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Speaker 1: Y dot com. Mosey It's always there. Welcome to brain

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Speaker 1: Stuff from how Stuff Works dot com Where smart Happens. Hi,

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Speaker 1: I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, what is dry cleaning?

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Speaker 1: What actually happens when you take something to be dry cleaned?

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Speaker 1: When you wash your clothes at home in the washing machine,

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Speaker 1: water is the solvent used to do the cleaning. Water

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Speaker 1: is cheap and easy to get, but water has some problems.

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Speaker 1: Many types of fabric, for example, do not handle water

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Speaker 1: very well. Woolen water don't mix, and then there are

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Speaker 1: many types of stains that water isn't particularly good at removing.

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Speaker 1: And then there's fading water in the chlorine it contains

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Speaker 1: confide certain colors. In dry cleaning, a petroleum solvent is

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Speaker 1: used instead of water. It is dry only in the

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Speaker 1: sense that it's not wet with water. Instead, it is

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Speaker 1: wet with solvent. In the early days of dry cleaning,

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Speaker 1: this solvent was often kerosene or gasoline deodorized. Of course,

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Speaker 1: today the industry uses a solvent called perchloroethylene almost universally.

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Speaker 1: The clothes are washed in this solvent inside a seal

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Speaker 1: dry cleaning machine. Then the solvent is recovered in an

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Speaker 1: extractor so that it can be reused and so that

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Speaker 1: it doesn't evaporate into the air and cause pollution. Once

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Speaker 1: the clothes are cleaned, they're pressed so they look like new.

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Speaker 1: There's a fair amount of controversy around perchloroethylene or PERK

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Speaker 1: and its health effects. Some dry cleaners are now using

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Speaker 1: liquid c O two instead. Do you have any ideas

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Speaker 1: or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me

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Speaker 1: an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com.

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Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, go

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Speaker 1: to how stuff works dot com. Protect your organization's critical

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Speaker 1: files with Mosey by E m C, the most trusted

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Speaker 1: Visit mosey dot com or ask your I T provider

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Speaker 1: from Mosey cloud Backup. That's m o z y dot com.