8/21/09: My better half comes home, with two huge black bags. Body bags? No, dry cleaning bags. Oh right. We saw canvas bags at some street festival earlier this year. Great idea, would it work? Some entrepreneur at morning meeting was giving these out—by the way, the fellow couldn’t answer what these bags were made out of, and I guess his presentation was not the most inspiring. Hmm. There are two. Great idea, because you drop off one, then fill another, and swap one for another at dry cleaning pick up time.
8/24/09: I drop off a bunch of laundering and dry cleaning at the local dry cleaners. I haven’t been too thrilled with this place, but the prices are good. Well, they don’t clean on site, which means more gasoline consumption, and I suspect they use perchloroethylene (perc), which is a nasty hydrocarbon. But I believe in buying local: after all, I my business cards are not on recycled paper, but they are from a local printer in Eagle Rock, an area that struggles to get a steady stream of business. I’m not perfect.
Okay, back to the dry cleaners. Apparently, there are two safer methods of “dry cleaning” according to the EPA:
- “wet cleaning” uses specialized detergents that are even milder than most household products; the result is little waste generation, soil or water contamination, or dangerous chemicals.
- carbon dioxide (CO2) cleaning, which uses liquid, non-toxic CO2 (basically carbonate soda). You’re using materials that would otherwise be spouted into the air as emissions, and you use less energy in the process than conventional dry cleaning.
I explain to the worker that I want to be more “green” and use this black bag, because I hate the waste from plastic, even if LADWP supposedly recycles plastic bags. She says, no problem, they have other customers who do this. Nice lady. I'm shocked she was willing to go along with this!
9/2/09: Dear Diary, I’m not happy. I went to pick up the clothes; took out my cash to pay for this batch; ready to drop off another bag, and . . . that dry cleaning bag is hanging next to the shirts and slacks, which have been enclosed in 4 or 5 plastic bags. My jaw drops. I tell the worker, “What happened? I thought you said you would just put the laundry in the bag like I had requested.”
“Huh? Oh, so sorry, I forgot to tell my son so next time.”
I had that gob-smacked feeling similar to my experience at a Korean grocery store where the bag boy put my groceries in plastic bags and . . . put them in the canvas bags into which I had asked the cashier to place the groceries.
Man, I was irritated, but I just kept it in. We live in a land of plenty, so what’s the harm in a few more plastic bags? Well, at least grocery bags are suitable for kitchen waste; but these dry cleaning plastic sheaths are useless, and actually, can contribute more wear and tear on your clothes by trapping those chemicals.
Oh well. Let’s see if this works next time. There’s a “green” dry cleaners across the street, so maybe I can ask them. But according to Jaime Nack, President of Three Squares Inc., many of these “green” dry cleaners are a scam. She told me she’s received plenty of defensive and nasty responses when she asked them whether they used perc as a solvent.
Meanwhile, I’ve already put those clothes in the closets and rolled those darned bags in a wad, ready for next week’s recycling pick up.
