Saratoga News

Dry cleaner gets wet

By Clarence Cromwell

A Saratoga dry cleaner is closing his 10-year-old business at Westgate Mall to get into a new field that is more friendly to the environment: "wet cleaning."

Abe Afshari on Dec. 4 held a grand opening for his new Cleaner 2000 store at 18572 Prospect Road where, thanks to a new $30,000 computerized washer and dryer set, he can wash delicate garments such as silk, leather or Angora with soapy water rather than the chemical solvents in which dry cleaners usually immerse clothing.

"In essence, what you're doing is giving the clothes a good hand washing," said Joanne King, a spokesperson for Aqua King, the company that sells the machines.

The washing machine is equipped with a microprocessor to calculate the correct amount of soap, level of agitation and water temperature needed for a type of fabric. Its carefully controlled motor mimics the gentle swishing of a hand washing.

The dryer tumbles much like an ordinary dryer, but it is equipped with an electronic device that monitors humidity and temperature inside. It dries the clothes in about 10 minutes.

The gentle treatment allows cleaners to use water to wash fabrics tagged "dry clean only." At his grand opening, Afshari produced three leather jackets cleaned in the machines. Microprocessors store information needed to clean various types of fabric, so the cleaner must recognize what material a garment is made of.

The advantage of the new machines is that they don't use perc.

Perc, short for perchloroethylene, is a chlorine-based chemical used in dry cleaning. Cleaners use 300 million pounds of it each year in the United States and Canada. Environmental officials have long been concerned about the effects of the chemical on people's health and the environment.

Perc is toxic, even in small amounts, according to an informational booklet published by Greenpeace, and it is believed to be a cancer-causing agent. When inhaled, it attacks the nervous system. Light exposure can cause headaches, dizziness or nausea, which Afshari says he has experienced.

The replacement wet-clean technology was developed in 1991 at the Textile Research Institute in Krefeld, Germany. Electrolux-Wascator, the manufacturer of the machines, had asked researchers for a way to clean "dry clean only" fabrics with soap and water. At that time, the German government, like other European governments, was cracking down on the use of dry cleaning chemicals. Electrolux-Wascator first sold the machines in Germany in 1992.

Saratoga's Afshari opened his first dry cleaning business, Dry Clean NU, at Westgate Mall in 1989. The shop will continue operating through the holidays and close sometime in January.

Afshari had previously earned a bachelor's degree in industrial printmaking from the art department at San Jose State University in 1984 and worked as a San Jose-area real estate developer from 1977 to 1989.