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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: it's Christian Seger. Have you ever wondered how dry cleaning

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Speaker 1: is actually dry? Well, you're about to know. You're about

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Speaker 1: to know how dry cleaning works a little bit. So

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Speaker 1: dry cleaning, here's the thing. It's not really dry. It's

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Speaker 1: actually using liquids. It just doesn't use water, and that's

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Speaker 1: why they call it dry cleaning, which, yeah, it's pretty stupid,

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Speaker 1: but look, that's just the case. In the old timey days,

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Speaker 1: dry cleaning used to use a solvent called kerosene. You

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Speaker 1: might light your heater with it in your home, especially

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Speaker 1: if you live in a rural area and you don't

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Speaker 1: have electricity. But people figured out that kerosene is not

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Speaker 1: that great for clothes, especially once we had something called

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Speaker 1: paar chloral ethylene, or perk in dry cleaning vernacular. This

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Speaker 1: is the solvent that's most commonly used today. It's probably

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Speaker 1: highly taught toxic. And there's a lot of dry cleaners

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Speaker 1: out there that you'll see say they use greener methods. Now,

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Speaker 1: when you see that, they're usually using liquefied carbon dioxide,

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Speaker 1: which is a lot greener than perk, and which is

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Speaker 1: again a highly toxic solvent, but it works. Now. A

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Speaker 1: dry cleaning machine looks a lot like a combination washer

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Speaker 1: dryer that you might see, you know, an industrial sized one,

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Speaker 1: and it is a finely tuned instrument. What the dry

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Speaker 1: cleaner will do is throw your clothes in there with

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Speaker 1: this perk or whatever solvent it is that they're using,

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Speaker 1: and they heat it to a perfect eighties six degrees fahrenheit.

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Speaker 1: Anything more than that it's just going to destroy your clothes,

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Speaker 1: and anything less than that it might not have the

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Speaker 1: cleaning ability that you wanted to have. And it's going

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Speaker 1: to agitate it and take the perk and filter it

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Speaker 1: out and reuse it. And then when it's finally done,

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Speaker 1: all of the perk is going to be captured and

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Speaker 1: reused and sequestered before they even to open the door,

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Speaker 1: because you don't want this stuff going into the atmosphere.

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Speaker 1: And then voila. You have a dry cleaned, wet shirt

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Speaker 1: that has been cleaned with industrial solvents, and that is

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Speaker 1: dry cleaning. And yes it's wet still, but at least

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Speaker 1: it's not water. Check out the brain Stuff channel on

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Speaker 1: YouTube and for more on this and thousands of other topics,

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Speaker 1: visit how stuff works dot com,