innovative, eco-friendly and biodegradable chemicals to minimise the environmental impact of production, including actively working with UK businesses wherever possible.
So keep your fingers crossed this greener way of dry cleaning will become a trend, we are definitely crossing ours!