Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren bog Obam here with a classic episode
Speaker 1: from what host who came before? Christian Sager. This is
Speaker 1: a topic we stumbled on a few years back and
Speaker 1: just had to do an episode about because it turns
Speaker 1: out that dry cleaning isn't dry. So what is it? Hey,
Speaker 1: brain stuff, it's Christian Sager. Have you ever wondered how
Speaker 1: dry cleaning is actually dry? Well, you're about to know.
Speaker 1: You're about to know how dry cleaning works a little bit.
Speaker 1: So dry cleaning, here's the thing. It's not really dry.
Speaker 1: It's actually using liquids. It just doesn't use water, and
Speaker 1: that's why they call it dry cleaning, which, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: pretty stupid, but look that's just the case. In the
Speaker 1: old timey days, dry cleaning used to use a solvent
Speaker 1: called kerosene. You might light your heater with it in
Speaker 1: your home, especially if you live in a rural area
Speaker 1: and you don't have electric city. But people figured out
Speaker 1: that kerosene is not that great for clothes, especially once
Speaker 1: we had something called para chloral ethylene or perk in
Speaker 1: dry cleaning vernacular. This is the solvent that's most commonly
Speaker 1: used today. It's probably highly toxic. And there's a lot
Speaker 1: of dry cleaners out there that you'll see say they
Speaker 1: use greener methods. Now, when you see that, they're usually
Speaker 1: using liquefied carbon dioxide, which is a lot greener than perk,
Speaker 1: and which is again a highly toxic solvent, but it works. Now.
Speaker 1: A dry cleaning machine looks a lot like a combination
Speaker 1: washer dryer that you might see, you know, an industrial
Speaker 1: sized one, and it is a finely tuned instrument. What
Speaker 1: the dry cleaner will do is throw your clothes in
Speaker 1: there with this perk or whatever solvent it is that
Speaker 1: they're using, and they heat it to a perfect eighties
Speaker 1: six degrees fahrenheit. Anything more than that it's just going
Speaker 1: to destroy your clothes, and anything less than that it
Speaker 1: might not have the cleaning ability that you wanted to have.
Speaker 1: And it's going to agitate it and take the perk
Speaker 1: and filter it out and reuse it. And then when
Speaker 1: it's finally done, all of the perk is going to
Speaker 1: be captured and reused and sequestered before they even open
Speaker 1: the door, because you don't want this stuff going into
Speaker 1: the atmosphere and then voila you have a dry cleaned
Speaker 1: wet shirt that has been cleaned with industrial solvents, and
Speaker 1: that is dry cleaning. And yes, it's wet still, but
Speaker 1: at least it's not water. Today's episode was written by
Speaker 1: me and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this
Speaker 1: and lots of other topics, visit how stuffworks dot com.
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