TSD Cleaning Articles

Dry cleaning

Many people read the tags on their clothing and find that it says “dry clean only.” They dutifully drop their clothes art the dry cleaners, only to have them magically appear clean and bright when they pick them up. What is this magic? How does dry cleaning work? The answer may surprise you. Like most good inventions, this one was the result of an accident.

Dry cleaning was born in France in 1855, after a dye-works owner, Jean Baptiste Jolly, noticed how much whiter his table cloth was as a result of having kerosene accidentally spilled on it. In the early days, gasoline and kerosene where the chief ingredients used in dry cleaning,( which, by the way, isn’t “dry” at all but the use of chemicals rather than water to clean garments.) Kerosene and gasoline proved to be volatile and dangerous substances to use for dry cleaning, as you can imagine, and soon a synthetic solvent called perchlorethylene was developed fro the growing dry cleaning industry.

“Perc,” as it is known, is still being used to dry clean clothing today. The industry has come a long way, offering one hour cleaning where it would normally take a week, the solvents had to be pressed and repressed out of the fabrics, but how does it work?

From drop off to pick up, here’s what happens to your dry cleaning:

It is tagged and inspected, usually with you still at the counter. Missing buttons are noted, stains marked, labels made up so that your shirt doesn’t get mixed up with anyone else’s.

Stains are pre treated with solvents.

The shirt is put into a dry cleaning machine and the “perc” is added. The machine is a motor driven perforated basket which can hold 25 to 100 lbs of dry cleaning in one shot. The washer and dryer are all in the same machine, which allows for any residual perc being recycled, saving time and wearing on the environment. Now here’s the really fun part; as the clothes turn in the perforated basket, solvents are blown in continuously. The incoming solvent moves against the clothes and saturates them, while the churning motion–much like the agitator on your washing machine–sloughs off the dirt. The solvent continues to move through, becoming sucked out as fresh solvent is piped in. dirt is trapped in the filtering system. Cool, hunh?

Post spotting insures that all the stains are removed. If there are set in stains, a separate solvent is applied by hand and scrubbed in, and then scrubbed out using solvent removers.

The shirt is pressed, folded, and packaged, either by wrapping in brown paper (old school) or by hanging on a wire hanger and covered with a plastic, transparent bag.

Quality control is preformed every day in all reputable dry cleaners, ensuring that the quality of the perc is high and the proper filtration of solvents is continual. The better your dry cleaner is, the fresher you clothes smell and the brighter they become naturally from the use of fresh solvents.