Dry cleaners clean with greenhouse gas

KUSA - A local dry cleaner is the first in the city to clean clothes with carbon dioxide.

There's something in the air that's getting clothes clean at Revolution Dry Cleaners near downtown Denver. It's carbon dioxide, and owner Noel Bennett is proud of his company's enviromentally sound method of cleaning clothes.

"We're the first ones in Colorado to have brought liquid CO2 cleaning to Colorado, because it's the wave of the future.", says Bennett.

So how can cleaning with carbon dioxide be good for the environment when it's considered a possible climate changing greenhouse gas? Bennett says that the gas they use is taken from other industrial processes, and then recycled in the dry cleaning process.

"Our carbon dioxide is recaptured from other industrial processes, the primary one being ammonia production. It's brought by our gas company to us and delivered to the side of our building into a huge storage tank".

Bennett says that 98% of the carbon dioxide is recirculated and refiltered in the dry cleaning process before being used again. This keeps the gas from escaping into the environment. And it's not just the environment that's cleaner, the shop is cleaner for the workers.

"They say that 80 to 85 percent of the dry cleaners use a chemical called perchloroethane or perc for short and there's lots of worries with perc. It's an air pollutan, it's a ground water contaminant and people working in or near dry cleaners have experienced a lot of nervous system problems," Bennett says.

Although it's a bit more expensive initially for businesses to go green with CO2 cleaning, Bennett says that the cost to the consumer is the same as it is for conventionally cleaning.

"We deliberately set our prices up so that we'll be competitive with any full service dry cleaners".

They will even save you a few bucks on your fuel bill when they deliver your clothes free in one of their clean fuel burning vans.